A psychologist working in design.
Product Design Manager · Porto, Portugal · ListenIn Labs
I'm Stefan Vilar Markiewicz — a Product Design Manager based in Porto, Portugal. I lead design teams inside tech companies. Most of what I write about starts closer to home than that: noticing my own patterns first, then recognising them elsewhere.
But my foundation isn't in design. It's in psychology — a masters with a specialization in psychotherapy. I added a postgraduate in UX and design research later, but the psychology came first. That sequence changed everything.
That combination changed everything about how I approach my work. I stopped seeing stakeholder pushback as an insult to my craft and started seeing it as a cognitive bias I could decode. I stopped treating career stagnation as a skills gap and started treating it as an identity problem. I stopped reacting to the room and started reading it.
ListenIn Labs is the project I run alongside the day job. A weekly newsletter, two 1:1 sessions, and a small cohort. It sits at the intersection of cognitive psychology, product strategy, and the inner work of doing meaningful work in tech. I do that inner work on myself with structured data — I built a personal ACT logging tool to track my own attention and behavioural patterns over time, and a lot of what I write starts there.
Every issue starts with something I've personally observed — in my own patterns, in my team, in the weird gap between how designers think and how the business thinks. And every issue ends with something you can use tomorrow at 9 AM.
"I stopped treating career stagnation as a skills gap and started treating it as an identity problem."
What I write about
The Autopilot Problem — the attention patterns and unconscious habits that keep designers reactive.
Stakeholder Psychology — decoding how PMs, engineers, and leadership actually think and decide.
Business-Fluent Design — translating design work into the language of business outcomes.
The Intentional Career — the psychological work of building a career on purpose, not on autopilot.
Product Design Manager with experience across SaaS and tech. Psychology background. I've led teams, shipped products, lost arguments to PMs, won a few back, and learned that the gap between good design and respected design is almost never about the Figma file.
Work with me
The Shaping Course (Cohort)
An eight-session rehearsal program for UI designers who want to work further upstream — on the work already on your plate. One rep per session, on your live project. Five people. Currently running as a closed pilot.
The Clarity Session
Two focused sessions (60 min + 30 min) with someone whose background is psychology and whose day job is product design. We name the pattern that's keeping you stuck, you get a written clarity document, and we lock in one concrete move. €150.
The Positioning Session
One hour on how your CV and portfolio read to someone who regularly reviews design applications. I review both beforehand, we clarify what role you're actually positioning for and whether your materials argue for it, and you leave with written takeaways. €120 for the first five, then €180.