Erin Casali, known as “Folletto”, is a senior product and design executive. She has a hybrid background in design, psychology, business and technology — with a people-centered approach. Over the years she built products and helped businesses transform by trusting people and giving them agency, and by clarifying goals, with a firm belief in transparency and diversity. Her objective is to change for better the quality of life of the people through the products she designs and leads. She currently works in Xero, and was previously in Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, Jetpack, WooCommerce and many other products.
She believes that “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, as Leonardo DaVinci reportedly said and her approach is to reach a focused simplicity through the existing complexity.
During her 17+ years of professional experience, she designed consumer and enterprise products and services for millions of users worldwide in different markets — and with WordPress, 40%+ of the web. She worked with companies like Bank of England, Intesa Sanpaolo, Banca Sella, Unicredit, Nokia, Vodafone, Telecom Italia, Ferrari and Benetton.
She co-founded Good 50×70, an international social communication project, and Baker Framework, a platform to publish HTML5 books and magazines on the iPad.
She was a design partner in the startup WideTag where she led the product design of WideNoise, listed in the Compasso D’Oro selection, the ADI Design Index 2010 and selected in the Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009. She worked on P2, a remote collaboration platform that got nominated for ProductHunt’s Golden Kitty Award in 2020.
She developed with Gianandrea Giacoma Motivational Design, a method that provides a theoretical approach and tools to deal with social dynamics and design social environments.
She advised multiple startups: Ernest, Impacton, PosterForTomorrow, Flythegap, Tallyfy, Pick1 and Tonight.eu and was evangelist of Hunie.co.
XERO
In my tenure at Xero I’ve covered multiple roles: VP of Design and Director of Design. In the time I spent in these roles I helped define the 3-years vision for the Accountants and Bookkeeping division, the vision for the Tax portfolio, as well as leading the standardization and unification for the EMEA products.
Great products are shaped by great teams, and that’s why three of my biggest achievements have been to establish the northern hemisphere design team, define and share the company-wide asynchronous work framework, and standardize how the design organization manages tasks and long term roadmap.
JETPACK
As a VP of Product and Design in Jetpack (19M+ downloads) I’ve worked closely with my peers (Business, Operations, and Engineering) to drive a multi-phase turnaround of the SaaS division. We helped the team to shift from burnout to reactive to planning forward, with a deep dive in processes and up-skilling our product abilities. Then we executed a major product pivot, researching the global market opportunities, repackaging the offering, creating new subscription pricing points, streamlining the onboarding, redesigning the brand language, and creating the “Jetpack cloud”, a cloud service based on the WordPress·com stack to manage all the Jetpack websites, with a three-parts strategy: users (B2B), agencies (B2C2B), and hosts (B2B).
WOOCOMMERCE
When WooCommerce realized the need of a best-in-class mobile application I took the role of Sr. Director of Product and Design and we conducted a mix of desk research, market research, as well as guerrilla research to identify a clear roadmap of key features businesses wanted. The launch of the first official WooCommerce mobile app for iOS and Android was successful, from MVP to frequent incremental milestone releases, with good reviews and steady scores of 4.7 / 5.0.
WORDPRESS.COM + WORDPRESS.ORG
AUTOMATTIC
During my time in Automattic I took multiple Director roles, covering both desktop and mobile, across Product and Design, while the company grew from 200 to 1,500 employees. I’ve initially worked on a major legacy project: decommissioning 5 legacy WordPress·com theme showcases to consolidate on one modern stack. My team also contributed in the major work that created Calypso, an API-first, React-based platform that later laid the foundation for the Gutenberg project. I’ve also worked closely with the open source project, leading important features in 7 different releases, and setting the initial vision for Gutenberg with Parrot. The open source WordPress.org CMS powers 40.4% of the web (Feb 2021), a large part of which is enhanced by Jetpack.
BAKER FRAMEWORK
I co-founded Baker in 2010, the first ever HTML5 ebook framework to publish interactive books & magazines on iPad & iPhone. The idea was to use open standards to build a simple open source publishing platform.
During the 3 years I led the product design of the project we have released 10 versions (one every 4 months) with more than 20,000 downloads just from GitHub. We were also able to bootstrap an opensource community around the project, a community that engaged with more than 300+ forks, 16+ contributors and over 1,200 discussions, and still run strong.
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HOME BANKING
INTESA SANPAOLO
In 2008-2009 I led the interaction design for the new wave of internet banking in a few European banks. Intesa Sanpaolo was the most extensive work among them, done right after the merger to become the biggest Italian bank. It was a full re-thinking of their online presence, model and interaction, with multiple stakeholders, integrated with their banks on the territory and covering both personal use and trading. In 2010 it was awarded Best Bank of the Year for West Europe by The Banker, and was the center of their online offering for more than 8 years.
RESTITUZIONI VIRTUAL MUSEUM
INTESA SANPAOLO
How to create a museum with the exhibitions distributed all over the country? This was the challenge that we undertook with the Restituzioni project: a museum that exists both as a virtual space where everyone can create exhibition tours, and as the physical art pieces themselves connected through a mobile app.
GOOD 50×70
I co-founded Good50x70, an award-winning no-profit international contest to help social communication, endorsed by UNESCO, charities (Amnesty International, Amref, Emergency, Greenpeace, LILA, Unicef and WWF) and design associations (AGI, Icograda, Beda, ADI, AIAP). The 2009 contest alone had more than 323.000 unique visitors. It won the Aretê Award 2007 as best Social Communication project.
UX FOR GOOD
This international project aimed to apply design practices to the most important problems in the world, partnering every year with a different no-profit for a one-week design sprint with research and strategy definition. I participated for two years (Vancouver and Kigali) and later I was one of the Fellows. I helped also to define the Inzovu Curve, an approach to design impactful and actionable museum experiences.
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WIDENOISE
WIDETAG
Creating the first mobile app that monitors in a fully distributed way the soundscape around us. This was the WideNoise project, an iOS and Android app to monitor the soundscape around us using WideTag’s proprietary Internet of Things platform.
TRACKING BRACELET
MAISON,THE R&D
I led the study and design of a bluetooth bracelet for kids, blending the needs of the parents worrying of their little child getting too far away when playing outside, with the needs of kids to wear something enjoyable and fun. Its design included an inner component and swappable soft-plastic bracelets.
MOTIVATIONAL DESIGN
Co-developed with Gianandrea Giacoma, this methodology lays the groundwork to analyze and design social network systems. Its main application has been in the enterprise market (a the dawn of Enterprise 2.0) to create effective collaboration platforms to break down silos, foster digital transformation, and overall create companies with more fulfilled people and better results.