Hello, I'm Luděk - a seasoned Design Leader with 20 years of experience building and shipping digital products.

Solving complex problems with both users and businesses in mind - prioritizing design that serves people over art for art's sake.

Anything from getting to know an abstract, complex problem to delivering an easy-to-use product or feature.

The bigger the challenge, the better. SaaS, B2C, B2B.

My passion is leading and mentoring design teams. I focus on creating a supportive environment where designers are happy, productive, and empowered to grow their skills. When people flourish, exceptional design follows.

💖 my wife, our pug 🐶 Hugo, ☕ oat milk flat white, 🎬 & 🎮

My work experience is not about flashy visuals, it's rather a short novel. Not a boring one, hopefully!

Emplifi is a new player in the CX space, born from merging 3 companies: Astute, Socialbakers (see below), and iPerception. New player, but an experienced one. Currently (Q4 2024) with a $140M ARR.

I'm leading a global design team (30+ members) that comprises both my Socialbakers crew and new members from the acquisition of other companies. We are no longer responsible for everything visual as we were at Socialbakers - our focus has shifted heavily towards product design, research, and experience.

Feel free to explore some of our design-related sites:

We are tackling quite a few new challenges like ...

Developing consumer-facing applications such as surveys, chatbots, live video streaming & advisors, ...
Unifying mobile apps
Unifying new complex products into a single, intuitive platform with consistent user interface & experience
Integrating new products and design teams seamlessly into our existing workflows
Designing and building innovative products, including Live Commerce, Care, Link In Bio, and more
Supporting product marketing and sales with even greater emphasis and attention
Enhancing our discovery and research efforts to better understand and meet our users' needs
... and much more

Joined Socialbakers right after its first seed of investment ($1M), having around 30 employees, exactly zero designers & one product (an analytical tool for social media).

I went through all ups & downs of transforming a startup into a mature company with 600+ employees and $55M+ ARR. The overall user experience of our SaaS platform - Socialbakers Suite - was often the reason clients have choosen us over competition and stayed with us.

I've hired every single member of my team (22+): an awesome multi-disciplinary product, branding, visual & motion designers combined with UX researchers and UX writer🙂

Some of the highlights and events we established, built & designed over the years ...

Built many new products, sunset some and then built another ones
Eventually merged all of our products into a unified platform
Redesigned products and website(s) and microsites and whatnot
Designed mobile apps that were never made (good strategy, bad execution of that strategy)
Rebranded the whole company (once) and updated the logo (many times)
Designed & rebranded many events
Had more than 1000 projects & prototypes in InVision before jumping into Figma
Made dozens of videos and visuals and ads, ... (stil love this one)
Switched from Adobe to Sketch to Figma (40+ editors, 150+ viewers)
Maintained many UI kits and then kicked off a huge design system(2016)
... the list could go forever

... and few thoughts about my approach to leading & building a design team

I've always preffered clever & passionate "juniors" from seniors (one of my best designers came from a Ministry of Education 🤓) ...
... but I also hate generalization: every single person is special!
Everyone evolves - visual designers moving to full-time motion, UX to UI, etc.
Totally diverse team in their approach to design - it creates a wonderful dynamic
(I hate how some "leaders" want to have a bunch of "slaves" who just do what they tell them)
Always encouraged designers to do side-projects as it helps to chill out a bit (product design can be quite exhausting)
Design reviews, design studios, design sprints, design syncs with devs/PM's, ...
Sharing (almost oversharing) + feedback gathering & receiving
Data, data, data & business goals
Soft-skills don't exist anymore: every designer should be able to not be an ass*ole

Actijoy is a smart system of a tracker & wifi bowls for dogs and apps for their owners.

I am always trying to “stay in the game” (constantly learning etc.) so when my friends approached me to help them with the design of a smart hardware/software for dogs and their owners, I went in. And I still like it: Hugo is wearing the tracker everyday. Do you have a spare few $millions to help?:)

I designed an iOS/Android app, website, desktop app, brand, emails, product, packaging, you name it.

This was my only side-project since joining Socialbakers: I am always focusing 200% on my work and then try to spend as much of my free time with family.

A website builder, that still exists! Our mission was to enable everyone to make a website (we had users aged 12 to 90). More than 5 000 000 users created their website using eStránky.cz.
150 000+ active real users were using our service every month. Ease-of-use, usability, and friendly support were our essential traits. 15 years ago🙂

eStránky.cz was for 3 years in TOP 10 of Czech's MRU ranking with 2M+ real visitors/month to websites created by our users and customers.

I was the first fulltime employee🙂 We started as a team of 3: a founder, a developer, and me.

We grew to around 15 employees and a nice recurring income with a great retention (95% of our paying customers renewed every year) but sold it to a pretty clueless corporation that fuc*ed it up (lesson learned).

My role was to lead the project product-wise. What it meant 15 years ago?:)

telling developers what to do
improving the application
bringing more new users (constantly playing with heatmaps, usage statistics, testing, ...)
finding a compromise between our business needs and needs of our users
designed & coded the application and the portal on my own (and redesigned it twice)
responsible for all our design templates (100+):
- finding and hiring designers/coders
- reviewing their work
- and then implementing those templates into the system

Face It was a small design studio that I co-founded with my good friend Tomáš.

We were focused on webdesign, print & identity. We did dozens of crazy websites that probably don’t exist anymore. Love those days.

I was mostly responsible for iA, wireframes, and CSS/HTML/JS/Flash.

My journey to do webdesign for living started in 2004.

I was working for one big agency as a webmaster and with many smaller ones, ocasionally doing some branding, etc

If you remember those years you know that there were almost no super cool buzzword job titles like now. I just did everything.