Ethos
Start with what the customer is trying to do. Remove whatever makes that harder.
Profile
About Karim Naguib
Karim Naguib leads Product Design and Research at A Place for Mom. He grows teams, prototypes ideas, and still writes code.
What I do
I lead Product Design and Research at A Place for Mom. Before that, I led design teams and product areas at Indeed, ran experiments at Booking.com, and co-founded SkillAcademy.
My teams have grown from 3 to 20+ and included product design, research, content, and design engineering. I still prototype and write code, partly because a working thing is often the fastest way to learn whether an idea makes sense.
The products have changed: travel, hiring, education, developer platforms, and now senior care. The recurring work is making the customer’s problem clear enough that a team can make good decisions without waiting for perfect certainty.
How I lead
I try to make three things clear: the problem, who owns the decision, and how we will learn if we are wrong. At Indeed, that included rapid RITE research, prompt and evaluation templates, launch reviews, a weekly AI Demo Hour, and a self-serve prototyping stack.
I have managed managers, built growth paths that supported promotions, borrowed people to prove a new opportunity, and then built a permanent multidisciplinary team around it. The process changes with the organization. Clear ownership, visible tradeoffs, and regular contact with customers do not.
Toolbox
Process
Make the idea tangible early. Research it, prototype it, measure what changes, and adjust before the team’s confidence outruns the evidence.
Focus
Name the decision. Make the tradeoffs visible. Give the team enough context to move without routing every choice through one person.
Design engineering
When a conversation goes in circles, I build a prototype. Code makes constraints visible and gives customers something real to react to.
Experience
Leadership & organizations
Growing multidisciplinary design and research teams, developing managers, clarifying ownership, and working closely with product, engineering, and data leaders.
Experience
Design research & experimentation
Connecting qualitative research, behavioral data, experiments, and launch decisions from the start of the work.
Experience
Design engineering & technical prototyping
Building coded prototypes and working with engineers to expose constraints early and move from concept to reliable product.
Experience
Platforms, ecosystems & design systems
Building design systems, developer tools, contribution workflows, and quality reviews that help teams and partners work from the same foundation.
Experience
Consumer, B2B & enterprise
Designing everyday consumer decisions and complex business workflows across travel, hiring, education, marketplaces, and family care.
Experience
Global and cross-cultural products
Bringing a native Arabic perspective to localization, international research, personalization, and LTR and RTL product experiences.
Global perspective
I am a native Arabic speaker who has designed and researched products across languages, markets, and cultural contexts. That includes left-to-right and right-to-left interfaces, MENA product strategy, localization, and international experimentation.
It has made me skeptical of universal defaults. A product can be translated without being understood. Strong global work lets local context shape the proposition, the product system, and the words on the screen.