Delfos Energy · Case study · Leonardo Ribeiro

Delfos Energy

Renewable energy monitoring.A distributed team.One designer.

Role

Senior Product Designer

Period

2025 / 2026

Product

Energy monitoring

Design team

One. Me.

02 · The scope

What one designer owned.

Five stages of the work, one person, three timezones. Anything I built had to survive without me in the room.

Europe15:00

Brazil10:00

Americas07:00

One designer

01DiscoveryFraming the request before it became a ticket.

02SpecificationWritten specs, scoped with the PM, reviewed by engineering.

03Design systemTokens, components and the documentation around them.

04HandoffReasoning shipped with the screens, in writing.

05Release validationChecking the build against the spec before it reached a client.

03 · How decisions happened

Design at both ends of the ticket.

Design showed up at the start of the ticket and again before it shipped. The argument moved to the cheap end of the process.

RequestFramed with design

Scope with PMCost on the table

Written specDesign writes it

Dev review

Build

Validation before releaseDesign checks the build

Release

BeforeReviewing specs before they entered development, instead of screens after.

CostA number on what a request would cost, said out loud, instead of absorbed quietly.

AfterA whole class of rework gone, because the argument happened while it was still cheap.

04 · The design system

The system was the leverage.

With one designer and a growing surface, the only way to scale is to make sure the screens someone else draws come out right.

TokensRuleNothing ships with a hardcoded value.
ComponentsRuleOne source, used by design and by code.
DocumentationRuleA developer answers their own question without waiting for my timezone.

Review, live

#FF6A00→color.action

Rejected in review. The value exists in the system; the screen uses the token, and the next screen inherits the fix.

Lisbonquestion asked

Docsquestion answered

Santosstill asleep

05 · Carried forward

What I took from it.

01

Density is a feature when your user is a specialist.

02

Documentation is how one designer scales.

03

The cheapest place to change a design is before it becomes a ticket.

Back to the case delfos.energy

Delfos Energy · 2025 / 2026
Leonardo Ribeiro