·3 min read
Common things, done super
Who I am, how I got from graphic design to operations and AI, and what I'll be writing about here.
Hi, I'm Mikołaj. My day job is Head of Operations at SkinApe. In practice that means making sure things at the company work: the visible ones, and the ones nobody thinks about until they break.
I didn't take the direct route into operations. For my first ten years I was a graphic designer.
Graphics came first
I got hooked on graphic design as a teenager. My first summer job was design work, and somehow that summer lasted a decade.
Over that time I worked on premium cosmetics brands like Vichy and Caudalie, and for the Douglas beauty chain. If a face cream ad ever looked expensive to you, there's a fair chance someone like me spent an evening nudging the logo two pixels to the left. Then back again, because it was better before.
On the side I designed visual identities for festivals. That's a completely different sport. With a face cream everything has to whisper, while a festival poster has to be readable from across a field, in the rain, at three in the morning.
Then AI showed up
When AI started showing up in everyday work for real, I caught myself caring less about generated images and more about how the whole way of getting things done was changing. Who does what, how long it takes, and what we can finally hand off to a machine.
So I changed direction, toward product management, agentic development, optimization and running the company's operations. From the outside it looks like a career change. To me it still feels like design, except instead of a poster I'm laying out how a company works.
Vibedev, or how I work now
My main tools are Claude Code and Astra. I came to this from design rather than programming, so what I bring looks a bit different from what a classic developer brings. I know what I need, and I can describe it precisely. I also have the patience to check whether what came out is what I meant. When you work with agents, that turns out to be a lot.
That's how I ended up building, among other things:
- Slack bots that post daily reports on ad campaigns and metrics, so nobody has to stitch them together by hand
- dashboards for finance and HR, plus a panel for managing Google Ads bids
- scrapers, an automated tester for Android apps and a sync for schedules in Notion
- a landing page rebuilt from Figma one to one
- after-hours projects, like an investment dashboard dressed up as an old amber-screen terminal, or a few attempts at my own airline management game
This blog was made the same way. If you're reading this on a computer, the pixels trailing your cursor came out of one of those conversations too.
Where the name comes from
Super Common Managment is meant to suggest something very ordinary, done very well. That's roughly how I like to work. Most problems at a company are pretty mundane: a report someone puts together by hand every Friday, a process nobody ever wrote down, a spreadsheet with twelve tabs of which three are actually needed. When you sort those out properly, there's more room for everything else.
What you'll find here
My work, AI, art and games. Sometimes a bit about life, but more the professional side than the private one, so I'm not planning any breakfast photos. Unless one of them is exceptionally well designed.
If you want to follow along, there's RSS, and you'll find GitHub and LinkedIn in the footer.