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
12 people at Docker: designers and design engineers
Based
Ann Arbor, MI · remote
Also
Father, dog dad, music production, ceramics
I want the people on my teams to do great work they're proud of.
I create trust within my teams. I raise the bar of quality. I create clarity of purpose. And I bring a sense of joy.
How I think about design teams
A group of people coming together to make products with a clarity of purpose. Where craft matters, trust is inherent, and we push each other to do great work.

01 · Docker design team, 2024–2026

Bringing a whole design team into AI tooling

Docker design · snapshot
Role
Senior Product Design Manager
Team
12 people: 8 Staff designers, 2 senior designers, 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
How the team moved, 2025–2026
Earl is designing this one. His account (2026-10-07):
Summer 2025: engineers on Claude Code, still too technical for design → the excited few explore (hackathons; Figma Make, Claude Code, Codex) → clear the old design system's cruft, then rebuild it for agents → weekly show-and-tells → peers pair with slower starters → the new VP makes it the expectation → the whole team.
When AI tooling showed up, it was 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, but 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.
Engineering velocity went through the roof, so we pivoted to focus on our biggest wins.
The experiments
Screenshot from the agentic
product work
The agentic product surface
One designer, on the product itself
The design system,
in code
A design system built for agents
One designer moved to the system and proposed building it with AI, to be read by agents
Fast trials
Others tried Figma Make, Claude, Claude Code, and v0 to see what held up
The room
Every week, someone showed what they were trying.
Ideas felt real much faster, so we could test them much sooner.
What worked was when one of our senior designers started having opinions about which agent and harness were useful for her.
Figma Make didn't design well or help our designers. She found that working in code was a lot better.
What shipped · the design system
Real screens: the agent-ready design system
(a component in code, the docs an agent reads, a screen built from it)
What shipped · agentic products
Delegation and approvals
Sandboxes, staying in control
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
[stat]
[a tooling stat]
What I was responsible for
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: 8 Staff designers, 2 senior designers, 2 design engineers [how it was organized]
Accounts & billing
$13.6M
net-new ARR from revenue and retention work
75K+
subscriptions migrated
$3.5M
in enterprise churn risk reduced
Sign-in, accounts, teams, checkout, and billing. [one decision design made here]
"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

Reimagining what developers need in a world of AI agents and tooling

Clarity of purpose
Who is this for?
What are we trying to do?
Why is it needed?
Docker Hub · snapshot
Role
Design manager for Hub Vision
Team
Sean Brady (Staff designer), 2 PMs, 3 engineering teams, and the VP of Hub
Surfaces
The homepage and image pages, the journey from a Google search to an image page, discovery, and agent journeys
Context
A product badly in need of an update, with no major redesign in more than five years
The real problem
The user journeys were stale. We were imagining Hub inside the box it was already in.
My job was getting Sean to expand his scope, and to pitch the updated designs to our executive team.
What we learned first
Most people never see the homepage. They land on an image page, straight from search.
Hub is the most used Docker product. Its homepage was a catalog of everything, which made it useful to no one.
93K
sidebar clicks a month
57K
same-session continuations
The process
1Re-skin what's there
2Start from how people arrive, and restructure the information to meet them there ← I came in here
3Establish the best-case user journeys
4Design for people and agents
Before
The image page as it was
After
Page designs
Homepage
Hub for agents
What's changing
From a Google search
to an image page
Discovery
An agent using Hub
What changed for the designer
Sean started as the person who knew Hub. By the end, he remembered that design has the power to make real change.
Not just the pixels: he owned the whole surface, and the responsibility that comes with that.
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.
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
Me as the designer · 4 engineers · 1 researcher · 1 content strategist · 1 PM
Surface
News Feed · 1B+ monthly users · web, Android, iOS
Context
The news credibility work was brand new, 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.
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.
News signals
Reputable signals in the feed
Publisher logos, so the source travels with the story.
Credibility indicators
Ethics, corrections, and ownership, in publisher tools.
Fact-checking
Partners like Snopes rated stories. A false rating dropped a story in the feed.
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
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 good people to do great work they're proud of.
Let's talk.
Earl Carlson · theearlcarlson@gmail.com · Ann Arbor, MI (remote)