Driving home from the very first AI Engineering Porto meetup, I kept thinking: oh my god, I miss this crowd so much!

I had caught up with old friends I worked with fifteen years ago, personal friends who came to support me, and engineers I was meeting for the first time. Our conversations went deep into how AI was changing their work, their roles, and how they felt about it all. That openness caught me by surprise. I was not expecting it. At all. 🥹

That evening was one of many rooms I spent time in during September and October. In some, I was speaking. In others, listening, asking questions, catching up with people.

Looking back, I realise how differently AI felt in each room, and how much those conversations shaped what I want to focus on next.

People who feel they can fly

At Porto AI Week, I spent time with founders and people building AI products. Many already knew how to build with AI. They had things working. They were shipping.

What I kept missing in some of those conversations was the product thinking. The judgement. The customer evidence that could help them understand whether what they had built was useful, and what needed to change.

The hype made me uncomfortable. I know how much it takes to build a good product, and I felt that complexity being reduced to how quickly we could get something out. More mediocre products, made faster.

But I also left energised ⚡️

People who would never have thought of themselves as technical were making things they couldn’t have made before. The “normal” people, as I kept thinking of them. People who had an idea and suddenly felt able to do something with it.

They felt they could fly, and that’s beautiful to see. I want to help people take what they’ve built further, without losing that excitement!

Where do we fit now?

At the Hatch Mixer Porto, organised by Ladies that UX Porto and Friends of Figma Porto the mood felt different.

There was curiosity, but also uncertainty. People seemed to be walking on eggshells. Where do we fit now? What’s our value? 🧠

But designers are navigating these changes better than I expected. I felt they needed clearer direction and more trust in themselves. We still have our craft, products still need our judgement, and the creative possibilities are growing. We need more influence to make that value visible.

And peeps, we are the masters of change. Our roles have changed so many times already! Now we need to figure out what each of us wants to do with these possibilities.

Protecting the thinking

At CPO Night, Product Circle and Product Tank Porto, I met incredible product leaders. Experienced people who were eager to share the nitty-gritty of their day-to-day battles.

Some conversations became unexpectedly vulnerable. We talked about the pressure coming from “AI stakeholders”. Can we call them that now? 🫠

Underneath the humour were real struggles around how to recognise risks earlier and protect the thinking, when building has become so much cheaper and faster.

Shipping can help us learn. But the learning needs to be able to change a decision, including one people are excited about. Hearing experienced product people speak honestly about how difficult that can be stayed with me.

The crowd I had missed

Then came the AI Engineering Porto meetup.

Gui Ferreira created a space where people could be vocal about what they were thinking and experiencing. And people used that space. We had some of the most honest conversations I’ve had about this AI era.

There was something about being with engineers again that spoke straight to my heart 💙

They reminded me how much I love working with sharp people who go beyond the obvious. Who go deep. Whose brains are wired in a way that I love being around.

I had forgotten how much I missed that.

I went there to contribute, and came home remembering something about where I thrive.

Finding people to think with

Future Product Days in Copenhagen gave me an assurance I had been needing.

I went as an attendee, crashed the speakers’ dinners 😅 and made the most of the conference, side events and city. I spent time with people from design, product and engineering, and learned a loooot.

There was relief in realising that other people were noticing some of the same patterns I was. In this AI era, we’re so focused on building and shipping, and it’s starting to show in features and products that lack thought and craft. Users are paying attention. And I saw evidence of it.

Customer feedback is always what stays with me: support tickets, user interviews, social media comments, reviews. The workarounds people invent, the questions they keep asking, the things they try once and never come back to.

God, I am so passionate about understanding this. Spending time with smart, mature people equally obsessed with good products and beautiful design helped me think further, and reminded me why I do what I do.

I would love to return next year and contribute my thinking as a speaker too.

What came home with me

These rooms became a kind of field study for me. Informal, personal, and full of things I am still making sense of. They gave me evidence for some thoughts I had been carrying, and more questions about others.

They also reminded me of the people I want to keep learning and working alongside. That drive home from the engineering meetup is still with me.

Now I’m thinking about how to put my knowledge and experience in service of the people I met. What can I help them see? What can we work through together? Where would my experience actually be useful?

