About
About
Veronica Rios, Colombian, trained in Colombia then in France, based in the south of France, fully remote. Work happens in French and Spanish, in international tech and product environments.
The background crosses visual design (Universidad de Caldas, Colombia), cognitive ergonomics psychology (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès), and more than 10 years of hands-on practice on complex products. That crossing isn't an accident. It's what makes it possible to think of a screen as a system, not as a surface.
Today
What I do today
Head of Product Design. Five years at PrestaShop just came to a close, from the first freelance mission to overseeing product design across the whole ecosystem: Enterprise, Program Expert, Core, Extensions, Account, CloudSync, Design System and Research System.
Hands-on leadership: the strategy and the team, and hands in the product, all the way to code in production. What those years built holds in three levels of responsibility, and that's what travels with me wherever the craft is practiced.
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Leading the design organization.
Managing designers spread across several squads, cross-team support, skills development, growing autonomy. Mentoring is a natural extension of this work, internally and externally through ADPList since 2024.
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Steering design strategy.
Design system governance and consistency, co-building the product vision with PMs and engineering, structuring discovery culture at scale. The constant challenge: building systems that let design carry beyond a single person. Shared frameworks, documented methods, tools that give teams autonomy rather than dependency.
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Exploring and integrating AI into design.
Not as a trend to monitor, as a daily practice. Code-first product design with LLMs, rapid prototyping, structuring briefs for agents, thinking about how a small team does larger-scale work by changing what we delegate and what we keep. It's uncomfortable. It's also where the craft is transforming right now.
Background
What shaped me
Before PrestaShop, more than 8 years of UX/UI consulting on very different projects. What remains from them: the ability to read a context fast, find where the real problem is, and deliver within real constraints. Four contexts in particular built the way I work today. PrestaShop, afterwards, put all of that to the test of scale.
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Airbus, via Metsys
2019-2020
Lead UX on E3/MyEE Activities
Complete redesign of a subcontracting management tool within a team of more than 20 people, SAFe/Scrum environment, critical stakes. That's where I learned to work at scale, to document for the long run, and to build systems rather than screens.
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Honda France, via Bloom
2021
UX/UI Designer & Agile Coach
Design of the national Electronic Purchase Order, from functional structure to validated MVP. That's where I learned to bring technical teams into an agile dynamic without being the person who 'makes things pretty'.
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Careline Solutions
2020-2021
UX/UI Designer
Redesign of a remote medical monitoring tool for heart failure patients. Ethical, medical and accessibility constraints. That's where I understood that design can have real consequences on vulnerable people, and that it changes the way we design.
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Pierre Fabre
2018-2020
First UX Designer of the group
Creation of the first UI Kit, design of the PIM, structuring a design culture where there was none. That's where I learned what it means to lay foundations that keep serving after you leave.
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PrestaShop
2022 – 2026
From freelance design ops mission to Head of Product Design
Arrived in January 2022 on a freelance mission to lay the design ops foundations for the largest product tribe, moved to a permanent role six months later, Head of Product Design from March 2024. That's where I learned to grow an organization, not just screens: structuring a team and its career paths, carrying a design vision, and transforming the practice itself by designing in code with AI.
The full background, certifications and detailed academic training are on LinkedIn .
How to work with me is on the My Management README page.
The beliefs underpinning this work are on the Credo page.