About

Hello, and nice to meet you! I’m Roman, born and raised in Brno, Czech Republic.

Career 💼

I worked part-time as a software developer, then became a product marketing manager and later a project manager & scrum master.

I became a UX Designer
because I like to figure things out,
solve problems,
design and improve people’s experiences.

Projects 🎨

My creative itch is a curse and a blessing. I made all kinds of stuff: UX projects, games, apps, videos, stories… check out the project tag.

There’s a ton of useless junk… pardon useful junk on my blog. You do read my blog, don’t you? 😉

I used to be quite into game development and VR. I participated in multiple gamejams (gamedev hackathons), and I volunteered on multiple game industry conferences. I’m proud that an article about my VR research was featured on Game Developer website.

Spark ✨

My spark, my mojo, my special edge… basically, the cool stuff I bring to the table that not many others do.

This would be called “individual advantage” in business lingo.

The culmination of my previous experiences
uniquely positions me as a UX Designer.

Here is how:

• Interest in making games uncovered my underlying passion for designing experiences. I love nicely polished games with excellent game feel and I’m curious about applying in it in ‘serious’ applications.
• My experience in developing software allows me to automate tasks and provides insights into software development. It also helps when communicating with developers in their language 🙂
• By serving as a Scrum Master, I gained a deep understanding of agile principles, acquired experience in facilitating workshops and meetings, and developed an awareness of team organization.
• Working on my diploma thesis really opened my eyes to the world of research and data analysis. I’m getting better in UX research with UXWell.
• I studied marketing and applied the lessons to promote a small indie game. It involved developing marketing strategy, blogging, networking, user testing, prioritizing feedback and more.
• Blogging forces me to formulate my thoughts clearly and concisely. I routinely rewrite my sentences. ChatGPT is a great help. I want to improve my storytelling skills.

How to pronounce “Lukš”

My last name is Lukš. The little mark above “s” is called caron and it sounds like “sh” in the word shell. Thus you can pronounce it as “luk-sh”.

Typically, I input my last name as Luks. Even in today’s modern age of UTF-8, some systems still fail miserably and encode the last character as a question mark or something…

Work style 👔

I enjoy working in a small autonomous team and solving problems together on our own.

I enjoy improving things for people, making them easier, understandable and automated. I enjoy throwing around ideas for solving problems and then trying them out to see which one works best.

To tame the chaos, I approach things methodically, and I’m putting effort into staying organized. I prefer clean workspace without clutter. It helps me focus.

I’m all about having fun at work, like when I throw together ’90s kids games’ events and rock goofy backgrounds on our video calls.

I try my best not to judge people. We all are busy with our lives, have flaws, and skeletons lurking in our closets. Active listening changed my life! I’m staying aware of cognitive biases especially when it comes to research.

Interests ❤️

I’m fascinated by deepfakes, autonomous learning and other applications of AI/ML, distributed consensus of blockchain, weirdness of quantum computing, better teamwork and constant improvement of agile, telling stories & evoking emotion through multimedia, the sense of immersion of VR, communication at scale & opportunity to share inner thoughts with writing, the magic of compound interest, thinking about design & usability, the power to share benefits and retaining people with marketing, and never-ending-story of becoming a better human being with soft skills.

Strengths 💪

Drive to improve and optimize everything:

• I’m rarely satisfied with status quo.
• I have an inner need to keep pushing the envelope.
• I like to see progress, and embrace change.

Thinking outside of the box:

• I’m full of (radical) ideas.
• I love problem solving with both realistic and unorthodox solutions.
• Ask me about the “Build the tallest building exercise”.

Empathetic:

• I never let my ego stand in the way.
• I’m understanding of how others feel.
• I’m a team player who respects and wants to help others.
• I’m into usability thinking, striving to make things easy to understand to everyone involved.

Calm and understanding:

• I know it’s not all rainbows – things break, people forget, we all make mistakes.

Methodical approach to problem solving:

• I’m all about research, spreadsheets, visualization, prototyping.
• Ask me about “Contacts base in Notion” or “Inbody log”.

Focused:

• I’m minimalistic, organized at home and at work (most of the time).
• My aim is everything having its purpose and place.

I’m a curious explorer and learner with a broad skill set:

• software development
• agile & scrum
• blogging & writing
• videogames
• marketing
• finance
• nature – biology, physics
• cognitive biases
• historical fencing
• scuba diving

But master of none. And that brings us to my flaws…

Weaknesses 😱

I’m only human. Here is list of my flaws and how I cope.

Poor memory – I’m writing everything down (paper, Notion, blog). I do remember all the unnecessary things with clarity. D’oh!

Laziness – I’m looking for ways to automate my work (ask me about “my python 3 poster” or “inbox tools”).

Poor at multitasking – I prefer to focus all my attention on solving one problem at a time. Context switching is bad anyway.

Poor at thinking on the spot: I rarely come up with witty response right there on the spot. Sadly, I’d be terrible at rap battles. – I’m working on improving my public speaking skills.

Lack authority: Often, I’m too informal and easygoing to command respect. – Servant leadership is a thing, isn’t it?

Tend to interrupt others – This got way better last few years. I’m practicing willpower, empathy, and active listening to alleviate this.

Poor handwriting – I need to write slowly if it needs to be legible. Seems to be gradually improving with practice and effort.

Tend to ruminate and overthink things: Also, I get caught up in thinking too much instead of taking action. – Coming up with the first smallest little task to start with works well.

Unable to decipher lyrics from a song: Seldom, I’m able to understand the lyrics of a song without first looking them up. – No solution yet. Stay tuned 🎵.