Priit Karu
Designer. Lead. Interdisciplinary creative.
8+ years of design experience in B2B and B2C SaaS – seven of them at Pipedrive 🦄. I design elegant user experiences for complex workflows, build design systems, and lead teams.
I designed my first website circa 2002. Since then, presenting information clearly and solving real problems through great user experience has captivated me more than anything else – so I made it my profession.
I have bootstrapped a web design studio where I coded, designed and ran the business. I then transitioned to become a product designer, a design systems designer, and a team lead at Pipedrive, the unicorn sales CRM from 🇪🇪 Estonia.
Most recently, I worked as Product Design Lead at Omniva 📦 where I reshaped how the design team worked with product teams, contributed to design systems, accessibility and designed the #1 free Productivity app on the Estonian iOS App Store.
I took a career break in August 2025 to re-energize. Since then I've travelled, gone mountain hiking and transformed my nutrition and training habits. I've also made $70k revenue with niche eCommerce in Estonia. Now I am ready to put my full energy into something new.
I try to keep fit, indulge my interest in cars, tech, music and business. I’ve sang in choirs and played guitar in bands. I love DIY projects and get inspiration from natural and urban environments.
Work
Zen Mode – banking for the elderly
2026A exercise to build a banking app for the elderly. Four iterations in less than 2 weeks.
Omniva Mobile
2024–2025Fixing the usability of Omniva's shipment-tracking app — now #1 on the Estonian App Store.
Pipedrive Design System
2021–2024Semantic token architecture and design systems leadership at Pipedrive.
Web Forms
2020Visual customization options for a lead generation tool.
Caller
2019Calling interface in a sales CRM — from concept through final design and shipped product.
Scheduler
2018Meeting scheduling tool to fit into salespeople's workflows.
Experience
- Took a deliberate break from product design to recharge and invest in health and personal projects.
- Created a niche Estonian web shop as a side project and grew it past €70k revenue.
- I built the shop, sourced the goods, shot the ads, ran the ads, shipped the packages, and handled customer support.
- Redesigned the function. Task finishers became partners for product.
- Embedded designers into product teams, significantly raising our influence.
- Redesigned the Omniva mobile app. Now at 100k MAU and 4.8★ in App Store.
- Shifted attitude toward usability testing and accessibility in the org.
- Coordinated a11y efforts for digital channels.
- Led a team of three (web, mobile, content).
- Created systems and rituals which ensured focus on high-impact activities.
- Achieved all-time high satisfaction with the design systed.
- Upgraded the design system to world class (published in Figma Community).
- Shipped a global customer effort score module to quantify UX quality.
- Baked accessibility into our components as a default, not an afterthought.
- Refactored web app design system and implemented a semantic design system architecture of my own design.
- Enabled two painless product rebrands.
- Key voice for consistency & quality during rapid design team expansion.
Conducted tens of user interviews regularly · Did on-site job shadowing · Designed a major internal dashboard design for engineers · Minor feature design in product
Co founded a web design studio · Custom Wordpress websites for SMEs