Stefan Ivanov has spent over a decade in UX and product design — but the word “designer” has always felt slightly too small for what he actually does. What’s driven him is not the craft of making things look right. It’s the harder problem of making systems behave right, for real people, under conditions nobody fully anticipated.
That instinct found its sharpest expression at nFuse, where he leads product for an AI-powered B2B ordering platform built for FMCG distributors. There are no screens to design at nFuse. The interface is a WhatsApp message. The flow is an AI agent parsing a field rep’s order in Bulgarian and routing it to a warehouse — correctly, every time, for real inventory and real money. The craft here is not visual. It’s behavioral. It lives in the instructions you give an agent, the trust signals you embed in a chat thread, and the failure states nobody thinks to design until production breaks.
His path has moved through UX practice, design systems, and product strategy — and more recently into mentorship, helping the next generation of designers navigate a profession that is shifting faster than its own vocabulary can keep up with.
He brings that shift to UX Sofia 2026 as both subject and argument. The role of the designer is not disappearing. But it is expanding — into territory that urgently needs people who know how to think about humans. The question is whether designers will claim that territory, or wait for someone else to define it for them.