Anton Jarl

From craft
to culture

Experience

20+ years in design.
The last 11 leading teams.

Design leadership

Managing teams, setting goals, and building culture through hands-on formats — design crits, weekly reviews, product reviews before shipping, and AI lab days that push the team to explore and level each other up.

Subscription products

Growth, conversion, retention, pricing. Experimentation-driven environments with A/B testing at scale.

Tools & prototyping

Figma, code, and AI as daily drivers. I use Claude to prototype, build presentations, and think through problems. I build in the browser because that's where the product lives.

2023 — Now

Design Lead / Manager

Aira

Owning the full customer acquisition experience across 3 European markets -- external and internal facing.

Leadership
2021 — 2023

Product Design Director

Epidemic Sound

Led five acquisition teams: public web, retention, emerging markets, and partnerships. Scaled the design team from 7 to 25 and built the culture around it.

LeadershipSubscription
2020 — 2021

Senior Product Designer

Epidemic Sound

Design for public web, subscription and upsell pages, retention, and partnerships.

Subscription
2014 — 2020

Product Design Lead

Mynewsdesk

Shaped the rebrand and redesigned the core product. Company scaled from 80 to 300 people.

LeadershipSubscription
2009 — 2014

Senior Designer

Tobii Technology

Brand and growth design across three user segments. Company scaled from 80 to 400 people.

Earlier Art Director at Gizmondo Studios · Senior Art Director at Pixel Tales · Motion Graphics at Rithuset · 3D Artist at Kaktus Film

Principles

Not frameworks I read somewhere. Things I've learned by doing the work.

01 Ship it.
Ship it now.

Always be prototyping in real code. If it doesn't run in a browser, it's still an idea. Ship early, ship often, learn from what's real.

02 Talk first.
Write later.

Get people in a room and talk. A 15-minute conversation beats a 15-page document. Write things down after you've aligned, not instead of aligning.

03 Be proud
of every pixel.

A good designer should be good at designing. Visual output, tweaking, polishing. If you're not proud of what you shipped, you haven't done your job yet.

04 The user's screen
is the only truth.

The world's greatest Figma file means nothing if the user doesn't have the same experience. What the user touches is the only thing that matters.

Work that moved numbers

I've been here before.

I've spent the last decade leading growth design teams. Here's what I've learned.

Experiences convert

You can optimize every button and still lose. The best growth design balances what people do with why they do it. Lean too hard on conversion metrics and you lose the brand. Lean too hard on brand and you stop learning. The sweet spot is both.

I put designers in position to grow

I help people identify where they want to develop, then I make sure they get the work that lets them do it. Feedback and 1:1s matter, but what matters more is strategically putting people in position to succeed and learn.

I thrive where there's more opportunity than people

What initiative has the biggest possible impact? Where are we leaving money on the table? Where could we be better? I like messy landscapes where the work is figuring out what to do, not just how to do it.

"Working with Anton means having a partner who sees the whole picture. He challenges you to think differently while staying invested in the success of the product and the people building it."

Let's talk.

anton.jarl@gmail.com +46 (0)736-491847 GitHub