Home

Alexander Kohlhofer

A product and design leader with over 20 years of experience building and scaling technology platforms — and still building, hands-on.

Career

  1. 2025 – now

    Principal Designer — Mixmax

    Product and design for an email and CRM platform used by revenue teams.

  2. 2024 – 2025

    Head of Design — Observable

    Led the design and research team, spearheading Observable Canvas — a collaborative data analysis platform for cross-functional teams to explore, visualize, and understand data together in real time. Canvas pairs AI-powered insights with point-and-click and SQL workflows, connecting to Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks.

  3. 2021 – 2024

    VP of Product — Tray.ai

    Advanced through several leadership roles — Sr. Director of Customer Experience & Growth Engineering, then Head of Product & Design, culminating as VP of Product. Integrated design with product strategy, evolving Tray from a low-code tool into the AI-powered integration platform it is today.

  4. 2018 – 2021

    Sr. Director of Product Design and Research — CloudBees

    Progressed from Lead Product Designer. Built a design and research function bridging engineering and creative strategy, and drove the integration of two major product lines into one market offering with eight-figure ARR, improving the developer experience for Fortune 500 clients.

  5. 2013 – 2018

    Director of Product & Design — UserVoice

    Joined as Senior User Experience Designer. Shifted the platform from basic feedback aggregation to strategic, data-driven product decision-making. ARR grew from $1MM to $10MM and ASP from $3K to over $18K.

  6. 2009 – 2012

    Senior Producer & Studio Manager — Electronic Arts

    Technical, product, and leadership roles following the acquisition of Weewar. Helped establish the EA2D studio and grow it from 6 to over 35 people, co-produced social and mobile titles, and launched EA's debut title on Google+.

  7. 2007 – 2011

    Founder and Director — Spreedly

    Co-founded an API-first fintech. Spreedly became a global leader in payments enablement, optimization, and orchestration — serving over 50,000 businesses, facilitating billions in transactions, and securely managing a billion payment methods. It also set early benchmarks for remote work practice.

  8. 2006 – 2009

    Founder and Director — Weewar ltd.

    Founded and directed one of the earliest browser-based gaming experiences, notable for an open API for academic research and player-created content. Its design and accessibility drew critical acclaim and led to acquisition by Electronic Arts.

  9. 2004 – 2007

    Creative Director — Soda

    Advanced from Senior Designer, leading work for the BBC, the British Council, Nesta, the Wellcome Trust, Amnesty International, and the London Science Museum — including an anti-censorship campaign for Amnesty, interactive museum installations, and extending the BAFTA-winning Sodaplay platform.

  10. 1999 – 2003

    Founder — schoene neue kinder

    Founded a design consultancy that laid the groundwork for a career in creative direction and business strategy — a AAA client base, and contract and licensing negotiation that shaped how I handle stakeholders and brand strategy still. The company continues to excel, with 100+ employees across several countries.

Alongside

I never stopped making things myself. At Field Bureau + Werkstatt I design and ship a suite of local-first tools — Signal Recorder SR-7, Markdown Library ML-42, Task Register TR-2 — built by a small pod working alongside AI. No servers, no accounts, no subscription.

It keeps my hands on the new economics firsthand. A handful of people can now hold an entire stack and move at a pace that used to take a department. Leading well through that shift is hard to fake from the sidelines.

How I work

Direction before speed: a team moving fast in the wrong direction just reaches the wrong place sooner. Outcomes over output, because a team can ship constantly and change nothing — and AI can fill every proxy metric we have at no more real value. And hire for judgment, because when execution gets cheap, judgment is what stays scarce.

The longer version is in how I lead.

Elsewhere

I write at notsocommonthoughts.com, post photographs at fewer.photos, and keep code at github.com/kohlhofer.

Reach me by email, or on LinkedIn.

© Alexander Kohlhofer