Meet the DevAllies - Andressa Lombardo, Head of Design

The Storyteller · Delivers magic · 6-12 months at DevAlly

Who are you, and what are you up to at DevAlly?

I'm Andressa, Head of Design at DevAlly, where I lead all our design efforts across product and marketing. I joined in January, having previously been a Design System lead at Miro, with 16 years in design behind me. I've always been passionate about digital accessibility, so DevAlly is exactly the kind of place I wanted to be. It's rare to get to do work that feels this meaningful.

Outside DevAlly I co-organise a conference called Into Design Systems, and I host in-person and online events across Europe on AI-driven design.

"Accessibility isn't a constraint on good design. It is good design."

What does a typical day look like for you at DevAlly?

A typical day can look completely different from one week to the next, and that's the beauty of working at a startup, especially in this new era of AI design. I work really closely with engineering and with marketing, so no two days are the same.

A couple of weeks ago I was leading user research, moderating usability testing and pressure-testing the core structures and mental models across our product. Another day I might be working with Bruno (our Head of Product) on where the product goes next, or with Aisling (Head of Marketing) on the visual language for an upcoming marketing campaign. I spend a lot of my time down in the weeds, prototyping with Claude Code and getting ideas ready to ship… and at some point an engineer gently reminds me I'm a designer.

Momentum and pace matter, but so do thought and consideration.

What problem does DevAlly solve - in your own words?

I've been on the other side of this: in big enterprises, small companies, and back in my agency days working on government sites. Accessibility is the goal, but proving you've actually met it is where it gets messy.

In a large product with lots of features, every team owns a different piece, and testing every flow is laborious. Then once it's tested, you still have to prove it. Putting together accessibility conformance reports and coordinating all those moving parts to show you meet regulations like the European Accessibility Act (opens in a new tab) is a real undertaking. DevAlly takes a lot of that weight off.

What's the thing you're most proud of building here?

It matters to me that I'm working on a product and a mission I really believe in. Accessibility has so often been treated as an afterthought - a box to tick, something rigid. DevAlly exists to make it more achievable, and the brand reflects that. It's disruptive, it's playful, it doesn't look like anything else in the space.

Our brand was created by the very talented Jack Collins, but for a while the product didn't carry much of that colour and personality. Over the past few months I've been bringing it in, and the part I've loved most is developing the pictograms we use across the app and all our marketing. They're inspired by Susan Kare's original Mac icons (opens in a new tab), reworked to feel properly DevAlly.

Most accessibility products are blue and a bit serious. We're on a serious mission too, but there's no reason we can't have some fun doing it. I'm really proud of that.

Hot take: what's the future of developer tooling?

There's a lot of talk right now about the old design process being finished, that with AI you can jump straight to solutions and find the problem worth solving along the way. There's some truth in it… But that really only holds when you're building something brand new, where nobody knows the right patterns yet. Most of us aren't working like that.

We're designing products where the context already matters, and skipping it doesn't make you fast - it just makes you uninformed. I'm as hands-on and fast-moving as anyone, prototyping in code and shipping quickly. But pace and problem-solving aren't a trade-off.

"Rushing to a solution and forgetting the problem you set out to solve isn't speed. It's just rework you haven't met yet."

Fun fact — something that surprises people about you.

People who've seen me host events are usually surprised to hear I was painfully shy as a kid. Speaking to a stranger felt impossible, never mind a crowd. These days I've hosted at the Spotify, Meta, Miro and Volvo offices, and helped stream a conference to a thousand people.

(And yes, I got my first tattoo at 12. Fully authorised by my mum - so not quite the act of rebellion it sounds like.)

Find Andressa on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)

Want to build accessible products? Get started with DevAlly (opens in a new tab)