I joined LOFINO in June 2023, bringing with me prior experience from my student job, which I’d held since 2015, focusing on UX design since 2019. Despite my background, starting at LOFINO presented a unique challenge: working in an environment with a 50/50 split in spoken language. All communication with the development team was in English, which fortunately felt natural for me. The rest of the company primarily spoke German, which also applies to all company meetings, events and presentations.
From day one, I was immersed in LOFINO's engineering department. This integration was invaluable as I gained immediate insight from engineers, jump-starting my understanding of the technical foundations of our products. As the only UI/UX designer, I was responsible for all of LOFINO's digital platforms. I worked with Figma to build a design structure from scratch, aligning it seamlessly with the ticketing system in Jira, where engineers planned and tracked their work. By ensuring a clean and straightforward connection between Jira and Figma, I established designs as a practical tool for developers, rather than an additional workload.
Image shows the ticket structure in Figma, which corresponds to the one in Jira (LEP is one of three mission teams to which the Engineers are distributed)
Collaborating closely with the product owner, I took ownership of various UX design topics, preparing, discussing, and collecting feedback. Together, we communicated with departments such as Operations, Sales, and Customer Success to keep stakeholders informed and ready for their tasks.
Thanks to my prior experience, I was already familiar with Scrum and agile workflows, which made it easy to seamlessly integrate into the team’s processes. I participated actively in all dailies, refinements, and retrospectives alongside the engineering team. This close collaboration not only strengthened my skills as a designer but also helped me bridge the gap between technical and user-centric perspectives — a cornerstone of my role at LOFINO.
Here are my key learnings, which I was able to gather especially during this phase of my work: