Portfolio · 2026
Earl
Carlson
Product design leader
About me
I lead design teams on products people use every day.
I give senior designers room to lead, I stay close to the product, and I push the work until it's excellent. Consumer products, connected hardware, platforms, trust and safety, and emerging technology.
Most recently
Senior Product Design Manager, Docker · 2024–2026
Led
A 12-person design team
Based
Ann Arbor, MI · remote
Also
DJ, music, ceramics, surfing
Consumer products, connected hardware, developer platforms, and a feed of a billion people.
Where I've worked
Neighborland
2010–13
Wikia
2013–14
Nokia
2014–15
DigitalOcean
2015–17 · 2019–22
Facebook
2017–18
Docker
2024–26

01 · Docker, 2024–2026

Keeping the work excellent while the tools changed every week

Docker design · snapshot
Role
Senior Product Design Manager
Team
12 people: Staff-heavy designers and 2 design engineers
Surface
Docker Hub, Docker Desktop, agentic products, accounts & billing, the design system
Context
Engineering moved to Claude Code. The rules for design were changing every week.
Real artifact here:
an agentic product screen or
the agent-ready design system
What I brought
I held the bar on taste.
In 1:1s: "Is your taste in this, or did you just let the agent do it?"
I let the excited designers lead.
No mandate. The three or four already experimenting each took a different area, then taught the rest.
I made the learning weekly.
Show-and-tells where someone always showed what they were trying.
I protected the team.
I chose not to chase every engineering ticket. Policing all of it would have burned out my designers.
The space I managed
Docker Hub
Modernizing it for a world of agents
Docker Desktop
[one line]
Agentic products
Delegation, approvals, sandboxes, staying in control
Accounts & billing
$13.6M net-new ARR · 75K+ migrated subscriptions
Design system
Rebuilt to be read by agents
The team
12 people · Staff-heavy · 2 design engineers
How the team moved, 2024–2026
Earl is designing this one.
Engineers pick up Claude Code → a few designers dive in → parallel experiments → weekly check-ins → the whole team.
Label Earl's moves on it: assigning the areas, starting show-and-tells, the hires.
"We're not in the time of optimizing how to use Figma. The rules are changing every week."
The room
Every week, someone showed what they were trying.
Designers who were struggling got a peer to learn alongside, and a weekly check-in.
What changed
~0 → all
designers working primarily in Claude Code, in about a year
2
design engineers joined; an agent-ready design system shipped
76%
fewer theme overrides after rebuilding the design-system foundation
"It's not about catching up. It's about shifting the way design works so that the impact of design remains true."

02 · Docker Hub, 2025–2026

Modernizing Docker Hub for a world of agents and new tools

Docker Hub · snapshot
Role
Design manager and reviewer for Hub Vision
Team
Hub Vision led by Sean Brady, Staff designer
Surface
Docker Hub: search, image pages, and how the Docker ecosystem fits together
Context
A product that had served its purpose, with no major redesign in more than five years
What I brought
Research before redesign.
I set Hub Vision up to understand how people actually navigate Hub before anyone redrew a screen.
A sharper question.
"If you only had three pieces of information to communicate, what would they be?" [decision owed: on a slide?]
A higher bar.
Competent wasn't the bar. I pushed the work from showing everything to showing what matters.
Six rounds to leadership.
I reviewed it through every round and took it to leadership, where it landed.
What we learned first
Most people never see the homepage. They land on an image page, straight from search.
The old homepage, a catalog of everything, was built for a front door almost nobody used.
93K
sidebar clicks a month
57K
same-session continuations
docker hub
Search images, extensions, and agents
ExploreSign in
nginx
Official build of Nginx.
docker pull nginx
PULLS
1B+
TRUST
Docker Official
UPDATED
2 days ago
TAGS
latest · stable · alpine · 1.27

WORKS WITH
Compose · Kubernetes · Agents
Where it is now
The team is shipping it now, one workstream at a time.
In progress
Homepage searchImage details pageAgent-friendly HubVisual refresh

03 · Facebook, 2017–2018

Fighting misinformation on a feed of a billion people

News Credibility · snapshot
Role
Lead Product Designer
Team
2 product designers · 4 engineers · 1 researcher · 1 content strategist · 1 PM
Surface
News Feed · 1B+ monthly users · web, Android, iOS
Context
A new team, formed the week I joined, as "fake news" became a global crisis
What I brought
I designed the fact-checking tool.
Partners like Snopes rated stories, and a rating reduced a story's reach across Facebook.
I brought publishers in.
I met the New York Times, CNN, and others to introduce the fact-checking and A/B testing tools.
I pushed for credibility signals.
Publisher logos and credibility indicators that landed across the product.
I took the research global.
I condensed field research into product direction, and pushed that our fix was too US- and Euro-centric.
Publisher variants: bringing the source into the story
Credibility indicators in publisher tools: ethics, corrections, ownership
Research · India
"Snopes isn't covering stories in Brazil or India."
Research in Hong Kong, Brazil, and India, where I joined the team, showed the problem looked completely different outside the US and Europe. People got their news in group posts and WhatsApp groups.
Results
~80%
drop in views once an article was rated as containing misinformation
25
fact-checking partners across 14 countries
Shipped
publisher logos, About This Publisher, and Trust Project credibility indicators
And journalist-safety tools, started after a journalist told us Facebook wasn't safe to post on.

04 · Nokia, 2014–2015 · PLACEHOLDER

REBEL: an outdoor adventure camera

What my designers say
[Testimonial: request from a designer]
Name · Staff Product Designer, Docker
[Testimonial: request from a designer]
Name · Designer, DigitalOcean
[Testimonial: request from a peer or partner]
Name · Role
Let's talk.
Earl Carlson · theearlcarlson@gmail.com · Ann Arbor, MI (remote)