About
Product Designer, Developer & Founder
I started in game design, where everything is about systems, feedback loops, and how behaviour responds to structure. That thinking transferred into product work, API integration, and building from scratch. The domain keeps changing. The questions don't.
Background
I grew up thinking in systems. How feedback shapes behaviour, how a small adjustment in the right place compounds over time. That instinct found its first real application at Bigpoint, where I moved from a QA role into game design and owned the engagement systems for a long-running global product. The work was data-led: find where users drop off, fix the loop. The result was a 50% engagement uplift.
After three years inside someone else's platform, I wanted to build from scratch. NavEire came from frustration with Irish transit tools. Tapglyph came from watching institutions spend heavily on apps that almost nobody used. Both are still running.
NavEire
A real-time public transport tracker and journey planner I designed and built solo for Ireland. It covers live vehicle tracking, multi-modal journey planning with progressive streaming, service alerts, and route reliability grading. Built on React, Node.js, and SQLite.
naveire.ie ↗Tapglyph
An NFC-powered SaaS platform that replaces underperforming museum apps with instant, browser-based visitor experiences. I designed the full product from user journey to pricing model, ran discovery interviews with curators across three institutions, and built the prototype myself.
tapglyph.com ↗What I Focus On
I work best where design, engineering, and product thinking overlap. That means I can take a feature from a vague brief to a shipped implementation: writing the spec, making the build decisions, testing the behaviour, and adjusting based on what the data shows.
Systems thinking runs through everything I do. At Bigpoint, it meant finding where users were dropping off and fixing the loop, not adding more content to a broken foundation. With NavEire, it meant designing a data pipeline that handles unreliable upstream feeds without breaking the user experience. With Tapglyph, it meant questioning whether a product category was worth entering before designing anything. The context is always different. The approach is not.
Skills & Tools
What I do
What I use
Highlights
Game Designer at Bigpoint on a live global product with real commercial stakes. Rebuilt the Atlantis expansion and its engagement systems. The redesign drove a 50% uplift. Every feature crossed at least three teams; I wrote specs engineers could build from without follow-up and ran reviews at pace. Still working with them as a freelance designer since late 2024.
NavEire is a real-time public transport tracker and journey planner for Ireland. It integrates live GTFS data from the NTA, handles conflicting stop IDs through a reconciliation pipeline, and degrades gracefully when upstream data goes stale. Live at naveire.ie.
Tapglyph is an NFC-powered SaaS platform for museums, built from curator interviews and pricing models to a working prototype. The harder problem was understanding what institutions actually need, modelling around their budget cycles, and writing it up clearly enough that they could evaluate it without me in the room.
Reference
“Excellent specialist knowledge across all areas, precise analytical skills, and complete reliability. He carried out all tasks completely independently and with exceptional care. His performance has at all times and in all respects received our fullest recognition. Due to his consistently excellent performance, he will continue working with us as a freelancer.”
Education
Graduate Certificate in Creativity, Innovation & Entrepreneurship
University College Dublin (UCD)
2025 – 2026
MSc Game Technology
Breda University of Applied Sciences
2021 – 2022
BA Game Design, First Class Honours
Technological University Dublin
2018 – 2021
Languages
Italian · NativeEnglish · FluentFrench · LimitedGerman · BasicLooking Ahead
I'm open to Product Designer roles on teams where product, design, and engineering work closely together. I'm also available for selective freelance product work where I can help from discovery through shipped implementation.
Alongside my freelance work with Bigpoint, I'm moving Tapglyph toward its first pilot partnerships with Irish cultural institutions and continuing to build NavEire. Both keep me close to what it takes to ship and operate real products.
If this aligns with what your team is building, I'd be glad to connect.