Career and Skills

I’m Daniel Arevalo, a Product Architect and strategic product design leader based in Oslo. I help product teams turn AI capability into trusted, adoptable workflows, mostly in industrial AI, IT/OT cybersecurity, and high-stakes enterprise software for critical infrastructure.

I studied electronic engineering in Colombia and interaction design in Norway. Since 2019 I’ve designed analytics, reporting, and security products for enterprise customers, and since January 2026 my designs go to production as code I build with AI agents instead of as Figma handoffs.

What a Product Architect is

I made the case for the role in a talk at RunwayFBU in June 2026. Product, design, and engineering are blurring, and AI concentrates the work into fewer hands that can hold both vision and execution. That pressure is strongest in industrial environments, and in Europe the NIS2 directive adds to it, because implementing its measures takes exactly this kind of person. RunwayFBU’s recap described a Product Architect as someone who “understands what should be built, why it matters, how it gets built, and what happens if it fails.”

RunwayFBU

On 25 June 2026 I gave a Takeoff talk at RunwayFBU in Fornebu on how product people stay essential in the AI age. My argument was that the old triangle of product manager, designer, and developer is collapsing as AI moves execution closer to the decisions. Where software decisions have real-world consequences, in energy, healthcare, manufacturing, or critical infrastructure, judgment becomes the scarce resource. RunwayFBU wrote up the session in Takeoff with Daniel Arevalo from Omny.

Since July 2026 I’ve been a mentor in the RunwayFBU AI & Robotics Lab. Its first cohort runs from June to December 2026 at Aker Tech House, where technical founders build and pilot industrial AI, autonomy, and robotics with real companies and real data. Every team leaves with a signed pilot, a letter of intent, or an evidence-based no-go. My part is helping founders decide where agentic AI and automated workflows belong in their product, go-to-market, and adoption plans.

Career

Omny, Lead Product Experience Designer (2024–2026)

Omny builds AI software that protects critical infrastructure operations from cyber threats across IT and OT environments. I set up discovery and execution roadmaps across three teams and turned customer workflows into prioritized requirements and end-to-end experiences for asset owners, IT/OT engineers, CISOs, and SOC operators.

The work that taught me the most was an alert system for industrial operators. The first version met a clear spec, and operators abandoned it within five days. Redesigning it around the decision an operator has to make in the thirty seconds after an alarm changed how I work. I wrote about it in Shallow Intent Ships Confident Failures. By 2026 I owned the front end as a designer who ships, building from PRDs and GitHub issues with Claude Code. That process is in About Craft, Taste, and Speed.

Forsta, Lead UX Designer (2021–2024)

I led UI and UX for Forsta’s reporting products: Dashboard Studio, Genius AI and machine-learning text analytics, and Forsta Visualizations. Forsta makes customer experience and research technology for large organizations.

Confirmit, Senior UX Designer (2019–2021)

I owned UX and UI for Dashboard Studio and Genius Text Analytics, which help enterprise customers turn large volumes of quantitative and qualitative feedback into action. I also built a unified design system that kept design consistent with front-end development.

Before 2019

I co-founded two startups: Glimty, where I was CPO from 2015 to 2018, and AW Initiative, where I was the product designer from 2018 to 2019. Before that I worked as an IT development consultant for The Ivy Faculty Consortium, as an automation engineer at E3T-UIS, and as a research assistant at Texas A&M University.

Skills

Product and design

Product and UX strategy, product management, service and systems design, interaction and UI design, design systems, and user and usability research.

Building with AI

Prototyping and shipping front ends with Claude Code and Cursor, writing the context files and PRDs that agents work from, and setting up review loops of automated code review, agentic tests, and human review before anything ships. My day-to-day process is in How I Write Code in 2026.

Domain

IT/OT and physical computing, industrial process automation, cybersecurity for critical infrastructure, and the EU’s NIS2 directive.

Strategy and leadership

Strategic planning, innovation management, go-to-market and growth, and starting companies.

Education

Languages

Spanish is my first language. I work in English and speak intermediate Norwegian.

What I’m building

Ækora sets up local language models so companies can process their own documents, such as invoices, contracts, and claims, on servers or a private cloud they control.

NIS2.chat gives NIS2 guidance specific to each EU member state, since every country transposes the directive differently. I built it because the directive is dense, and the people implementing it are operators and engineers, not compliance lawyers.

Writing

This blog is where I work through what changes in product and design when agents do the building. Good places to start are How I Write Code in 2026, Design Leadership Has Evolved, and Taste, Thought, and Trust Don’t Come From the Model.

Working with me

I take on advisory work for teams adopting AI in high-stakes software, workshops and lectures on the Product Architect role and agentic AI, mentoring, and product diagnostics for founders. You can reach me on LinkedIn. My portfolio is at danielfae.com, and the full resume, with earlier roles and awards, is at danielfae.com/resume.html.