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"Tenny is one of those exceptional talents with exceptional coding skills combined with outstanding design".
‍- Bob Whitehead, co-founder of Activision.
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I helped pioneer Service Design globally.
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Head of Design. Design Engineer. Serial Founder. Author.


Read my mind at /thinking.

LEAD UX ENGINEER

Meta Reality Labs

At Meta Reality Labs I workied on the Meta's AI Glasses.

Coding and crafting high fidelity prototypes, and improving the Design System to push the boundaries on rich intuitive user interfaces.
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#UX Engineer
#UX Designer
#iOS Engineering
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HEAD OF DESIGN

Kinds

Founder. Head of Design + Research.
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Kinds Prismatic Self™ is kept on-device and remains private to its user. It feeds a continuous experimentation pipeline we named Alchemist™ . The Prismatic Self™ is the anchor: a single ground truth, replicable, explainable, and alignable. Alchemist™ is an ever-shifting, multi-model engine that reads it to perform inference and classification on demand.
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#UX
#ML AI Research
#Agentic Design Engineering
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HEAD OF DESIGN

Livework

Livework is the prime Service Design agency globally. Founded in London in 2001, it was the first agency to introduce Service Design as a practice.

In 2009 I joined as a partner and co-founder, leading the Design team from research to implementation with a focus in enterprise transformation projects and product development initiatives for the Latin America region. Over a hundred projects including full digital design areas implementations for enterprise clients.

#Director
#Head of Design
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HEAD OF ACCELERATOR

Cisco

I designed the processes, structure, frameworks and led the internal acceleration program (vision, strategy, research, roadmap and metrics) for Cisco in Silicon Valley, with a late global rollout.

Enterprise transformation. Led, trained and mentored over 100 product managers, engineers and designers on applying Design Thinking into numerous product development acceleration cycles.
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EDU NON- PROFIT

First Steps

In 2026 I've launched Sprint with Ai: First Steps. A self-paced, not-for-profit, bootcamp designed to help Designers not only keep their jobs in the agentic revolution but also find their voices inside AI-first organizations.  
First Steps is built for teams that want practical AI acceleration without the token bloat , the slop, or the blind automation. Our “triple A” approach combines actionable same-day AI-powered sprints, analog human-in-the-loop decision-making, and accessible AI workflows that run on LLMs you already use.

PRODUCT CONCEPT

Vinyl

Vinyl is a simple App concept I've designed from idea to prototype during a hackathon in San Francisco, CA. It uses machine learning to run a deep roots and influences analysis based on an album of choice. Choose an album, hit spin and Vinyl will trace the roots and influences of the artist while recording that album, suggesting albums by focusing on inheritage rather than "people are also listening to this".
Vinyl proposes a new listening experience, one in which users travel back in time and get inside the brain of their artist of choice deep diving into their influences and roots.  

#UX Design
#UX Research

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Product design

NYX A.I. (WEB3)

Head of Product.
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NYX A.I. is a presence protocol utilizing a proprietary AI and hard science. Soul NFTs (E.I.) can have vast utility, we are starting by experimenting with making introductions based on who people are, not how they look.
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#Head of Design
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Head of design +Engineering (PORTAL)

Bayer CropScience

Head of Design + Engineering. Managing 36 global, large scale tech products. Over 80 direct designers and engineers reports.

Responsible for the end to end delivery of the pipeline that completely transformed the way Bayer Crop-science interacts with farmers and clients around the globe. This was a major digital transformation project ran in collaboration with the HQ in Germany, and rolled out globally.
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Head of design  (PORTAL)

LR Group

Worked and lived in Africa for two years spear heading design and software engineering projects for the LR Group. During my two years in Angola I've led a team of Designers and Engineers designing service experiences for the public and private sectors in Angola.

I also acted as Head of Design (Portal experiences)  for Angola's telecom Movicell, leading the implementation of twelve online services, available for the first time, to the general public.  

I also served as Head of Product (.Net) for Microsoft in the region for a period.

#Head of Design
#Project Lead
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COLLABORATION

IDEO (HCD)

I am proud to have collaborated on the HCD toolkit with my colleagues at IDEO. The HCD by IDEO is regarded by having sparked the Design Thinking revolution in the late 2000's.
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In 2009, IDEO designed and launched the HCD Toolkit, a first-of-its-kind Design Thinking guide that laid out how and why human-centered design can impact the social sector. In short order, a community of designers, entrepreneurs, and social sector innovators embraced it, buying and downloading over 150,000 copies.
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books / Articles

The Service Startup

(2014 - EN-JP-PT) This book explores how startups and business leaders can integrate Service Design and Lean Startup to create desirable and viable services. The methodology expressed in this piece, the MVS model, is being used by companies like Cisco and GE across the globe. This book was also published in Japan by Hayakawa.

Breaking free...

(2015) A book manifesto stating the reasons why you shouldn't use ONLY Lean Startup to create and accelerate businesses. Instead, project teams should also rely on the service-driven and human-centric power of Service Design. If we are to focus again on a scientific-only approach to entrepreneurship, well… we are in for a tough ride." (...)

