personAbout

I build the teams that build the products.

Carlos Lima Santana

I'm a digital product design and research leader based in London, currently Design & Research Manager for E-Commerce & Platforms at British Airways.

I started as a kid in Brazil who cut brands and logos out of magazine adverts to work out how they were put together. When my father brought home a copy of Ícaro, Varig's inflight magazine, aircraft joined the list, and I've been an aviation geek ever since. But the instinct underneath was always the same: take something apart, understand it, and make it work better for the people using it. That instinct became a career in design.

What connects the work isn't the industry. It's that I keep ending up responsible for the design getting better: building the team, the system and the way of working, and coaching the people doing it. I've done that as a strategic designer, as a consultant mentoring client teams, as a university tutor teaching the next intake of designers, and now leading design and research in-house at British Airways. The setting changes, but the job doesn't.

A lot of that happened in travel, aviation and mobility, which is where the obsession started and where I know the terrain best. It's a passion, not a limit. I work comfortably in English, Portuguese, French and Spanish, and I'm eligible to work across the United Kingdom, European Union and Mercosur.