Carmel Hassan Montero

Product designer for 18 years — Lead, Senior, UX Specialist, whatever the org called it. What’s stayed constant: I set strategy, build and run design teams, and still get into the details myself when it matters.

Carmel Hassan Montero

After finishing my Computer Engineering degree, I spent my early career as a web developer. Working alongside designers taught me to care about the why behind every decision — and led me naturally into UX design.

Most designers come from visual design. I came from engineering — spent my first two years writing code before I ever opened a design tool. It's still the lens I use: can a developer build this, will it hold up at scale, does anyone actually want it.

Carmel is the city where my father was born — in Palestine, now Israel. He was forced to leave. Hassan was his own first name; it became our family surname when he became a Spanish citizen. Montero comes from my mother, who's Spanish. My name is how he holds onto that memory. My daughter is called Salma — peace, in Arabic. I suppose naming as memory runs in the family.

Approach

I don't believe there's one right way to design, and after 18 years I've stopped pretending there is.

Early in my career, everyone was obsessed with adopting Scrum and Agile canonically — a process that, by principle, assumes anyone can do anything, ignoring that design is its own discipline. I see the same pattern now with AI: teams treat it as a fixed sequence — research, then ideate, then build, then test — because that's the canonical process everyone points to. But the moment you're fixed on a sequence, you realize not every step makes sense for your team or your project. Sometimes research comes third. Sometimes you brainstorm first and check assumptions after. What matters isn't the order — it's understanding the value each activity actually gives you.

AI has changed what's possible here in a real way: it's fast enough now to build something interactive, close to the real experience, before ever opening a design tool — so I can test a hypothesis with users directly, and pull in research just-in-time as I design, instead of always front-loading it.

I'm a talk-first designer, not a sketch-first one — I like to build the big vision early: understand the goal, then talk to users and stakeholders in parallel, comparing how each of them sees the problem, so the details become straightforward once the strategy is clear. But I don't force that on the people I work with. I've led designers who think visually before they can even describe an idea in words — forcing them into a wireframe-first process would waste their real strength. Letting people use their own language is the better move, for them and for the work.

Experience

Six companies, six different problems — but the same instinct keeps showing up: build the foundation that outlasts the immediate project, not just the one screen in front of me. A real-time query interaction model at ITRS became the basis for how I think about NRQL and Notebooks at New Relic, a decade later. An instrumentation library I built from scratch at ITRS became Ebury's measurement framework. A widget-based design pattern at CSC became a reusable pattern for later products.

Work

I build products for people doing complicated work.

Most of my career has been in B2B—finance teams making international payments, healthcare professionals managing patient data, developers troubleshooting distributed systems. These aren't casual users. They're experts under pressure, often dealing with high stakes. A confused interface doesn't just annoy them—it costs time, money, sometimes more.

I'm drawn to the messy problems. Multi-currency workflows where one mistake means someone doesn't get paid. Clinical interfaces where confusion could affect patient care. Observability tools where developers need answers in seconds during a production incident.

These problems don't have obvious solutions. That's what makes them interesting.

📓 New Relic Notebooks
Observability · Incident investigation · B2B · 2024–Present
🤖 Fonos TTS Editor
AI-generated voice · 0-to-1 product · Startup · 2022–2024
✉️ Skate: Team Chat for Gmail
Email collaboration · Chrome extension · 5-person team · 2021–2022
🌐 Ebury Online Platform
International payments · Fintech · Design team of 5 · 2017–2021
📊 Valo: Real-time Analytics
Data visualization · Direct manipulation · High-stakes ops · 2015–2017
🏥 Healthcare Systems Design
Clinical software · Design system · Team of 10 · 2009–2015

Designs are one of my communication tools — not the deliverable. If you want to see how my work looks, let's have a call. Or let Mommy Pig make the case:

Community

In 2015, I was working at a startup. Same patterns I'd seen at other companies: dismissive comments, exclusionary behavior, jokes that weren't really jokes. I was tired of wondering if it was just me.

So I tweeted. "Does anyone else feel this way?"

Turns out, a lot of people did. We met in Málaga that July. It was supposed to be one meeting. It became a community. Then an NGO.

Yes We Tech is now 1,500+ members. We organize conferences, provide grants and mentorship, advocate for inclusive education, and create spaces where women in tech don't have to pretend everything is fine. A few years in, I noticed something had shifted, and I deliberately stepped back to make room for new people and new voices. It was the right call — the community is in a genuinely good place now, shaped by people who aren't me, and I couldn't be prouder that it's outlasted my involvement.

In 2022, we co-organized WeyWeyWeb, an international UI conference in Málaga with 60% women and non-binary speakers and 500+ attendees — the only tech conference in Málaga, and likely in Spain, with that kind of representation. Organizing it has been a genuine gift to me as a designer: I got to choose the people I wanted to learn from, in my own hometown.

I taught UX at Lemoncode's master's program since 2015 — alongside Braulio, who directed it and made it one of the best professional relationships I've had. The program taught developers, not designers, what they actually needed to know about design — not the surface, but the root of the theory. Students would tell me, "I can't believe this is the origin of everything." When I stopped teaching it, because it took more personal time than I could keep giving, I released every document, slide, and article publicly at enlainterfaz.com, so anyone could learn from it. I've published 75+ articles there and elsewhere on design, technology, and making tech more inclusive. Of those, I'm proudest of two, for opposite reasons: "Introduction to User Experience," which I've rewritten and refined line by line more times than I can count, and a conference talk on el coste del aburrimiento — the cost of boredom — that mixes poetry, music, essay, and philosophy to make a point a case study never could.

WeyWeyWeb

Wey Wey Web

WeyWeyWeb is a community and conference focused on web development and design. I've participated as a content curator, MC and speaker, sharing insights on interaction design and multimodal interfaces.

The community brings together professionals passionate about creating better web experiences and pushing the boundaries of what's possible on the web platform.

Yes We Tech

Yes We Tech

Yes We Tech is an NGO dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion in technology. I co-founded the community in 2015, since then I'm involved in mentoring and supporting underrepresented groups entering the tech industry.

Through workshops, talks, and mentorship, we work to create a more inclusive tech ecosystem where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.

en.la.interfaz

en.la.interfaz

en.la.interfaz is a Spanish-language knowledge centre about design, technology, and the intersection between humans and digital interfaces.

I contribute by discussing design principles, sharing case resources, and exploring how we can create more thoughtful and effective digital products for Spanish-speaking audiences.

Contact

I'm looking for Lead, Principal, or Director-level design roles — where I can shape product strategy, build design teams, and tackle complex problems.

I work best when:

  • The problem is complex, with competing constraints and no obvious solution — I'm good at connecting ideas across a mess like that
  • You need someone who can think at both strategic and tactical levels
  • Technical feasibility is a major consideration
  • Cross-functional collaboration is critical
  • You're building something that needs to scale, at a pace where you can actually see the value land for customers

I'm probably not the right fit if you need:

  • Small, disconnected UI tweaks to satisfy one client at a time, with no throughline between them
  • Pure visual design or branding work (I can do it, but specialists are better)
  • Deep specialization in one narrow area

This page is about the work. It isn't all of me — the rest matters just as much, even if it's not written here.

Contact Me

Last update: September, 2026