About
Grzegorz Hadała, Design Engineer
Greg has 20 years experience as a generalist designer and 10 years as a product designer. He studied design, fine arts and photography.
- 20+Years in design
- 100+Projects delivered
- 10+Companies
- 1,300+Figma components built with MCP
- Now
- Product Design Lead at Douro Labs
- Based in
- Madeira, Portugal — remote
- Companies · case studies
- 7 · 11
I'm Greg, a design engineer based in Madeira, Portugal. I've worked in design since 2005, starting in brand, print and motion. For the last decade I've designed interfaces for fintech, blockchain and data-heavy products: payments and risk tooling at Adyen, a DeFi options platform at Rolla, ecosystem apps at Sei, and since 2024 the Pyth Network and Fogo ecosystems at Douro Labs, where I built and led the design team before returning to hands-on product work.
I work across design and code. I write TypeScript, React and Next.js, and maintain the Figma library that matches the code. AI is part of how I work: Claude Code is my daily driver for implementation, and I use MCP to automate design-system work, so a design decision becomes a shipped component in hours, not a handoff cycle.
Away from the screen: motorcycles, painting and making music.
Experience
- 2026 — Now
Douro Labs
Product Design Lead
- 2025 — 2026
Douro Labs
Head of Design
- 2024 — 2025
Douro Labs
Senior Product Designer
- 2023 — 2024
Sei Labs
Senior Product Designer
- 2021 — 2023
Rolla
Senior Product Designer & Front-end Developer
- 2020 — 2021
Adyen
Product Designer · Risk
- 2018 — 2020
Adyen
Product Designer · Treasury
- 2017 — 2018
Kite
Senior Designer
- 2015 — 2017
Founders & Lightning
UX/UI Designer
- 2014 — 2015
PayU
UX/UI Designer
How I work
- 01
Start with people and data
I talk to the people doing the work — risk officers, finance teams, traders — and look at how they actually use the product before deciding anything.
- 02
Frame the problem first
A clear, shared problem statement saves weeks. I align product, engineering and business on what we're solving before we design how.
- 03
Design systems that ship
My Figma libraries stay in sync with code through MCP and Code Connect, so design and production never drift apart.
- 04
Prototype and build in code
I validate ideas in real React components, not just static screens — and ship them, with Claude Code speeding up implementation and refactors.
- 05
Ship, learn, iterate
Release in phases and refine with real feedback. A perfect v1 that ships late teaches less than a good one that ships now.
Stack
Figma
Where the Pyth and Fogo design systems live. The library mirrors the production components one to one, and MCP with Code Connect keeps both sides honest, so a spec and its component never drift apart.
Claude Code
Writes and refactors the production React with me, runs the design-system automations and the content migrations behind this site. A design decision becomes a shipped component in hours, not a hand-off cycle.
MCP
I run MCP servers against Figma, DatoCMS and the codebase so agents build Figma components, sync tokens and migrate content for me. The 1,300-component Figma library at Douro Labs was built this way rather than by hand.
VS Code
Where the front-end gets written: Next.js views, Storybook stories and the automation scripts, with Claude Code in the terminal beside it.
TypeScript
The contract between design and code: typed tokens, typed GraphQL from the CMS and typed component props that the Figma library mirrors. If a variant exists in Figma, the type says so.
React
The shared unit of work. A component in Figma is a component in React, built once and reused across the multi-app Douro Labs codebase.
Next.js
Runs this site and the product front-ends I ship at Douro Labs, from Insights Hub to the Pyth Network site: server components, typed data and routes I can reason about.
Storybook
Every component ships with stories first. They are the acceptance test for the Figma spec and where the team reviews states, themes and edge cases before anything reaches a page.
Tailwind CSS
Carries the design tokens into code. A token change in Figma lands as a one-line diff in the Tailwind config, and the token linters catch anything that drifts.
shadcn/ui
The base I rebuilt the Douro Labs component library on across a multi-app codebase, with Storybook and the Figma library kept in sync through MCP and Code Connect.
Framer
Company and campaign sites I build end to end: early prototypes through production, custom components, the CMS structure behind them and the upkeep afterwards.
Notion
Specs, decision logs and research notes for the design team, plus the lightweight internal tools and databases I build so the work stays visible across product and engineering.
GitHub
Where design work actually ships: pull requests, code reviews and Actions for CI across the monorepo. The Figma library and the code are versioned side by side.
Vercel
A preview deployment for every pull request, so design review happens on a real build rather than a screenshot. Hosts this site and the product sites.
PostHog
Session replays and funnels on what I design, to see what people do with a feature after it ships and feed that into the next iteration instead of guessing.
Spline
Interactive 3D objects for landing pages and prototypes when a launch needs some depth beyond flat UI.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Brand and campaign assets, illustration and motion when a launch needs more than UI, as with the Pyth Network repositioning.
Linear
Where design work is planned next to the engineering work: an issue per component or flow, cycles per release, so a designer's tasks and a developer's tasks sit in the same list.
Slack
Where the design conversation with product and engineering happens: component reviews in threads, preview links and Storybook builds posted by bots, decisions written down where everyone reads them.
TouchDesigner
Generative visuals and data-driven motion for talks and experiments: the fastest way I know to prototype an idea that moves before it ever becomes UI.
Ableton Live
Music production, outside work. It trains the same muscle as design: building a system from small parts and iterating on a loop until it feels right.
Logos by Logo.dev
Clients
On GitHub
908 contributions in the last year
Latest work
Recent talks
- 01
Talk1 Oct 2026Startup Madeira UPTalks #2: Design — Beyond the PromptStartup Madeira, Funchal
From Figma to Production with AI and Data
A practical look at shipping digital products when one person can design, build and measure — from Figma to production with AI-augmented workflows and data.
- 02
Talk3 Sep 2026Madeira Design Meetup #2 — Friends of Figma PortugalCowork Funchal
A Design Odyssey
Navigating a multidisciplinary design career through time, space and money — an honest look at the projects, companies and teams that shaped me: the wins, the losses and everything in between.
