Application as Head of Design

Dear Hiring Team,

In 2015, I helped build the visual identity of the black frame — codecentric's innovation lab in Dortmund. I spent two years embedded in cross-functional software teams, running innovation camps for clients like DEVK and Douglas, and shipping products from first workshop to delivered prototype. I know the culture that Dash0 grew from: engineering-driven, pragmatic, deeply technical. I am applying for the Head of Design role because it brings together the domain I understand with the leadership challenge I am looking for.

Most recently, I led a team of seven product designers across three cross-functional product teams at ABS Safety, a B2B platform company in the safety technology space. I built the design function from the ground up: design system, UX debt backlog, research repository, career framework from Junior to Principal, and regular user feedback formats. The product domain — planning tools for fall protection systems on roof layouts — required exactly what observability tooling does: making complex technical data actionable for expert users under time pressure. I also introduced AI enablement as a weekly practice through show-and-tells and AI-augmented prototyping — the first initiative of its kind in the company.

Before that, I founded and ran a GovTech company for six years. I designed Shift Studio, a no-code workflow engine for municipal government that handled complex data models, conditional logic, and multi-step processes for domain experts. I built the design system from scratch and iterated the product through seven pilot municipalities with over 400 active users. The company was acquired in 2023.

Observability is one of the few product domains where design quality directly determines whether engineering teams can do their work effectively. An OpenTelemetry-native platform is a bet on open standards and composability — the kind of principled technical choice that needs equally principled design to succeed. Growing a design team during a Series B growth phase, defining the design vision for a complex technical product, and staying hands-on where it matters is exactly where I deliver the most value.

I look forward to a conversation.

Best regards
David Latz