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  Mihai Bâlea - 28 Aug 2026

  AI-assisted product design: what your design system must enforce

  AI has entered product design at both ends of the process and barely touched the middle. Discovery now runs through AI research synthesis and synthetic participants, generation runs through prompt-to-prototype tools, and the design phase between them is the only part of the sequence that produces output that somebody can be held to. That distinction matters because generated design output becomes usable only where a system enforces constraints rather than documenting them, and enforcement is the part that most teams have not built. This article uses a three-zone model, discovery, design, and generation, to locate where AI-assisted product design breaks down inside a funded team.

  UX/UI Design Featured AI Product design
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  Alex Marciuc - 21 Aug 2026

  Product design in software development is not UI/UX design

  Product design and UI/UX design are not the same service. UI/UX design is the craft of the interface: information architecture, user flows, visual direction, design system foundations. Product design in software development is the phase that runs before a build and decides what gets built, whether it is technically feasible and what it will cost. It is delivered by a trio of product manager, UX designer and software development lead, and it ends in a validated, estimated, buildable scope rather than a set of screens.

  UX/UI Design Featured Product design
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  Alex Marciuc - 30 Jul 2026

  Why a product design phase comes before the build budget

  A product design phase is four to six weeks of structured work sitting between an approved idea and a committed build budget. It produces a validated prototype, a prioritised feature breakdown with ranged estimates, a technical architecture with integration risk resolved, and a release plan with cost scenarios attached. The output is not a set of design artifacts. It is a narrower cone of uncertainty, and a scope that can be cut without breaking. Teams that skip the phase rarely save the money. They move it into the build, where it gets spent on rework nobody planned for.

  Featured Startup Product design
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  Alex Marciuc - 7 Aug 2025

  Faster compliance, fewer errors: a RegTech framework for reporting automation

  Regulatory reporting has become one of the most resource-intensive functions in compliance, and one of the least scalable when managed through legacy processes. Across our work with RegTech teams, we consistently see the same challenge surface: compliance leaders are being asked to do more, faster, and with greater precision, but often without the tools or time to fundamentally rethink their approach.

  Technology Featured AI
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  Alex Marciuc - 19 Jun 2025

  Deciding what not to build, and when to rescope or freeze

  Products rarely slow down because of bugs. More often, it’s an overloaded roadmap, features added “just in case,” tweaks nobody asked for, scope creep disguised as polish. Before anyone notices, deadlines slip, feedback loops stall, and teams lose momentum. This isn’t an edge case. It’s a pattern. Startups don’t succeed by building everything. They win by building the right things at the right time.

  Featured Startup
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  Alex Marciuc - 2 Feb 2024

  The Art of MVP Development: Balancing Added Value and Functionality

  Someone once told me “Ideas are everywhere, opportunity is not.” It got me thinking about the multitude of possibilities when it comes to designing and developing digital products that can have an impact on the market and ultimately touch the end users.

  Idea to MVP
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  Alex Marciuc - 2 Sep 2022

  Here’s our agenda for running a remote discovery workshop

  Discovery workshops are a great way to establish the parameters of a new collaboration. We’ve been doing them since 2017, on-premise, with the focused goal of understanding a potential client’s needs.

  Team Idea to MVP Startup
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  Alex Marciuc - 3 Jul 2020

  Our ups and downs with Agile and Scrum these past 8 years

  It wouldn’t be a stretch to say we were in a cargo cult, we’d seen some practices, learned some ceremonies and we tried to implement Scrum the way we understood it.

  Team
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  Alex Marciuc - 3 Jun 2020

  Best practices for scaling up a project

  Getting a new project is always a rush but so is scaling up an existing one. A healthy business relies on a good balance of bigger projects and smaller ones. Diversity is also key, especially in challenging economic times. Today we’re going to be looking at the different types of scale-ups we’ve experienced so far and what are some of the best practices we’d recommend for each of them.

  Team