Sprint Master's Guide

(2017) The complete guide to service Design Sprints. This book is a comprehensive step by step guide aimed to help you plan and execute service-driven Design Sprints using the MVS - Minimum Valuable Service methodology. It is part of the Design Sprint School Official Curriculum.

Core 77 :: Contributor

Core77 is the world's #1 reference blog for design news and content. In it, Tenny Pinheiro pens the column design @ your service, in which he covers the application of design thinking to service businesses and the complex nuances of our current service economy. Other contributors and columnists include names like Donald Norman and Bill Mogridge. 

DESIGN SPRINT SCHOOL

I've created Design Sprint School as a way to contribute to UX design education around the world. The online bootcamp went on to win many awards as best online design bootcamp and certified thousands of people worldwide.
The program presents a good balance of grounding design theory and Agile UX and Service Design practices. Not only presenting tools or the how but also holding a strong focus on the why.

Design Thinking BR

(2009) A best-seller in Brazil, this book is a deep dive into the roots, reasons whys, applications and myths regarding Design Thinking. Its the #1 choice for understanding Design Thinking in Brazil and is known as the book which started the Design Thinking movement in the country. Published in Brazil by Elsevier PT-BR only.

The Service Startup

(2014 - EN-JP-PT) This book explores how startups and business leaders can integrate Service Design and Lean Startup to create desirable and viable services. The methodology expressed in this piece, the MVS model, is being used by companies like Cisco and GE across the globe. This book was also published in Japan by Hayakawa.

The GV Model Guide

(Coming soon: Fall, 2018) The complete guide to Google Ventures Design Sprints. This book is a comprehensive step by step guide aimed to help you plan and execute Design Sprints using the GV model methodology. It is part of the Design Sprint School Official Curriculum.

METHOD RECOGNITION

CSD MATRIX (NN/g)

NN/g, the institute that coined the term User Experience, featured one of the design research methods I've created on their recommended frameworks collection and made it part of their research methodlogies certificate.

I'm a big believer that in the same way "form follows function", design tools should be shaped to fit the task at hand. No silver bullets. That said, the  CSD matrix, featured here by NN/g, is one that I've created that I keep finding useful across different projects and realities.
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RESEARCH METHOD

UX-ML Researcher

This Research log is aimed as a recap of the global research leading to the first iteration of Kinds development. This is a different iteration, focused on match-making inferences, that I've worked on in 2019.
I've led and designed the research beginning to end. It included user research in Japan, Eu, South America and the US. It runs deeper than I'm able to portray in the website and the prototypes are, of course, outdated, but you can get for sure a glimpse of Kinds' product development journey.
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#UX Research

RESEARCH METHOD

U.S.E. Global Report

Research director, and methodology creation. U.S.E was a global usability study with 69k+ consumers to map user experience across five different continents. It turned journeys into KPIs for measurable service performance across industries. The USE.Report Global 2015 gauged consumer's perception of UX core principles and innovation capabilities. It depicts a balanced vision of how organizations deliver services across the globe.

#UX Research
#Head of UX Research
#Methodology creation

CONCEPT DESIGN

Vinyl

Vinyl is a simple App concept I've designed from idea to prototype during a hackathon in San Francisco, CA. It uses machine learning to run a deep roots and influences analysis based on an album of choice. Choose an album, hit spin and Vinyl will trace the roots and influences of the artist while recording that album, suggesting albums by focusing on inheritage rather than "people are also listening to this".
Vinyl proposes a new listening experience, one in which users travel back in time and get inside the brain of their artist of choice deep diving into their influences and roots.  

#UX Design
#UX Research

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CONCEPT DESIGN

The Brief (NFX)

Product design.
The brief is a tool by NFX used by founders when pitching VCs.
The idea in this prototype reboot was to preserve the original brand identity and convert the old website into a web App capable of hosting founders services.
This redesign is based on the concept of actively helping founders in the process of building quality content to present to VCs, instead of being a collector/ organizer tool of this content.

#UX Design
#UX Research

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FOUNDER (EDU)

Design Sprint School

I launched the original Design Sprint Schoolin 2017 to teach founders, designers and engineers the Service Design Sprint, a design acceleration framework I've developed two years before Google launched Sprint.

The program was considered top 3 best online Design Schools by Switch-up for four years. DSS is also part of a non-profit educational initiative committed to fostering better design and helping designers transition into the AI agentic era and keep their jobs.

The original program was discontinued to open space for the not for profit:  First Steps: Sprint with Ai.

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Design + code

Corky

This is a minimalistic wine store app I designed and coded for a San Francisco local wine store.
It uses Apple pay for checkout and machine learning image recognition for scanning labels, like Vivino. It also has some serious custom designed views, singleton(stateless) architecture, core data and GCD queues.

This app was created in sprint speed and took two weeks from concept to launch.
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#UX Research
#UX Design
#Software engineering

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Design + code

Angeo.me

An App that allows people to chime in and "angel" you while you are commuting. The idea was to bridge local shops and commuting routes creating something that would expand the inflow of customers of the shops. People that you trust that are not near you, can see you are commuting and pay you a cup of coffee, for example, on the exact geo-location, at the same moment you are walking by.
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#Product Development
#UX Research and Design
#iOS Engineering

Design + code

Jung: A Social Game.