Those questions are helping shape what I’m building with wingmaker.co and the work I want to do through closetothesun.co and the ideas I’m still finding words for.

Thank you for being in the room,

Sónia

First published in the LinkedIn edition of In the Room, 27 October 2026.

This September, when I shared that I would be speaking at several events, a few people were surprised.

Is this your new thing?

I smiled. Enough time had passed that some people had forgotten this was my thing before Covid. Others had only met me afterwards, so they had never known that version of me.

I don’t remember exactly what I answered. But secretly, inside, I was saying something else.

Yes. I am back. Finally.

In 2020, at sixteen weeks pregnant, I had to end a pregnancy because my baby had not developed properly. Covid restrictions meant I went through it alone in hospital, without my husband, family or friends beside me.

Not long after that, I was fired. I was not at my best. Of course I wasn’t.

Eventually, after IVF, I became a mother. Something I had wanted so much had finally happened. And then postpartum depression arrived.

Sleep deprivation is serious business. I don’t think I understood how serious until I no longer felt like myself.

There was brain fog. I lost my sharpness. I forgot memories and stories that had once been easy to reach. I would go to job interviews and, when someone asked me for an example of my work, I knew I had one, but I couldn’t find it. The story was somewhere in my head, but I could no longer reach it when I needed it.

It was dark. Very, very dark.

Still, I kept pushing. I tried to keep my career going, to keep proving, to other people and probably to myself, that I could still do this.

Then came burnout.

My head literally stopped working. I spent days looking at my computer, unable to do even the smallest task. Complex problems that had once excited me now looked like enormous mountains I could not begin to climb.

That was the moment when pushing through stopped feeling brave and started feeling frightening.

I kept asking myself the same questions.

Did I lose my brain? Did I lose my sharp thinking, my attention to detail, my ability to just… think?

For a while, it felt as if I had.

And I was terrified that I might never be able to work again.

My body had changed too. Throughout those years, the medication I needed came with weight gain. I looked different. I thought differently. I worked differently. There were days when I barely recognised the person I had become.

This was not only a difficult period in my career. It was a long separation from myself.

The first time I stepped onto a stage again this September, I was nervous and tense. It felt almost like the first time I had ever done it.

I had spoken many times before, but my body did not seem to remember that. Or perhaps it remembered everything that had happened since.

Then I did it again. And again.

After a couple of times, something began to settle. I could think while I was speaking. I could read the room. I could find the story I wanted to tell. I could improvise. I could be present instead of watching myself from the outside, afraid that my mind would suddenly go blank.

I felt at home again ❤️

And every time, underneath the nerves and the preparation and the relief, there was gratitude.

Gratitude for having my brain back.

Gratitude for having my charisma back.

Gratitude for being able to do something I once feared I had lost forever.

I recently read Oprah’s reflection on Céline Dion returning to the stage after six years away, following her diagnosis with stiff-person syndrome.

The part that resonated was what standing on that stage represented: the long, mostly invisible fight behind the visible return.

Everyone sees the performance, but what we don’t see are the days spent wondering whether the part of you that made it possible is still there.

Her story reminded me of my own, not because our circumstances are the same, but because I recognised that fear. The fear that something you trusted your whole life might no longer be available to you. And the complicated joy of discovering that, although you are not the person you were before, another chapter is still possible.

I am not back because everything has returned to the way it was before 2020. It hasn’t.

I am back because I can think again. I can tell stories again. Complex problems excite me again. And when I walk onto a stage, after the fear begins to settle, I recognise myself.

Not the old me exactly.

Me, now.

Thank you for being in the room,

Sónia

First published in the LinkedIn edition of In the Room, 29 September 2026.

When I decided to call myself a Fractional Product Design Partner, I thought I was giving a name to a new way of working. However, the more I look back, the less new it feels.

I have never been someone who stays for years inside the same product company or team. I tend to enter around a problem, help make sense of it, do the work, strengthen the team, and move on when the problem no longer needs me in the same way.

Solve the problem. Strengthen the team. Don’t make yourself permanently necessary.

I wasn’t working under fractional contracts then, but the instinct underneath the model was already there. Now I have decided to give it a name.

The question behind the calendar

The easiest way to explain fractional work is through time: one day a week, two days a week, a percentage of a role instead of a full-time hire.

