Recommendations
The following recent recommendations are shared with permission from the leaders I worked with most closely.
Ty Saunders — business partner
Head of PayPal Design Systems
“…she was a genuine strategic and leadership partner”
I’m Ty Saunders, Senior Director and Head of PayPal Design Systems, where I lead the design systems organization supporting experiences across PayPal and Venmo. I worked closely with Karin, from 2025 to 2026, during her time leading Design Operations for Design Systems. Over that time, she became one of my most trusted partners in helping lead the organization through a significant period of change.
A major focus of our work together was evolving PayPal’s design system and establishing a modern system across native mobile, mobile web, and desktop web, with native mobile as our initial priority. A critical part of that effort was creating much stronger parity between our design system in Figma and what was actually available to teams in code. This was not simply a tooling or component effort. It required us to rethink how the system was built, adopted, communicated, and ultimately used across a large product organization.
Karin played an important role in making that transformation possible. She helped connect the dots across Design, Product, Engineering, Brand, and our product teams, coordinating work that crossed organizational boundaries and helping us establish a clear rollout plan. She was deeply involved in the planning, messaging, organizational strategy, and company-wide presentations that helped teams understand not just what was changing, but why it mattered and how they would be part of it. Her ability to take a complex initiative and create clarity around priorities, ownership, dependencies, and next steps was incredibly valuable.
Karin also brought significant Design Systems experience to the partnership. That perspective became especially important as we began moving beyond a more traditional approach to design systems and thinking about what a modern system should become, including how AI could change the relationship between design, code, tooling, and the way teams build products. She understood both the operational realities of delivering a system at PayPal’s scale and the strategic opportunity to rethink how a design system could work in the future.
What I valued most was that Karin never approached Design Ops as simply managing process. She was a genuine strategic and leadership partner. I could bring her an unresolved organizational problem, an early idea, or something I was struggling to move forward, and she would help me pressure-test the thinking, understand the broader implications, and turn it into something actionable. There was a level of trust, candor, and shared ownership in our partnership that made our organization stronger and made me a better leader. I would work with Karin again without hesitation.
Khadijah White — direct manager
Group DPM, Foundations
“…strategic thinking, operational rigor, systems thinking, and genuine warmth”
Karin is an exceptionally seasoned program leader and subject matter expert with deep experience working across Product, Design, and Engineering, and truly elite expertise in Design Systems. What makes Karin stand out is her ability to understand the complexity of an organization and then build the systems, processes, and ways of working needed to make it successful at scale. She has partnered with leaders ranging from individual contributors to VPs, designers and senior directors to drive roadmaps, establish operating models, launch global programs, and build the foundational infrastructure required for a large-scale Design System. She is an outstanding cross functional collaborator who knows how to bring the right people together, create clarity, build alignment, and move complex initiatives forward.
The qualities that do not necessarily show up on a résumé are some of Karin’s greatest strengths. She is incredibly proactive, dependable, thoughtful, kind, and genuinely passionate about both the work and the people around her. I could always rely on Karin to get the job done, even when we were navigating significant ambiguity, changing leadership direction, shifting priorities, or territory where there was no existing playbook. She does not wait for perfect conditions. She asks the right questions, identifies what is missing, creates structure, and helps teams find a path forward. She is also an exceptional communicator and documentarian, extremely thorough, strategic, and highly skilled at turning complex information into clear plans that teams and leaders can act on.
Karin is also a tremendous mentor with a real talent for learning and development. She has created and rolled out programs that enable teams across Product, Engineering, and Design to work more effectively, while generously sharing her expertise and helping others grow. She brings a rare combination of strategic thinking, operational rigor, systems thinking, emotional intelligence, and genuine warmth. She is the kind of leader who makes both the work and the people around her better. I would enthusiastically recommend Karin to any organization looking for a senior program leader who can build, scale, influence, and lead through complexity.