Client • Santander UK & Allied Irish Banks
What luxury real estate at Urbane Barcelona taught me about designing for trust, timing, and human decisions that can’t be A/B tested
The Architecture of Choice
At IKEA Centres, I helped reimagine a shopping mall into an emotionally resonant experience prototype a space people wanted to explore, not just consume in. We staged connection. We mapped foot traffic like feeling. We thought in emotion, not in leases.
But after months of building space for thousands, I found myself asking:
What does that kind of design look like at a human scale? One buyer. One property. One irreversible choice.
That question led me to Urbane International Real Estate in Barcelona.
At Urbane International Real Estate, I worked with clients navigating some of the most personal decisions of their lives where to live, where to invest, where to begin again. These weren’t impulse purchases. They were long-tail journeys filled with doubt, emotion, and nuance.
My role sat between architecture and aspiration:
Helping international buyers interpret what they wanted through what they noticed.
Guiding them through the quiet tradeoffs of location, layout, and light.
Explaining market complexity, without overwhelming. And most importantly, learning when to step back and let trust build on its own.
I wasn’t selling listings. I was mapping emotion.
Urbane specialized in high-end homes for international buyers often unfamiliar with the local market, emotionally invested, and deeply uncertain.
I worked across the full journey: From initial outreach to curated tours to decision-making moments that had less to do with specs, and more to do with emotional clarity. It was high-trust, high-touch, and often high-stakes. But it was also quiet. Subtle. Beautifully complex.
It felt like UX research, but in linen and sunlight.
I learned that the best advisors don’t push decisions. They design an environment where good decisions reveal themselves.
This was experience design without the wireframes.
Every viewing was a test. Every question a user interview. Every hesitation a signal.
I began refining my ability to read between the words. To shape narrative arcs through space, not screens. To reduce friction not through funnels but through presence and pacing. And most of all, I learned to recognize what wasn’t being said, and design for it anyway.
What I carried forward
Today, as a Product Manager, I think about users the same way I once thought about buyers:
Not as personas, but as people navigating uncertainty looking for something to feel right before it makes sense. My job as a PdM isn’t to control that journey. It’s to create the conditions for clarity through context, pacing, and well-placed signals.
Whenever I’m designing a flow wether its onboarding, conversion, or even retention, I still think back to those long walks through Eixample.
The ambient trust. The unspoken cues. The quiet pause before a yes. I don’t just map features. I sequence emotion. Because the goal isn’t to surface the best option. It’s to guide people toward the one they can trust.
Urbane wasn’t a break from tech. It was product thinking, stripped of process, pure, human, and raw. And it made me slower, sharper, and more attuned to what actually drives action.