Ilias Mandalos — CV
Product Designer · UX Designer — healthcare, pharmacy operations and data
Rhodes, Greece — working remotely across the EU
iliasmandalos@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/iliasmandalos · iliasmandalos.me
Languages: Greek (native) · English (C2) · French (C1)
Profile
Product and UX designer with two design MScs and fifteen years running a healthcare business from the inside. Co-founded a retail pharmacy in 2011 and still operate it. Founded and ran a business selling Power BI analytics dashboards to Greek pharmacies: built it for a year, took it to a hundred doors, and closed it when customer discovery showed I had designed for a user I had assumed rather than interviewed. I design for healthcare workflows because I have lived inside one, and I measure what I design — SQL and Power BI, and tooling I have specified and shipped against a live pharmacy ERP today.
Experience
Co-founder — independent retail pharmacy, Rhodes, Greece · 2011 – present
- Co-founded the business in 2011 and have operated it for fifteen years.
- Grown in customers and value year on year through the Greek debt crisis, the 2015 capital controls, sector-wide mandated price cuts and reimbursement clawbacks, and COVID — most of all since COVID.
- 2011–2018: worked at the counter, assisting the pharmacist.
- Since 2018: back office. Oversee the pharmacy’s finances and keep the spreadsheets that track them. Run supplier discount control through a workflow I built with Claude Cowork — it tracks the discounts, and I update them in the ERP by hand, under a discount policy the pharmacist approves. Enter invoices into the ERP when needed.
- Built a Power BI dashboard with Claude Code on the pharmacy’s Pylon Farmakon ERP database that follows regular chronic patients: when each is due back for a refill, and whether they come on time, early or late. Beta.
- Designing and building the pharmacy’s back-office system on the live ERP database: a demand-attribution model that separates repeat-patient demand from acute and retail demand, so orders are placed against attributed demand rather than a stock level. Three surfaces, still working drafts with the interface design to come — an order screen, a printed order sheet, and a keyboard-driven shelf-walk interface. Built with Claude Code; in review with the pharmacist before workflow adoption.
Founder — DATAPULSE, Greece · 2022 – 2024
B2B analytics product for Greek retail pharmacies.
- Identified an operational problem in my own industry and built a Power BI analytics product directly on the Farmakon ERP SQL database — the system I operate daily, giving domain access no outside vendor had.
- Built the product solo over roughly a year (2022–23), on the SQL and Power BI training completed the year before, using ChatGPT as a build partner in the first months it existed.
- Registered the business and produced the whole commercial package alone — naming, business cards, flyers and their copy, value proposition, target list and Athens visiting plan — and launched to market at the end of 2023.
- Built a technically filtered target list (pharmacies known to run the Farmakon ERP), hired and directed a salesperson to run door-to-door discovery in Athens, and ran doors and demos myself.
- Funnel: ~90 pharmacies approached → ~10 booked demos → 2 paying customers.
- Ran the discovery that killed the product: pharmacists did not want metrics, they wanted workload removed — and a large share of them never entered purchase invoices digitally, so the data my product depended on did not exist in their systems.
- Priced it as a one-off installation fee. That made the first yes easier, but it meant no income after the sale, and no renewal moment to tell me whether the two customers who bought it found it worth keeping.
- Closed the business on that evidence in June 2024 rather than spend further into it.
Contract Soldier — Hellenic Armed Forces · 1998 – 2003
- Completed a full five-year enlistment contract from age 18; chose not to renew at 23 and entered university through the national examinations.
Education
MSc Interaction Design · Cyprus University of Technology + Tallinn University, Estonia · 2020 – 2022
Taught in English. Thesis: Pilly — a two-sided application for Greek retail pharmacy customers and pharmacists.
MSc Integrated Product Design and Innovation · University of the Aegean · 2018 – 2020
Thesis: interpersonal drivers of patient compliance. Two-sample quantitative study — 115 doctors and 65 patients. Questionnaires piloted with 3 doctors and 8 patients, then revised. Reliability tested (Cronbach’s α), exploratory factor analysis, and 7 hypotheses tested with crosstab and Pearson correlation in SPSS.
BA Political Science & History · Panteion University of Athens · 2003 – 2008
Erasmus exchange, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium — Spring 2007.
Training
Business Intelligence / Data Analysis — Workearly · 2021
Data warehouse and ETL · SQL · Tableau · Power BI · Python fundamentals · business analysis.
Also: The Ultimate MySQL Bootcamp (Udemy) · Microsoft Power BI Desktop for Business Intelligence (Udemy) · From Zero to NVivo 12 (Udemy) · Service Design (Interaction Design Foundation) · How to Design for Augmented and Virtual Reality (Interaction Design Foundation)
Selected projects
Pilly — two-sided pharmacy product · MSc thesis, 2022 · case study
18 hours of work-sampling observation across 3 pharmacies (147 interactions, 517 data points) and 6 semi-structured interviews, thematically analysed in NVivo. A clickable Android prototype of about 40 screens for patients, a 7-screen desktop dashboard for pharmacists, and a proposed architecture for connecting both to the pharmacy ERP (never built). Not user-tested.
KINISI — Parkinson’s exercise app · co-founder, one of three · 2025 · case study
Survey of 260 people with Parkinson’s across 25 countries and territories, analysed by me in Power BI. Made the segmentation call to design for one segment — women aged 40 to 59. Six personas and four requirement sets. Project closed end of 2025.
LEXIS — crossword game, research to MVP · 2025 · case study
Semi-structured interviews in Greek with 7 participants across 4 transcripts, thematic analysis, converted into 10 prioritised MVP decisions.
Design for All — BBC accessibility evaluation · team of 3
W3C Easy Checks and WAVE audit across three BBC pages, tested with VoiceOver on macOS and on Windows.
Skills
Design — UX design, UI design, interaction design, user research (qualitative and quantitative), usability evaluation, accessibility evaluation (W3C Easy Checks, WAVE), prototyping, Figma, Adobe XD, Adobe Suite, Miro Research — SPSS, NVivo, Google Forms, thematic analysis, work-sampling observation, survey design Data — SQL, Power BI, data extraction, data modelling, dashboard design, ERP database work Product & business — product discovery, customer interviewing, go-to-market, P&L ownership, operations, inventory and supplier invoice control AI-assisted development — Claude Code: directing AI implementation on a live production database