Eric Knudtson

I lead teams to design and build tools that enable developers get their jobs done.
EK

Profile

I work as a Technical Product Designer specializing in developer experience and technical tools. I apply a collaborative design practice to create and improve products that help software developers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers get their jobs done more effectively and efficiently, at scale.

I partner with engineers and product managers to bring products from initial customer research and development to launch and iteration. I have worked as a designer, developer, and manager.

If my profile sounds interesting to you please check out work experience summaries and projects below.

Work Experience

I

Intuit (AI Data and Analytics)

December 2021 - September 2023
Principal Technical Product Designer
I joined the AI Data and Analytics organization at Intuit to design technical tools and harmonize the ML platform for Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers. I was the first designer in the organization focused specifically on tools for AI development.
  • AI Workbench is a 'one-stop shop' for ML projects designed to serve as a central organization and management hub across the MDLC. It was created to address the needs of Intuit’s data science and machine learning teams by providing a unified interface that ties together various ML tools, workflows, and project information previously scattered across the organization. AI Workbench enables managers to gain observability and insight into the hundreds of ML projects in development, production, or archived. It also fosters cross-organizational learning and collaboration by giving teams the ability to peek behind the scenes of ML projects. I worked on AI Workbench for one year, first as a solo designer with my product management partner and engineering leads from inception to launch. This included customer research and solution exploration before focusing on a specific first delivery. We expanded to include another designer and a full dev team as we gained traction.
  • Prediction Service, a self-service AutoML tool designed to empower teams to train machine learning models without requiring specialized expertise. It enables users to easily experiment with a wide range of algorithms and parameters, fostering greater innovation and rapid iteration within their projects. I worked on the second version of Prediction Service for about three months. My contributions included a refactoring of the information architecture and navigation, addition of UI to enable the deployment of models, viewing and comparing experiment results, scheduling and managing automated and ad-hoc jobs, viewing model details, model history, and guardrail configuration.
  • AI Launcher SDK, a Python SDK to accelerate the MDLC by reducing or eliminating “dev to prod” barriers with “portless” AI development. I was on the team for about 3 months and served as an advisor for another six months. My contributions included leading my team of one Product Manager and three Engineering leads through customer research to uncover our customers most pressing needs, followed by a Design Sprint to explore solutions and narrow on solution to prototype for the SDK - A readme on GitHub. By using the Readme Driven Development process, we iterated quickly through various versions of the SDK and made many design decisions with confidence before writing a single line of code.
I

Intuit (Futures)

February 2020 - November 2021
Principal Technical Product Designer
As a member of the design team within the Intuit Futures organization I was privlidged to work with top technologists and researchers to explore and develop leading-edge technology to be applied to the company’s future.
  • No-code authoring environment for Intuit’s Knowledge Engine, a rule-based system which drives the TurboTax experience and enables customers to receive accurate and personalized tax guidance. I joined the program for 6 months as a solo designer after it had exited the prototype and early adoption stage and was entering a phase of wider adoption. I worked with the team to design UI for authors to write tests,specify hierarchical completeness graphs, and manage deployed modules.
  • No-code authoring environment for general software development via visual programming. Intuit acquired a startup that had developed a platform for creating AR experiences and IoT applications. I joined the founders, product manager, and engineering team for six months to help orient their expertise to the needs of Intuit by prototyping an authoring environment for Intuit product experiences
  • Authoring tool for specifying knowledge-driven analytic optimizations
I

Intuit (Intuit Design System)

October 2016 - January 2020
Principal Design Technologist
I joined a team of 3 at Intuit to help establish a company-wide design system for product design. IDS is a company-wide, multi-theme design system that accelerates Intuit’s mission by delivering innovative and foundational design system guidelines, tools, and services that support Intuit designers and developers across Intuit’s product ecosystem.

My first area of focus was on the development of technical standards and infra to enable developers across the company to work together to build a React-based UI library.

As a central Intuit Design System team we worked to shepherd components through a rigorous design process from inception to company-wide adoption. This included writing code for prototype components myself for the purpose of exploring and testing design variations before approval.

I also helped setup development infrastructure for the design system itself, including the internal website and component showcase. Today, IDS serves 11 teams with 914 designers and 5000+ developers.

G

GE Digital

November 2012 - September 2016
Senior Design Technologist
At GE Digital my work focused on two projects, Industrial Controls Convergence and the Predix Design System.

On the Controls Convergence team we worked to advance the core technology, design, and user experience of control systems in industrial settings such as natural gas power plants and automobile manufacturing facilities. My individual contributions include field research at industrial plants, design of a new UI architecture, and model-based UI system to rapidly design and deploy high-performance HMI (Human-machine interfaces) in a plant automatically as machines and processes are updated or reconfigured without the need for design rework.

I also worked on the design and development of the Predix Design System for the GE Digital Industrial Internet platform, a set of reusable components and guidelines for building industrial applications. I worked with a team of designers and developers to create a system that would be used by 100s of developers across GE to build applications for the Industrial Internet.

C

Chef Surfing (Startup)

January 2011 - July 2012
Founder, Designer and Front-end Developer
Online marketplace startup connecting over 1,000 professional chefs to local customers to deliver catered experiences. I served as co-founder, UI designer and front-end developer. I led our team of three to bring the Chef Surfing vision from conception to reality, iterating continuously based on customer feedback and research, while maintaining a steady pace of development. We were invited to Startup Chile seed fund program in Santiago, Chile and Local Food Lab accelerator in Palo Alto, California.
F

Freelance

May 2007 - August 2011
Designer and Developer
I led the design and development of high-traffic, multilingual e-commerce websites and back-office applications. Among the most notable projects were:
  • Nitro Snowboards (2007–2011): A European snowboarding brand offering thousands of products in seven languages.
  • Nitro Photo-files (2008–2011): A Digital Asset Management (DAM) web application designed to streamline the organization and access of digital assets.
  • Coal Headwear (2007–2011): A custom-built e-commerce system where I pioneered mobile-responsive web design in 2008, ensuring a seamless shopping experience across devices.
M

Microsoft

May 2002 - June 2006
Web Designer
I worked with the Microsoft Games and Xbox.com teams to design and develop microsites, web graphics, and animations promoting new games, and Xbox. Our team redesigned xbox.com twice, including information architecture refresh using a user- centered design approach. I led implementation of front-end code (HTML, CSS, JS) after design phases, building the UI on a .Net backend.
N

Northwave

July 2001 - April 2002
Web Designer
I designed and developed three rich-media web sites for the Northwave, Drake, and Bakoda brands. I also developed a back-office system to distribute sales & support info to sales agents and retailers.

Design Skills

User Research
Information Architecture
UI Design
Design Systems
Design Technology

Coding Skills

HTML
CSS
JavaScript
React
Next.js
Typescript
Node.js

Tools

Figma
Sketch
Adobe

Languages

🇺🇸 English
🇪🇸 Spanish
Contact

Get in Touch

ericknudtson@gmail.com
Click to copy