It is also the least useful place to begin. The calendar tells you how time is allocated. It says very little about what the person will be responsible for or which outcome they are there to influence.

For a founder or product leader, the more useful question is: what is happening in the company that we cannot resolve with the capability we already have?

Maybe the team is shipping but the outcome is not moving. Research exists, but it is not changing the roadmap. A redesign feels urgent, although nobody agrees on what it needs to solve. Or the company needs senior design leadership but does not yet know whether that need is permanent.

These are not always capacity problems. They are often problems of judgement, direction, and leadership. Fractional Product Design brings senior involvement into one of these moments without assuming it must become a permanent role.

Access has to match responsibility

For this to work, access matters more than the number of days. Not access to every meeting, message, or document (nobody needs more meetings 😅), I need access to the context, evidence, people, and decisions shaping the product.

One of my current engagements began as a one-off audit of several pages in a content-heavy product. The expectation was that I would produce a report and the team would take it from there.

The audit showed that the problems did not live inside individual pages. The navigation told different stories in different places, important proof was difficult to find, and the visual language felt accumulated rather than coherent. I turned those findings into connected areas of work and a strategic roadmap.

But a roadmap is still a report.

To turn it into the product, I needed to work with the people making the decisions and doing the work. At first, I wasn’t always in those conversations. The recommendations existed, but the thinking behind them wasn’t reaching the right rooms.

Once that changed, I could move from diagnosing the system to helping the team change it from the inside out. The audit became an ongoing retainer. The new navigation and information architecture are live, and a new visual language has been delivered. The sales team is already reporting stronger engagement from existing clients with the new look and feel. It is early, qualitative feedback, and the work is still in progress.

But the diagnosis did not remain inside a document. We are turning it into the product together.

What the model asks from both sides

A company cannot ask someone to influence an important outcome while keeping them at the edge of the system producing it.

The engagement still needs boundaries: what the partner owns, which decisions they can influence, what remains with the team, and what should be different when the work ends. Within those boundaries, access has to match responsibility. The company needs an internal sponsor who opens the relevant rooms and remains accountable for what the organisation does with the work.

I have responsibilities too. I cannot hide safely inside recommendations. I need to stay accountable to what happens next and help the internal team become more capable rather than more dependent on me.

The goal is not to make myself permanently necessary. It is to help the company move through a consequential moment, leave the product and the decision-making stronger, and be honest about when the engagement should evolve or end.

Sometimes the answer is not fractional

Fractional should not become the answer to every hiring or product problem simply because the model is becoming more visible.

If the team knows what it needs to build and the constraint is sustained execution, it probably needs delivery capacity. If the company needs permanent ownership of its design people and direction, it probably needs a full-time leader. And if it cannot share context or provide access to decision-makers, a fractional partner will struggle to contribute beyond recommendations.

The stronger fit is a company that can build and ship but is facing a consequential decision or an outcome it cannot fully explain. It needs experienced judgement now, enough hands-on involvement to make the work real, and support that strengthens the team without assuming the need is permanent.

So before asking how many days a week you need a fractional partner, ask what you need that person to help change: which decision is difficult? What outcome is not moving? Which conversations will they need to enter? What will they be allowed to make real?

Because fractional is not a number of days, it is a different kind of relationship built around a specific need.

Maybe it is not a new way of working for me after all. Maybe it is simply the first time I have given the way I have always worked a name.

Thank you for being in the room,

Sónia

First published in the LinkedIn edition of In the Room, 2 September 2026.

I learned how to run research, facilitate workshops, build design systems, lead teams, collaborate with engineering, and navigate the messy reality of product development.

I worked with talented founders. Great product leaders. Incredible teams ✨ I genuinely believed I understood what it meant to build something people wanted.

Then I tried to build businesses of my own. Not venture-backed startups. Just ideas I couldn’t stop thinking about 💡

An organic skincare brand

Or at least, that was the plan.

I spent months learning how to formulate products, sourcing ingredients and studying organic cosmetics. Eventually, I discovered what it would actually take to bring the idea to life: a laboratory, regulatory approvals, an investment I simply wasn’t prepared to make.

For a few weeks, I thought the project was dead. Then I realised something: what I really cared about wasn’t manufacturing skincare, it was helping people make healthier choices.

