Hi, I’m Carl  👋. A product design leader with 13+ years of experience turning complex systems into intuitive, high-impact products.

Most recently, I served as Head of Design at Neon, where I helped shape the future of serverless Postgres. Throughout my career, I’ve led design in fast-paced environments—scaling systems, simplifying developer tools, and delivering measurable outcomes. From Microsoft and Google to Meta, Postman, and Kong, I’ve built a reputation for making the complex feel clear, the technical feel human, and design feel like a strategic advantage.

What I value:

  • Transparency → Clear, honest design builds trust.
  • Meaningful Simplicity → Focused solutions beat feature bloat.
  • Empowered Teams → Design scales when people thrive.

When I’m not refining interfaces or scaling design systems, you’ll find me hiking with my dogs, building furniture, or testing new recipes in the kitchen.

Interested in collaborating or just want to talk shop? I’d love to hear from you.

A brief look at my career

Previous/Current engagements

Jul 2024 – May 2025

Head of Design – Neon

Led the design strategy for Neon’s serverless PostgreSQL platform, transforming design into a key lever for product growth and market differentiation.

  • Recruited and scaled a high-performing design team, increasing velocity and output by 75%

  • Integrated AI tools (Devin, V0) into design workflows, accelerating design-to-dev cycles by 30%

  • Partnered across marketing and product to unify the brand experience and drive engagement

  • Contributed directly to 200%+ ARR growth by designing frictionless, developer-first experiences

Sept 2022 – Present

Mentor – ADPList.org

Feb 2024 – Jul 2024

Senior Staff Product Designer – Growth / Kong HQ

Founded and led Growth Design at Kong Konnect, launching self-serve and monetization strategies for API Gateway products.

  • Designed and shipped the Serverless Gateway experience, unlocking early adoption from key trial users

  • Increased trial-to-paid conversion by 17% and reduced support tickets by 40% through onboarding and billing UX redesigns

  • Improved activation by 15% by aligning onboarding flows to developer mental models

  • Established growth team design rituals and frameworks that scaled influence across product teams

Jan 2022 – Jan 2024

Growth Design manager / Postman – Growth

Managed a cross-functional growth design team that helped Postman surpass $100M+ ARR, driving global PLG strategies and onboarding improvements.

  • Led and coached a team of designers and content strategists, delivering experiments with measurable product impact

  • Spearheaded AI-integrated UX flows to personalize onboarding and simplify team collaboration

  • Defined team metrics and design workflows, improving iteration cycles and confidence in shipping experiments

  • Promoted from Lead Designer after growing team impact and contributing to record ARR milestones

April 2020 – Jan 2022

Product Designer / Meta (FKA Facebook) – Enterprise Products & Marketplace

Focused on growth design for commerce and enterprise tooling at scale.

  • Led buyer growth efforts that drove a 20%+ lift in engagement and purchase conversion

  • Designed internal LLM-powered tools that reduced task completion time by 30%

  • Facilitated org-wide workshops on inclusive design and growth experimentation best practices

June 2018 – April 2020

Interaction Designer / Google – Android Developer Tools

Shipped developer-facing features in Android Studio that improved product quality and performance.

  • Launched GPU and performance tools that helped developers improve app launch times by 15%

  • Led 0→1 design for Resource Manager, cutting asset upload time by 50%

  • Introduced a shared design system that reduced design-to-dev time by 30%

July 2014 – June 2018

Designer II / Microsoft – Data Group Customer Experience [C+E]

Drove UX strategy for flagship Azure data products, from early concept to GA.

  • Led end-to-end design for Azure SQL Elastic Pools and Data Warehouse, key components of Microsoft’s cloud data suite

  • Built and scaled design systems that improved dev efficiency by 40%

  • Converted from contractor to full-time based on high-impact delivery and cross-team leadership

Early 2012 – Early 2014

Front-End and Web App Developer Roles

Worked across Microsoft (Office 365, TFS), T-Mobile, Tag Creative, and Rational Interactive—crafting early user experiences and front-end systems for enterprise and B2C products.

Articles

Awards

ADPList • Jan – Mar 2025
Top 50 Mentor – UX Engineering

ADPList • Oct – Dec 2024
Top 50 Mentor – UX Engineering

Passions & curiosities

  • Generative AI
  • AI automation
  • AI-driven Design
  • Sustainability
  • Gaming
  • Life style automation

Recent work