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
Team
12 people at Docker: designers and design engineers
2022–24
A creative sabbatical: music, art, and travel
Based
Ann Arbor, MI · remote
Also
DJ, music, ceramics, surfing
Why I'm useful as a design leader
I create trust within my teams. I raise the bar of quality. I create clarity of purpose. And I bring laughter.
How I think about critique
Two people in a wrestling ring, both there to do the best thing they can together, and push each other.
No fear of critique. And it has to be an emotionally safe place to do it.
What excellent means
Who is this for?
What are we trying to do?
Why is it needed?
Then it has to look good and feel good. Everything we ship should push our design, engineering, and product language forward.
The opposite of death by paper cuts.
How I critique
More explorations, less information.
You have six things in a card. Which three does the user need to know, and which are just priorities for the company? Start there. Then work out with our partners what we can cut.
Also: humor.
What senior designers need from me
Room to explore, with guardrails.
So nobody builds a perfect solution in an ivory tower that can't be implemented.
Pulling them back up for air.
Strong seniors go deep. Sometimes they solve every constraint and every case, and the design ends up with no opinion.
Help getting it in front of executives.
Making the work make sense to them. Sometimes, not being a bull in a china shop.
Sharing back to the team.
What one person learns in a deep problem should reach everyone else.

01 · Docker Hub, 2025–2026

"What is this thing trying to do?"

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
The question I asked
"If you only had three pieces of information to communicate to a user, what would they be?"
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 [vs. homepage visits?]
57K
same-session continuations
How the work moved
1
A re-skin
It looked a little better. Nothing actually changed.
2
Restructure the data
Closer, and still not far enough.
3
Make the page make sense on landing
The data and the inputs, rebuilt for someone arriving cold.
4
Start from where people come from
Mostly Google, or an agent, not hub.docker.com.
5
Design for agents too
Docker's AI agent in search, and how an agent would use Hub.
I pushed for each of these. The work found its point of view around the fifth, once it started from how people actually arrive.
Before
The image page as it was
After
What changed for the designer
Sean started as the person who knew Hub inside and out. By the end, he was quicker to say: it doesn't have to be this way.
My job was to coach, shift priorities, and get it in front of leadership. The pixels were his.
Where it is now
The team is shipping it now, one workstream at a time.
In progress
Homepage searchImage details pageAgent-friendly HubVisual refresh

02 · Docker design team, 2024–2026

The designers led, because they were the ones doing the work

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
When the tools showed up
A real mixed bag.
A couple of people were super excited. A couple said, nope, I never want to touch this. Everyone in the middle found it interesting and couldn't see how it fit their work.
Summer 2025. Claude Code was still really technical for designers.
What I brought
I let the excited designers lead.
Not a mandate, at first: the tools were too early for design. The three or four already experimenting each took a different area, then showed the rest.
I made the learning weekly.
Show-and-tells where someone always showed what they were trying.
I gave the slower starters a peer, not pressure.
Gentler on-ramps, a peer as a coach, and a weekly check-in.
I held the bar on taste.
In 1:1s: "Is your taste in this, or did you just let the agent do it?" [critique practice: what you set up] And I chose not to police every engineering ticket, so I didn't burn out my designers.
The room
Every week, someone showed what they were trying.
Ideas felt real much faster, so we could test them much sooner.
When I knew it had worked
One of our more hesitant senior designers told me Figma Make was slow, and Claude was better.
Once she had an opinion about which agent she liked to use, it had locked in.
What changed
~0 → all
designers working primarily in agent tools, 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."

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
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.
Journalist safety
A journalist told us Facebook wasn't safe for journalists to post on.
Cat Audi and I pushed for it, and the team started building safety tools: who can tag you, who sees your posts, what reaches your timeline.
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
One of my favorite things
A designer on my team started doing improv. I pushed him to bring it to work.
People used to get combative with him. Then he was the one opening meetings and interviews with his dumb jokes.
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
I want to coach good people to do great work.
Let's talk.
Earl Carlson · theearlcarlson@gmail.com · Ann Arbor, MI (remote)