So I changed the vehicle, not the mission. Instead of building a skincare brand, I launched a wellness e-commerce store.

It wasn’t the original idea. But it kept the original purpose alive. Eventually, I closed it too. Not because I stopped believing in the mission. Because the evidence told me it wasn’t gaining enough traction, and I wasn’t willing to keep forcing something reality wasn’t supporting.

A little later, I explored another idea.

A speciality coffee and design subscription

I love speciality coffee. I love design. It felt obvious. This time, I decided to validate it properly before building anything. For three months, I spoke to people, tested the concept and estimated the market. The conclusion was uncomfortable. Fewer than twenty people were likely to buy it.

That wasn’t a business. It was a hobby wearing a business model.

And maybe the hardest part wasn’t letting go of the idea. It was admitting that I loved coffee enough to spend my mornings drinking it... But not enough to spend the next ten years building a company around it.

Looking back, neither of those projects failed

They quietly dismantled the way I thought about product. For years, I’d encouraged teams to test assumptions, to follow the evidence, to avoid falling in love with solutions.

Building something of my own was the first time I had to follow that advice myself. I had to kill ideas I loved. I had to change direction when the evidence contradicted what I wanted to believe. I had to separate my identity from my ideas. And that’s much harder than it sounds!

I realised I’d spent years discussing product with founders. But discussing someone’s decisions isn’t the same as carrying their uncertainty. The moment your own time, money and energy are tied to every decision, product stops feeling like a roadmap, it becomes a series of bets. Some informed, some intuitive. None guaranteed 🎲

That’s why my conversations with founders and product leaders are different today. I naturally ask about pricing, business models, customer acquisition. What would have to be true for this to become a real business? Not because I’m trying to become a founder, but because I finally understand the weight behind those questions.

Ironically, trying to build businesses didn’t make me leave product. It made me realise I’d only been looking at one part of it.

The biggest lesson I learned wasn’t how to build a business. It was learning how to let go of ideas when reality asked me to.

And I think that’s true for products too. The hardest part isn’t coming up with ideas. It’s having the humility to change them when you learn something new.

It took trying to build my own businesses to truly understand the weight of the decisions I’d spent twenty years helping other people make.

First published in the LinkedIn edition of In the Room, 24 July 2026.

Last week, I walked away from something most people would have taken.

A contract was on the table, good product, good people, a real problem to solve. Then they changed the ask. They needed someone full-time. The fractional model, they said, wouldn’t give them what they needed. Leadership. Authority. Presence.

They weren’t wrong about what they needed. But they were asking me to be someone I’d decided not to be anymore.

Every other time I was at this crossroads, I took the full-time path. The title, the org chart, and the stability. The work was good and I don’t regret it.

But I kept noticing the same thing: design always arrived after the fact. Either the decisions had already been made, or they were being made in rooms design wasn’t in. Either way, design was executin, not shaping.

The thing nobody says out loud is that the problem isn’t execution. The problem is never the designers. It’s the moment they’re invited in.

When design arrives late, it can only be executed well. It can ship on time, make things look good, and smooth the rough edges. But it can’t fix what it wasn’t there to influence. It can’t surface the assumption that’s quietly shaping every decision.

The most expensive design mistakes don’t happen during development. They happen before design starts.

When design is upstream, it can do what it’s actually best at: make the cost of not knowing something visible.

Research that reveals what’s actually broken. Discovery that tests assumptions before they harden. Decisions based on what’s true, not internal consensus dressed up as certainty. That’s not a design philosophy. It’s a business argument.

So I said no.

In that same conversation, the CEO told me my diagnosis had made something clear to them: they needed a full-time design leader for that team. I was glad it helped — just not in the way either of us had originally imagined.

The fractional model lets me be there in the moment that matters most, before decisions are locked in. I come in, diagnose what’s actually broken, run the research that reveals it, and help build the conditions for design to lead. Then the team carries it forward.

That’s the work I want to do. That’s why I chose this.

This time, I’m insisting on it.

If you’re a founder, CPO, or CTO building a product where design isn’t driving decisions yet, I’d like to talk. Not a pitch. Just a conversation about what’s going on.

hello@soniagomes.me · soniagomes.me

Sónia

First published in the LinkedIn edition of In the Room, 15 June 2026.