I was born and raised in Istanbul, where East meets West. I grew up sailing through the 90s and 2000s. I raced for the Turkish National Sailing Team at European and World Championships. I learned early that you don't control conditions — you adapt to them. Everything out there changes: weather, wind, waves, current. The target never stops moving, so every decision has to be intentional, and the small ones compound into the result — which turned out to be decent training for design. I studied Interactive Digital Media Visual Imaging, and in 2006 moved to the Bay Area to be closer to where technology actually gets made.

In 2010 I joined Fitbit — a small team of optimists with accelerometers, trying to persuade the world that steps were worth counting. As its first interface and interaction designer I helped define the visual language and interaction patterns across web, mobile, desktop and the hardware itself. Turns out the steps were worth counting.

What followed was a decade of design for early teams: Pinterest, Dropbox, Intuit, Zendesk, Rigetti, EasyPost, Gantri, atSpoke and more. I led design at Lovely through its acquisition, built and ran an eight-person team at Omada Health to set it up to scale, and was one of the founding designers at Operator, where we designed commerce that ran entirely through messaging.

From 2019 to 2026 I was Vice President of Design at Carbon Health, responsible for the patient, provider and clinic software the company ran on, and the design of the clinics themselves — where we married technology with architecture. We grew the design team from 2 designers to 23 designers, 4 disciplines all integrated within the organization.

In 2026 I returned to client work full time, partnering with early-stage teams like Altira Health and Maximus. Design and AI are colliding, and I think the winners will be the ones who bring intention and systems thinking to the mess — the kind of work I love most. If you're building something worth building, say hey@kerem.co.