Leading what's next for design teams

Design leader with 20+ years across every major change in design.
Prototyping, facilitating, coaching and hands-on team building.

Where I've made my mark

Featured Projects

2022‒2025
TomTom
Redesigning TomTom's B2B experience from the ground up
2020‒2022
Adyen
Crafting the developer experience that put Adyen's docs on the map
2017‒2020
Booking.com
Pricing tools for 2M+ properties to compete more effectively

Past Projects

Company Year Project Role
ServiceNow 2025‒present Industrial Product Suite Staff Product Designer
TomTom 2025 TomTom.com redesign Principal Product Designer
TomTom 2022‒2025 B2B Customer Experience Principal Product Designer
TomTom 2022 TomTom Digital Cockpit Principal Product Designer
Adyen 2020‒2022 Docs & Developer Experience Senior Product Designer
Booking.com 2017‒2020 Pricing, cancellation and payment policies. Product Designer
Sportsbet.com.au 2016 Android & iOS Apps Product Designer

Ways of working

Prototyping at a new pace

A new generation of agentic prototyping tools changes what a designer can do alone. Prototypes that use real data and open up new possibilities.

Facilitation that aligns and unblocks

Design sprints for big kickoffs. Structured critiques that improve the work, not just share it.

Coaching designers, growing teams

Four years leading design teams, involved in 30+ hires. Less about giving the answer, more about helping designers find their own way.

Communication for impact

Design work doesn't sell itself. Good storytelling, the right detail for the room, and making the reasoning land as well as the design.

Guidelines that codify what works

The best guidelines come from what the team already does well. I watch for patterns, capture them, and turn them into something everyone can rely on.

About Karl

Portrait of Karl Salisbury

Karl is a design leader who is hands-on with the craft. He facilitates, coaches, designs and prototypes alongside the teams he leads.

20+ years across every major change in design tooling, surfaces and ways of working. Print to web, web to product, and now into a new generation of tools that has fundamentally changed how design teams work. His leadership is founded on team rituals that actually work. Design sprints for big kickoffs, structured critiques that improve the work, coaching conversations that get designers unstuck, and guidelines built from real patterns the team already uses.

He's designed product at Booking.com, Adyen, TomTom and ServiceNow. Large, complex organisations with millions of users, where design decisions carry real consequence. Design teams ranging from 50 to 500 people, with C-suite exposure when the work calls for it.

The last two years have fundamentally changed what's possible in design. Karl has spent that time at the forefront of it, building, teaching and embedding new ways of working into the teams he leads and works with.

Appearances

Name Topic Role Media
Design Huddle Podcast UX for the Travel Industry Guest
API the Docs Open Sourcing Adyen's API Explorer Speaker

Get in touch

Open to design leadership opportunities.

Building a design team well is more than a hiring problem. The rituals, processes and ways of working put in place decide how the team performs as it grows. If you're building something awesome and would like to do it together, get in touch.