Manuel Rocco
Product and design leader who became a builder. Twenty-four years of curiosity, from a punk rock band to shipped code.
When I was seventeen, I was the bassist in a punk rock band. One day, our drummer showed me something that changed everything: a website he had built for our band. Our pictures, our songs, available to anyone in the world. My jaw dropped. That moment, twenty-four years ago, sparked a fire in me that is still burning today. I went home and started learning HTML and CSS that same week.
Into the Wild
At twenty, fueled by dreams of punk-rock stardom, my friend Roberto and I packed our bags and headed to Buenos Aires. We spent three exciting years there. During that time, I stumbled into the world of design, working for agencies that were becoming known for their quality. I soaked up all the fundamentals, from tools to UI best practices. I was even a Flash designer back then.
Learning the Hard Way
When I returned to Italy, I stepped into UX and UI design. I will be honest: I was one of those designers who focused on making things look good without really considering the users or the business goals. But working with agencies in Bologna on clients like Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Ducati taught me invaluable lessons about teamwork, putting users at the center, and collaborating under pressure.
Building at Scale
Then my family and I moved to Switzerland for five years. I went from mid-level designer to leading interaction design, eventually establishing myself as a product and UX leader. At SEI Novus, I built a UX process from scratch for a team that had never had one. Now, based in Spain, I lead product design at DataCamp, where millions of people come to learn data skills. It is genuinely meaningful work.
Why I Still Build
On the side, I co-founded invoo.es, an invoicing tool for Spanish freelancers and small businesses. I designed it and built most of what users actually see. It is a small product, but every time someone tells us it made their life easier, it reminds me why I got into this in the first place.
When I am not designing or tinkering with code, I am probably walking my dog or spending time with my family. Both bring me more joy than any design sprint ever could.
Why I Became a Builder
The market shifts every six months. AI is rewriting how products get built. Product-market fit is no longer something you find once — you chase it, constantly.
The traditional process — designers hand off to engineers, engineers hand off to QA — was built for a slower market. It doesn't keep pace anymore.
So I work end-to-end. I spot the opportunity, define what to build and why, design the experience, and ship the code. Engineers review what I ship before it lands. That works because of a shared system of rules we built together — patterns, guardrails, and processes that let non-engineers contribute production code safely.