Ecosia. As Director and co-CPO, I supported Ecosia's expansion into the AI space, designing and building a growth framework and a subscription model while we raised the UI craft bar and updated the brand across all product surfaces.

Director of Design, 2026 - now

Product
Brand

Ecosia is a search engine, browser and now AI platform. As its director of design, I led product design, content design, UXR and brand design, directly managing a team of 8→10 reports, plus freelancers, including staff & lead designers. I also shared the CPO role with the CEO, shaping product strategy and vision, while captaining the People Leads guild through organizational changes.

Stuck in a “fast-follow“ attitude, product and design needed to rethink their OS to become a real AI contender. No product vision, no dedicated DS ops, and designers lacking allies to start writing code and confidence to try.

I was asked to 1. co-own the CPO role, 2. make the team “AI-first” and 3. raise our craft quality bar to compete with players like DuckDuckGo, Brave or Google’s Gemini.

We rebuilt our design foundations (semantic tokens, better rituals, rotating Design System governance). Believing AI-fluency is key, balanced with an entrepreneurial mindset and strong focus on users, I coached designers to work in the codebase, build their own workflows and pitch as if they were talking to a VC.

I led the work to stretch the brand, to cover our AI expansion and our refocus on EU sovereignty. Being a hands-on leader, I built AI agents & automations to handling content writing and localization, while jumping into Figma to show where I set our new craft standard. I introduced an AARRR framework to bring growth rigor into product decisions, and recruited 2 designers to support us on UI, AI and motion/micro-interactions.

In just 6 months, we doubled our acquisition rate, beat our goals for ads revenues & MVP subscription model. All that supported Ecosia's biggest revenue raise so far, from 3.2 to 4.5M€/month.

ecosia.org

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