Director of Design at Ecosia
2026
- Product
- Brand
- Product
- Brand
Hello, I’m Sylvain. I build design teams that don't wait for a brief. Until recently, Director of Design and co-CPO at Ecosia.
Design leader with a kink for AI/edge technologies and ambiguous problem spaces.
15 years in design from Berlin to Tokyo, helped raise over €100m along the way.
I coach my teams to pitch like founders and ship like engineers.
- Ecosia
- Zalando
- Renault-Nissan
- Omio
- GetYourGuide
- Autodesk
- Taxfix
- McCann
- Holoplot
- Mercedes-Benz
- Amazon
Work
Capabilities. The problems you want a director to solve, and where I’ve already solved them.
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Business11
Design has no say in strategy
Convinced the CEO not to merge search and AI the way Google did, keeping AI optional to protect Ecosia’s core promise: positive impact, nothing forced on you. Our US user base doubled in a quarter.
Growth has stalled
Introduced AARRR, a full-funnel growth framework. Product made sharper focus and priority calls and we patched the biggest leaks in our funnels, doubling acquisition in 6 months.
The business needs a new revenue stream
Designed and shipped the subscription MVP, beating its goals as monthly revenue grew from 3.2 to 4.5M€.
Support costs are eating margin
Redesigned post-booking comms and checkout, saving 1.3M€ a year in customer service costs.
GetYourGuide
Nobody agrees where the product should go
Designed the vision the company redesigned toward.
TourRadar
We need to raise the next round
Researched and designed the mobile web experience investors asked for, ahead of a $27M Series A.
Omio
We have an idea, not a product
As product and design co-founder, turned the founders’ pain point into a product plan, built the business model with the CEO and co-coded an MVP sized to learn fast without overinvesting. Live in under 3 months, with an NPS of 42.
We don’t know what design is worth to us
Mapped design work to six types of business value. With BI, surfaced 30-day sign-back-in as a key metric nobody tracked, then designed the features and comms to move it.
Where should design headcount go?
Rebalanced the team toward brand-savvy product designers by retraining brand designers, backfilling a senior with a mid-level hire and sharing a designer across teams, at a near-neutral budget.
Design isn’t heard at exec or board level
Ran the team as an internal consultancy on agentic AI: business case modeling and MVPs without engineering, ending in an invest-or-not recommendation to the CEO and COO. They approved the investment.
We’re entering a new market or product line
Defined agentic AI experiences as a new product line, positioning Ecosia as a force-for-good AI platform with a path to a new revenue stream.
Organization9
The org is going through change
Led the People Leads guild, a dozen managers from HR to engineering covering all 120+ employees, through reorganizations. Shared hiring frameworks, pushed for career structures that retain talent and for transparent budget decisions, and sharpened managers’ proposals before they went to the C-level.
The team needs to grow
Hired to strengthen our craft and reconcile product & brand at Ecosia, while coaching seniors into super ICs (8→10). Set up fast growth strategy at TourRadar, mixing external hiring, transitioning from marketing design to product design and freelance staffing (4→8).
Teams ship without coordinating
Set shared OKRs at GYG with GIST across Fintech, Lifecycle, Traveller Experience and Partner Tools to fix a critical piece of the experience. Crafted a design vision by including the entire org at TourRadar, rallying them behind a new product direction and a brand refresh.
GetYourGuide, TourRadar
Design, product and engineering leadership don’t act as one
Shared the CPO role with the CEO and worked as one leadership team with engineering.
Design managers need a leader
At TourRadar, split scope with a hybrid design manager: he owned UX, conversion and the bridge to research; I set the craft bar, prototyped and sold the vision to execs. In leaner orgs, led through leads and senior ICs, and at Ecosia led the company-wide guild of people leads.
TourRadar, Ecosia
The org structure doesn’t work
Moved from one designer per team and surface toward critical user journeys: designers owning wider domains like Search and AI, plus transversal specialists in growth, lifecycle and brand motion. PMs took on basic design work with AI, so delivery got faster and seniors gained time for craft.
Nobody knows how to grow here
Rebuilt the design ladder at TourRadar. At Ecosia, fitted it to a company-wide ladder with too few levels, defined in-between steps like Staff, and refocused the capability matrix from UX toward craft, product thinking and pitching. It unlocked promotions, was picked up by other orgs, and design team satisfaction rose from 5 to 6.5 out of 10.
