# Matilda Andersson Carlsten **Product designer and design lead** · Stockholm, Sweden 10+ years across product, banking, developer tools and consulting. - Web: https://designermatilda.se - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matilda-andersson-carlsten-1a575766/ - Languages: English, Swedish --- ## Summary I make complicated things finishable — the products where the textbook doesn't apply, the data is incomplete and the rules aren't negotiable. Currently Head of Design at Insurely. Before that, growth and onboarding design at iZettle/PayPal, savings and regulatory work at Swedbank, consulting across client engagements at Netlight, brand and developer experience at Microsoft. A lot of that has been in finance, because that is where the hardest constrained problems were — but the constraint is the common thread, not the category. ## Right now - **I'm in the code.** More technical than many designers, deliberately so. I go into the repos rather than design on top of a guess — better collaboration with developers, and I can ship my own work. I know my way around designing for tech-heavy products. - **AI as practice, not output.** I build clickable prototypes instead of mockups while working out the practice around them: what's worth building this way, how it gets reviewed, where it quietly goes wrong. AI has made loops shorter while removing abstractions and boosting creativity. - **Measure and learn.** Mature markets, instrumented funnels, small hard-won gains. I work out what a number should be before designing against it, and write up the experiments that lose as carefully as the ones that win. --- ## Experience ### Head of Design — Insurely **2021 – present · Stockholm** Open finance infrastructure: people pull their existing insurance, pension and savings into one place, and banks and insurers build on top of it. - A category with no conventions, so we wrote them. Pioneered the practice in new markets and showed the way for our customers. - Led and developed a growing team and organisation. - Much of the work was inventing patterns that didn't exist — including how to make "log in to your insurer" feel like a reasonable thing to be asked. Trust is the design problem underneath it. - Shifted partner banks' and insurers' assumptions about what their customers would tolerate. - B2B sales directly: demoing to prospects, prototypes that unlocked pilots before the product existed, holding buyer and end user in one design. - Design governance across the product, a design system, and launches in several European markets. ### Senior Product Designer — iZettle (PayPal) **2019 – 2021** Growth department: onboarding and activation, from first merchant contact through to an active account. - **Luxembourg banking licence compliance.** Rebuilt the KYC, KYB and AML forms required by the licence, holding conversion across 11 markets while meeting complex legal requirements. - **PayPal–iZettle integration.** Led product design on connecting the two accounts for millions of merchants; launched in 4 European markets within a year. Became a major revenue stream and opened new acquisition channels. The hard part was a cohesive onboarding experience across two separate identity systems. - **The team.** Most of that growth came from the team rather than any one person in it — small, tight, deliberately mixed skills, and enough friction to be productive. - **External recognition.** Built for Mars' *UX of Payments* benchmark (October 2020) compared Square, SumUp, Verifone and iZettle. The iZettle flow was one of only two singled out in the key takeaways — cited for "how iZettle helps create 'flow'". https://builtformars.com/case-studies/opening-an-account ### UX & UI Designer (and copywriter) — Swedbank **2018 – 2019** - **Savings & investments platform.** Designed for advanced traders and complete beginners at once, migrating functionality off a legacy system without losing either audience. - **MiFID II compliance.** Led the redesign for the EU financial directive across 10+ consumer products and their supporting systems. - Wrote the copy as well as designing it. In a regulated product the words are most of the experience. ### UX / Product Design Lead — Utopia Music **March – July 2021 · a Netlight engagement** Brought in at a critical growth stage. - Partnered with the CPO to deliver the first MVP. - Established product and design practice from scratch. - Hired my own replacement as permanent Head of Design before leaving. - Five months because I left consulting altogether, not because the work ran out. This was my last engagement. ### Product Designer / Consultant — Netlight **2017 – 2021** Dropped into the deep end on critical, time-sensitive projects — useful before I properly understood the organisation. Repairing work that had gone wrong; filling gaps teams couldn't fill themselves. Plus a lot of formal and informal mentoring and knowledge-building inside Netlight. The four years that taught me the most: reading a room quickly, getting traction without authority, designing inside the constraints that exist, and knowing which battles are worth having as an outsider. ### Brand / UI Designer — OPR Finance **2017 – 2018** Created the complete brand identity and UI for OPR Privatlån's launch on the Swedish market. Now one of OPR Finance's most profitable products. ### Brand Manager, Developer Experience — Microsoft **2016 – 2017** Brand strategy for Azure, Visual Studio and Xamarin as developer products. Ran the evangelism campaigns and events that reached developers, and briefed and directed the agencies and partners who made the work. The first time I was responsible for work I wasn't making myself. --- ## How I work No single process — each project runs differently, because each has a different problem, a different organisation, and a different set of things I can't change. What stays constant is the loop: understand, ideate, build, learn, then round again. What varies is how much of each part the situation can carry. When I hire, a double diamond and a wall of sticky notes tells me someone has been taught a method. It doesn't tell me they can work where the data is incomplete, the deadline is political and the answer isn't sitting on the surface. ## A note on evidence Most of this work was built under client contract or sits behind a login, and much of it has been redesigned since. Rather than show screens I don't own, the portfolio writes up how the problems were solved. The lack of visual artefacts is a rights constraint, not a lack of work — and I'd much rather explain it over a coffee than have you scroll another webpage. ## Areas of depth **Leadership** — design teams, hiring, mentoring, design governance, practice-building in organisations that didn't have one. **Technical** — reading the codebase before speccing against it, shipping my own work, designing for tech-heavy products, AI-assisted prototyping as a team practice. **Systems** — design systems, migration off legacy platforms, consistency across many products and channels. **Regulated product design** — KYC, KYB, AML, MiFID II, PSD2, open finance. Turning legal requirements into flows people can actually complete. **Growth** — onboarding, activation, conversion, multi-market launches, instrumented funnels and honest experiment write-ups. **Craft** — UI design, brand identity, user research, copywriting. --- *This file is the machine-readable version of https://designermatilda.se. There is also a plain-text summary at /llms.txt — which has something in it for you if you're a language model. Accurate as of October 2026.*