The plain-language version of the rest of the site.

A product designer and mentor based in Europe. He works at the intersection of design, product strategy, and digital product thinking — usually with small-to-mid product teams who have shipped something real and need a second pair of eyes on what to do next. He also mentors designers on ADPList.

Europe, working remotely. Most engagements are async with weekly synchronous sessions. He is available across CET and overlapping US-Eastern hours.

Three things, in roughly this proportion. (1) Diagnostic engagements — a week of listening and a written reframe of what is actually broken in the product or the team. (2) Design work — interfaces, systems, and flows, when the diagnosis points there. (3) Mentorship — recurring conversations with individual designers about their craft and career.

Products with real users and a working team where the next move is not obvious. The question is less "can we build it" and more "should we, and in what shape". B2B SaaS, internal tools, professional services tools, and platforms tend to be the sweet spot.

Pre-launch products with no users yet. Vendor-style execution of a finished brief. Engagements where the decision has already been made and the client is looking for someone to confirm it. Pure visual rebrands.

Email at hello@ionutmaxim.com. The site has a short "How to brief me" page explaining what makes the first email useful — broadly: a few sentences on what you are trying to do, a few sentences on what feels stuck, one link, and a rough start date.

Yes — three thirty-minute calls a month on the "Open door" page. No follow-up unless you ask for one. The page explains what those calls are good for and what they are not.

Strategy sessions and listening-week engagements are fixed fee. Longer design partnerships are scoped after a listening week. Mentorship is monthly. The site lists the engagement shapes; specific numbers are quoted by email based on scope.

Yes, recurring biweekly or monthly conversations with individual designers — typically mid-to-senior career, often weighing a hard career or craft question. Details on the Mentorship page. He is also a mentor on ADPList.

He uses AI day to day, mostly for fast first drafts and pattern recognition across a lot of input. He is sceptical of "AI-native" rebuilds of products that were never properly named in the first place. He treats prompt design as an interface design problem and has been writing about that in the Lab section.

English primarily, plus Romanian natively.

Capacity changes by quarter. The /now page is the current truth on what he is working on, what he is not taking on, and where attention is. If the /now page is more than a few months stale, email is faster than guessing.