Hi, I’m Nicolas Backal. I’m a Product Designer & Strategist based in San Francisco.

I believe in the power of Design to find the shared story between people, business, and technology. Currently, I’m a Lead Principal Product Designer at Okta. I also love to draw, write and spend time as a design mentor in the ADP List community.

Selected writing

The superpowers of great product designers

Product designers, like superheroes, are always faced with unprecedented villains. These maleficent beings come in all types, sizes, and shapes, sometimes with powers of their own, and for the most part, they all try to make someone’s life miserable.

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Hey designers and engineers, you can be friends

Building a digital product is hard. Whether you’re a product designer, a product manager, or an engineer, we all play a significant role in the user experience. And perhaps, one of the biggest challenges we face is building great relationships and communication channels within our teams.

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Our ever-changing windows

Windows. All of them. Regardless of their size or shape, they connect us with people on the other side. We sit on the second floor of what I used to consider a relatively quiet street. Every day hundreds of people walk by it, and I got used to the noise made by their talk, laugh, and walk

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Product Cookbook

Magic happens when product managers and designers work together collaboratively. Katie Le (PM at Okta) and I have been writing recipes for a great PM + Design partnership based on our learnings and experience.

Onboarding new team members

For the past year, Katie and I have been working together co-owning a couple of scrum teams. We constantly collaborate with our engineering partners and seek constant feedback from other product managers and designers, but the day-to-day work usually comes down to us two.

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Create shared focus with vision prototypes

Vision prototypes have a lot of similarities with product development prototypes. Both of them serve the purpose of testing and validating our product and design ideas while getting feedback from users as they try to complete a task with an unbuilt product.

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Selected talks

Mini-workshop Toolkit: Easy To Run, Interactive Workshops To Build Better Products
with Katie Le at the BeMore Festival 2022 by ADPList.org
September 2022

The Journey into Product Design
ADPList.org + Sketch + Springboard
August 2022

Differences between UX & UI
ADPList.org + Design Buddies
November 2021

Working at a Startup vs Corporate
ADPList.org + General Assembly
September 2021

Coffee Hours: Portfolio Edition
ADPList.org
August 2020

Blended Space: From Architecture to UX Design
Talk 20 at BCJ
San Francisco, CA
November 2018

Blended Space: From Architecture to UX Design
Tradecraft
San Francisco, CA
April 2018

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Selected work

Okta’s Identity Vision

Lead Product Designer, Okta, 2021

This vision-driven project explores just how robust identity’s role is in every facet of our lives, and how Okta sees the future of digital identity.

watch the demo →

Okta end-user experience

Lead Product Designer, Okta, 2020

What started as a research project to understand user pain points, quickly evolved to define the future for Okta’s end-user experience.

The Human Diagnosis Project

Head of Design, Human Dx, 2018

How can we help healthcare providers provide better care for them by collaborating between them in a safe and supported environment?

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