Ecosia, TourRadar
We need leaders, not just designers
Hired leads at TourRadar and many seniors since. Grew seniors into strong senior ICs at Ecosia and Holoplot; at Ecosia, kept a senior who was about to leave by opening a new way of working, promoted him to Staff and handed him strategic scope.
We have to do more with less
Asked to cut spending on arrival, I reduced software costs and reallocated budget so the design team could still grow.
Craft7
The UI doesn’t compete with the best
Raised the bar with Ecosia's staff and lead designers, benchmarked against DuckDuckGo, Brave and Gemini. Every redesign outperformed its predecessor. At MRM, I introduced designers to Jitter to elevate the agency's motion design standard closer to what dedicated web design studios do. Implementing more motion was a major factor in overtaking MRM's direct competition in pitches.
The team isn’t AI-fluent
Took product designers from not touching code to all pushing to the codebase, working with engineers on the process and on making the design system agentic. AI agents for writing and localization cut content prep time by more than half, reduced QA errors and kept the brand consistent across languages.
The brand doesn’t cover where the company is going
Stretched the brand to AI and EU sovereignty across all product surfaces, growing our core claims from 3 to nearly 20 across five themes like privacy, impact and sovereignty. Marketing and PR used them to broaden messaging and open new segments.
The design system doesn’t cover the product
Semantic tokens and rotating governance at Ecosia. At GetYourGuide, took comms component adoption from under 25% to over 80%. At TourRadar, raised component coverage to around 90% and tracked developer velocity through GitHub activity.
GetYourGuide, TourRadar, Ecosia
Research doesn’t influence decisions
Strengthened user research in TourRadar's niche with little market data: higher cadence, better tests and shared access to insights. Findings on pricing sensitivity and how travelers decide fed the checkout rework. At Ecosia, turned research into a strategic consultancy, looking far ahead and in-depth, to provide strategic insights to C-levels while building an AI-powered knowledge system.
TourRadar, Ecosia
Quality varies from team to team
Set up demos and shared definitions of done and good enough wherever I worked. At Ecosia, brought brand into the design show-and-tell and added a weekly rotating connector who briefed other teams, avoiding duplicate work and scaling comms, trust and micro-interaction patterns across teams.
We have to earn trust and stay compliant
Reworked TourRadar’s checkout for installment payments worth thousands of euros, fixing confusing prices: +1.5% conversion and nearly 20% fewer phone checkouts. At Ecosia, moved tracking to opt-in, doubled down on accessibility and built agents to check EU green-claims compliance.
TourRadar, Ecosia
Scale7
Quality has to scale beyond one person
Set standards with staff & lead designers, who carried them across Ecosia's design org. At TourRadar, partnering with a player-coach, we used vision designs to set the 'bar to match' with all new interface/interaction work.
Ecosia, TourRadar
Many teams, one customer journey
Service blueprinting across squads; 30+ pain points, top five prioritized with RICE, cutting support contacts by about 15%.
GetYourGuide
A domain of 100+ people needs one direction
Co-led the product org as co-CPO at Ecosia, and all product experience squads at TourRadar with the CPO and CTO: set product direction, brought engineers into design sprints and experiments, and partnered with every PM on design, staffing and collaboration.
Ecosia, TourRadar
Many products, one brand and experience
Unified Holoplot’s products into one software suite, OS 2.0, with a design system realigned to the brand. Moved Ecosia’s products toward an ecosystem built around a more relevant, more consistent brand. At Renault-Nissan, the reverse: white-label apps adapting to every brand and local market.
The team is spread across countries and time zones
Led teams split between France and Japan, Germany and South Africa, and a fully remote team at Ecosia. Shared rituals, strong async documentation, and space for each person’s personality, down to a game opening every Monday meeting.
Renault-Nissan, MRM//McCann, Ecosia
We’re modernizing a live product
Redesigned GetYourGuide’s checkout and post-booking comms without stopping the business, bringing mobile web closer to native. Set priorities with PMs, owned part of delivery and distributed the rest. Checkout conversion rose 2.3%, beating a 1.4% target.
GetYourGuide
Complex technology, simple experience
Turned beamforming across large speaker arrays into a predictable, trustworthy interface for experience creators and sound engineers, balancing automation with manual overrides. Training got faster, testing and live changes sped up, and support requests during show preparation dropped.