Jung is an Ai friend that helps you meet people and make friends at the social spaces you love and often go to. It is an experimental App, with a "RPG" like chat-dialog where users interface with the Ai. The board you see to the right represents the social space. This project evolved into Kinds.app.

#Vision
#UX Research
#UX Design
#Visual Design
#iOS Engineering

Design + code

Piper, the Weather Cat

What started as a joke between friends became a weather App. Piper the weather cat is a simple, one-screen, spritekit based App. In it a cat dresses for the weather and the weather elements can be spoted animated around the cat. What is cool about it is the weather casting system I've created based on singletons, parsing data from OpenWeather's Api and converting it into scenes full of particle effects.

#Vision
#UX Research
#UX Design
#iOS Engineering

Design + code

Spheres

An App that allows local shops and entities to broadcast promotions and utility messages to people commuting through a region. The messages are only received if you are located inside the geofence.
A bakery can broadcast about a fresh out of the oven batch, coffee shops can offer coupons on slow hours, the police can broadcast a warning. The idea was to create something that can complement Yelp, being it realtime and connecting people and local services.

#Vision
#UX Research
#UX Design
#iOS Engineering

Design + code

Firecoins App

An App that supports the live-action immersive game Firewalk. It allows users to rack up and collect firecoins which are in turn released to them whenever they cross a gate or win a challenge. The game is aimed as an immersive Silicon Valley experience for visitors in the valley and simulates, for a week, the ups and downs of startup-life.

#UX Research
#UX Design
#iOS Engineering

founder (Edu)

The School for Service Innovation (EISE)

The Service Innovation school I designed in 2011. The vision was to create a Bauhaus for Service Design. The curriculum moved beyond  Service Design to encompass arts and cognitive sciences. Eise kick started the Service Innovation ecosystem in Brazil. Today, over 70% of the people working with Service Design in Brazil are somewhat related to the school.
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founder (Edu)

Hivelab.co


Hivelab provides product acceleration by employing product design processes and approaches within Design Sprint timeframes. As an example, over 35 products were accelerated for Cisco in Silicon Valley and across the globe. Clients include Softbank, Cisco, Magic, GE, Microsoft, Metlife and others.

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founder (Edu)

SprintMaster.co

SprintMaster.co is a community of Design Sprint Masters that have been fostering change across the globe one sprint at a time. The Sprint Masters' Community has presence in many different continents and it keeps growing. I believe the future of Service Design lies in treating it as a teachable super power not a academic discipline.  


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DESIGN + CODE

Me.Mo App

Me.Mo is a listener, like a Man-In-The-Middle, that hacks through all the communication channels its allowed to and spontaneously compiles memory dumps out of peoples experiences and exchanges online.
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These contextual memory dumps can then be consumed via user and SaaS interfaces.

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DESIGN + CODE

INSPRD

INSPRD is an app that allows you to connect to specific content you choose from social media profiles you follow. With INSPRD you don't follow people, only the relevant content from them you care about.
INSPRD is your way to connect to people and follow only the things they do that really inspires you.

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Serial entrepreneur, UX/ Product/ Service designer, IOS Developer and Author.


"One of those exceptional talents with exceptional coding skills combined with creative design. As a team player he was well liked and energetic too. (...)"
- Bob Whitehead, Co-founder, Activision.

"Tenny has a design and UX background which I believe makes him an even better iOS developer. He is also passionate enough about design that he has at times opted to design UI elements from scratch instead of using frameworks like UIKit. It takes a deep understanding and great creativity in order to do this."
- S. Blades, Senior Engineer, Paypal.

"Tenny approach to Service Design taps into an inexhaustible source of creativity and innovation. His book, The Service Startup is a trusty roadmap that founders will long keep by their side."
- Jamer Hunt. Dean of Design, Parsons, The New School

“In this book, Tenny offers some extremely valid and hard-hitting criticism regarding the ideals surrounding  the dictate of building a Minimum Viable Product. Agreed on many fronts but I found his reinvention of these principles when applied to the service industry to be extremely insightful.  The concept of a Minimum Valuable Service is unique, new and sets goals intended to deliver maximum value with measurable results. This is a must read for anyone in the global innovation economy.”
- Rick Rasmussen, GSV.


DETAILS

I wrote this in 2012. It is a manifesto for a Service Innovation School I created back then. I truly believe a shift from product to services, from transactions to relationships, is not only necessary, but it holds the key to the foundation of a more sustainable society.

Shibuya, Tokyo bookstore.The Service Startup was published in Japan by Hayakawa, and worldwide by Elsevier and CreateSpace in 2014.  It was, de-facto, the first book to introduce a Design Sprint approach. Google's Sprint came, only, in 2016.

Keynote at SDNC Japan 2016 (Service Design Network Conference) on why Service Design has to embrace Agile. More about it here.

"To work with Tenny is to ride the road of disruption. It does not matter if you are designing experiences, services or processes. You will be able to find a clear path to service innovation."

- Jolivan Lopes, Head of Innovation at Bradesco, The largest bank in the south hemisphere.