On being a Spanish product designer

There is a tax on writing in your second language and a tax on writing in your first. Most designers I know in Madrid or Valencia pay both, ship the English version, and feel the cleaner Spanish draft was lost in translation.

The English version is the one the world reads, so the English version is the one that compounds.

I once wrote an internal proposal for a benefits feature in Spanish, because the audience was a Spanish-speaking compliance lawyer in Madrid. The document was easily the best thing I had written that year.

I rewrote it in English the next morning, because Slack threads at Factorial were in English by default and I needed to share it more widely. The English version was fine. It was a different document, slightly more cautious, missing the small jokes that had carried the argument.

My English prose has rough edges. The semicolons sit in the wrong place. Articles drop where a native speaker would keep them, and the rhythm comes in one beat short of where it should.

I have stopped correcting most of it. The rough edges are how the reader knows there is a person behind the page, not a copywriter polishing the corners off.

I work remote, mostly. The day looks like this: coffee at home, a few hours of deep work, lunch with my wife, an afternoon of meetings against a German timezone, a long evening walk along the Turia where my head finally stops being a Notion doc.

This routine is the reason most of my best work happened in the last three years and not the seven before them. You can build inside a city you actually want to live in. The city does not care that your job is in Berlin.

There is no real product design scene in Valencia. There is one in Madrid and one in Barcelona, and both are smaller than people abroad assume.

Most of my professional conversations happen on Telegram and on Discord with people I have never met in person. This is a feature, not a bug. The Spanish-speaking design community online is small enough to be generous, and the European-English one is large enough to push back when an idea is weak.

I work in English, think in Spanish, and the seam shows in the prose. For years I tried to hide it. Lately I have tried to lean into it.

The seam is the only thing in the writing that no LLM can fake.