…Lead UX Designer and Digital Product Development expert based in Hamburg, Germany. Great to meet you!
I’ve been designing digital products for more than 20 years. I help product teams figure out what’s worth building – and I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about why good solutions so often get lost on their way to the user.
How I got here
My digital product journey started in the late 1990s, when I built my first websites as a teenager. I went on to study computer science and visualization at the University of Magdeburg and the University of Michigan. It was an inspiring time, diving deep into the intersection of algorithms and images – from websites to medical MRI scanners (quite a mind-bending topic), from motion capture to immersive 3D environments.
Alongside my studies, I co-founded WebUni, one of the most active local social networks for students of its time, and was responsible for its concept and design – my first lesson that a successful product isn’t luck, it’s closely observing your users and designing the experience around their needs. A later, much harder lesson: being in love with your successful product can make you blind to disruptive competitors like Facebook.
I graduated in 2006, earning an engineering diploma (the good old German “Dipl.-Ing.”) with a thesis on how to enhance ideation processes with digital tools. I stayed in Magdeburg after graduating and worked as an Art Director and Interaction Designer at two web and usability agencies before getting a recruiter call from Hamburg.
Shaping OTTO from the inside
Since 2011, I’ve been designing user experiences at OTTO, Germany’s second-largest online retailer.
In my first ten years, I worked in almost every product vertical of otto.de and was closely involved in some of the defining changes in the shop’s history. I was one of just three UX designers on the complete in-house rebuild of OTTO’s shop software, enabled our product teams to turn otto.de into a responsive experience that works on every device, and was instrumental in establishing OTTO’s two major design systems.
In 2021, I took on the role of Lead UX Designer B2B. Since then, my team and I have been responsible for the touchpoints through which merchants, advertisers and agencies run their business on otto.de. For me, this was a fascinating change of perspective: from inspiring mobile shopping experiences for consumers to complex, efficient interactions for professionals – where good UX is measured in clarity and time saved, not in delight.
Over all these years, OTTO has given me the chance to learn from the best – and the opportunity to help define how product development works: how designers and other roles on a product team work together, which processes, skills, tools and team setups they need, and how to put users at the center of it all.
Teaching discovery at scale
2016 I co-founded OTTO’s internal Discovery School. Since then, we’ve been continuously training the organization in the methods and processes of user-centered product development over the course of almost 60 trainings.
As a Product Discovery Coach, I get a close look at how discovery is practiced across OTTO’s roughly 100 product teams: which methods and frameworks actually help, why principles matter more than processes, and how teams can take on new developments like AI without losing sight of the people they’re building for.
Since 2025, I’ve also been offering the Discovery School concept to other companies. My biggest strength is my hands on experience: I don’t teach the textbook version – I teach what happens when the textbook meets a real organization.
Why I created Systems of Design
I love sharing what I learn. I believe that the abundance of openly shared knowledge is what brought our field this far. Sharing is how I make sense of things and structure my knowledge – and the best way to get valuable feedback in return.
Since my early days as a professional designer I’ve shared my knowledge in talks at meetups and conferences, and in writing on produktbezogen.de, the German-language blog on product management and UX that I co-founded. Still I felt that I needed a channel for expressing some other perspectives of mine. So here we are…
Good user experiences rarely fail for lack of talent. They fail because of the systems around the people doing the work: how decisions get made, how teams are set up, which problems they’re allowed to solve, and which foundations they can build on.
These systems aren’t laws of nature. Someone designed them, often without meaning to. And anything that has been designed can be designed better. That idea is what this blog is named after, and it’s the question I keep coming back to after two decades in this field.
On Systems of Design, I write about the systems that shape and define the work of User Experience professionals, with a particular focus on:
- Designing design teams and product organizations – the roles, structures and rituals that let good work happen, and how UX can shape decisions instead of just delivering screens.
- AI – what changes for UX and product work when building gets cheap, and what doesn’t.
- Product Discovery – how teams find out what’s worth building before they build it.
- Design Systems – the shared foundations that let many teams build consistent experiences without reinventing the
wheelbutton.
Want me to speak at your event or work with your team? Have a look at Public Speaking and Trainings & Workshops, or get in touch directly. And if you just want to talk about product organizations, design systems or what AI means for our craft: my inbox is always open.