Colton Schweitzer

DESIGNPaaL

- Design partner for early-stage through Series C startups.
- We offer an 8-hour free design trial where we resolve a design issue for you.

Co-Founder

Kickass UX

For the past four years, we've been reimagining UX education specifically for graphic designers.

Kitty AF

New comics every so often. 

https://www.facebook.com/kittyasf/

Owner

Smartsheet

- Led the UX design for the "Solutions" pillar of the product team. 
- Redesigned and shipped the Admin Center to help thousands of users better administrate their instance of Smartsheet.
- Designed and shipped 3+ premium products that significantly increased revenue.

Senior UX Designer

UX Designer

At Kickass UX, we're on a mission to empower graphic designers to craft a career they love and achieve financial success.

Axcels

Advising Axcels on ux, product and growth topics. Axcels is the AI marketing and digital creation studio for tech SMEs. AI-assisted video editing, social marketing planning and strategy, all-in-one.

Product & Design Advisor

Docdocjob

🤖 Co-founded and led the initial product & design efforts at Docdocjob, an AI-powered recruitment platform for healthcare professionals. Jumped in full-time after I left MRM.

🏆 Impact:

→ Leveraging as much AI as possible, we reached an initial 100% organic growth
→ Reached 1,500 healthcare professionals in Singapore within just 6 months, all pre-funding.

Co-Founder & Head of Design

✌️MRM is the digital and CX branch of the advertising giant, McCann. Leaving interim work behind, I joined as one of their Experience Directors for DACH, overseeing their portfolio of Fintech clients.

🔑 Key activities:
There I led major CX, digital transformation and redesign projects for Zurich Insurance, Mastercard, and Al-Futtaim Group.  Collaborated directly with USA teams on AI-powered CX strategies and helped clients adopt upcoming accessibility standards (EAA 2025).

→ However, MRM//McCann focuses heavily on corporate websites and old-school client management, which didn't align with my desire to be product-focused and work in a modern, agile environment. So I decided to step down and give my entire focus to the AI venture two friends and I had previously launched as a side project but was gaining traction, Docdocjob.

Experience Design Director

Sylvain Maretto Design

Interim/freelance portfolio at https://pitch.com/v/freelance-portfolio-qbwbwm

🚀 Available as:

→ Interim Director, Lead or Manager to help your org do better
→ Senior IC (Staff or Principal) to get things done
→ UX/Product consultant & partner for early stage startups

🎯 Achievements:

→ Designed software for the MSG Sphere Garden
→ Saved 5m$+ through user lifecycle redesigns
→ Led recruitment of 10+ senior designers
→ Partnered with 8 early stage startups, helping raised 3m$+ pre-seed

🦄 Clients: Taxfix, GetYourGuide, Zalando, Holoplot, Autodesk and a solid collection of small startups (MoreTo, Stenon, OpenHealth Technologies, Axcels...).

Interim product design leader (Director, Manager, Lead, Principal) & design startup advisor

HOLOPLOT

🙏 Took over the design team's leadership at a crucial phase of growth with a mission:

→ Increase the team's output and outcome quality
→ Operationalize design
→ Help with hiring
→ Co-create a design strategy with CPO

📦 Working with acousticians, sound engineers and DSP engineers, I personally researched and designed Holoplot’s award-winning (ISE 2024) sound management software – CONTROL – powering the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas.

Product Design Manager

Zalando

🙏 Filled in for a parental leave, I took over defining and designing Zalando's new in-house tool for collection creation and order placement – Buying Home – to take the project to the finish line.

Staff Product Designer

GetYourGuide

🙏 Joined a cross-functional task force to decrease customer support contact rate:

→ Saved millions of $/year by fixing GYG's post-booking experience through service design mapping and user lifecycle focused efforts.
→ Create modular system for comms
→ Designed experience around Pickup points
→ Improved online voucher experience

🙏 Then I joined GYG's fintech team where I supported new payments implementation, A/B tests and design system scaling efforts:

→ Designed and released the Buy Now-Pay Later experience
→ Nearly x2 our initial CRO augmentation objective

Principal Product Designer

Taxfix

🙏 Led a team of designers and content designers to take Taxfix's POC for the french market from zero to one.

🏆 Released an excellent tax filling experience (speed, ease of use, trustability), exceeding our growth and UX objectives in the next tax season.

🧑‍🎓 Cocreated design ladders and in-house training for the content design team.

→ Personally oversaw the training of the french team's copywriter into a content designer (prototyping, UX principles...)

Lead Product Designer

TourRadar

🙏 Started as a contract leader but was quickly asked to join the team full time.

🧑‍🎓 Scaled the team from 4 to 8 product designers and UXRs

🤖 Led the creative vision and design operations during a full-scale redesign of the company’s entire user experience—from brand refresh and funnel optimization to checkout improvements and design system creation.

→ Turned TR into the fastest growing online tour company, doubling our conversion rate, improving all engagement metrics and setting the solid foundations of user experience (shared user journey, user lifecycle improvements, coms, design operations) that allowed TR to be the fastest recovering company in the travel activities industry.

Sadly, Covid hit the travel industry hard and this adventure was cut short due to layoffs.

Director of Product Design

Started off as a freelancer to focus on TourRadar's designOps. I was quickly promoted as their product design director.

Interim Lead Designer

Goodpatch Inc.

Led 3 UX teams at our studio's biggest client, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, across Paris, Berlin and Tokyo. Also explored delivery-to-your-car services for Amazon and Mercedes and owned product & design for our in-house venture, Drive Athena, a VR prototyping tool for autonomous vehicles experiences.

Service Design & UX Lead

I'm a product design leader & product generalist with 15 years experience building first-class products and services for global audiences.

Started building websites in high school and followed growth from there. Went from tinkering with code to joining early-stage startups in Berlin, eventually becoming product design director, managing teams of 8+ direct reports and co-leading cross-functional domains of 40+ people. Then I co-founded Docdocjob, an AI platform to transform how medical organizations recruit.

Along the way, I've orchestrated major redesigns for global players, elevated design organizations and released products that earned industry recognition—across travel, fintech, music, fashion, automotive, and AI, spanning B2C, B2B, and B2B2C.

→ As a strategic generalist with a founder mindset, I like to join companies at pivotal moments, empowering design specialists to do their best work while creating bridges across teams and organizations. Director experiences and years of interim work taught me to thrive in chaos—structuring the unstructured, whether that's crisis-proofing a product/design org during hypergrowth or supporting founders/execs through inflection points.

→ As a startup advisor, I partner with early-stage companies like MoreTo, Stenon, Open Health and Axcels as a product & design advisor, helping them find product-market fit and scale from 0→1 then 1→100.

In short:
→ Designed the sound control brain for the MSG Sphere's 360° sound—yes, that one in Las Vegas
→ Helped 6 startups raise seed funding, so far
→ Recognized at ISE 2024 & Nordic Startup Awards
→ 5,000+ minutes of design mentoring and counting

Get in touch! 🧡☕
→ maretto.is (portfolio)
→ sylvain@maretto.is (contact address)
→ I publish articles here on Linkedin about Design, AI, tech hiring, processes...

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Colton Schweitzer

Sylvain Maretto

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