CV
Martin Kool
Experience and product design leadership for platforms at national and global scale. Currently rebuilding how design and engineering work in an AI-native delivery model.
- Role
- Executive Director, Experience and Applied AI, Monks
- Based in
- Hilversum, the Netherlands
- Languages
- Dutch and English
- Contact
- hoi@metmartin.nl, LinkedIn
martinkool.nl/cv
Experience
2025 to now
Executive Director, Experience and Applied AI
Monks, Hilversum
- Own experience strategy and applied AI direction across digital platforms and enterprise clients, cross-domain, with no line authority over the teams that adopt the direction.
- Rebuilt design and frontend delivery workflows around AI tooling, and documented where AI-generated output degraded quality, which is what the guardrails are drawn from.
- Hold a published, evidence-based position on AI design tooling: generic output fails at problem framing and product context, so the leverage sits in design foundations, context layers and review standards rather than in artefact generation.
- Architected AI-enabled content and campaign workflows for enterprise clients including Samsung, integrating monks.flow agents with marketing and delivery platforms at scale.
- Partner with product, technology and strategy leadership on how AI changes team composition and builder profiles, not only tooling.
- Confidential workplace counsellor (vertrouwenspersoon) since 2025.
2022 to 2025
Experience Strategy Director
Media.Monks
- Led the experience design workstream for ResMed across more than 140 sites, defining information architecture, component systems and content governance across parallel workstreams and markets.
- Set experience direction and quality standards for greenfield digital ecosystem programmes at national scale, aligning design, engineering and content teams that did not report to me.
2013 to 2022
Head of User Experience
Media.Monks
- Defined and scaled the global product and experience design practice, holding one craft bar across regions, domains and markets with very different local contexts.
- Led design through the move to component-driven frontend architecture and systems-based design. Not by rolling out a tool, but by rethinking what designers produced, how they worked with engineers, and what done meant.
- Created Fabric, Media.Monks' foundational design system and internal tooling layer, the base on which client design systems were built. Adoption was voluntary across regions, because it made engineering faster rather than because it was mandated.
- Built global design standards, playbooks and quality gates that gave regional design leads a shared foundation without adding process overhead.
- Embedded research, usability testing, analytics and experimentation as continuous inputs into design decisions, whatever the reporting lines said.
- Led a design organisation of more than 40 across Europe and the Americas through a layer of design managers, coaching managers and staff-level individual contributors through structural change.
- Delivered platforms under non-negotiable accessibility requirements including Section 508 and WCAG, for government and enterprise clients.
- Shaped flagship work for the US Air Force, adidas, Philips and Weber.
2000 to 2012
Managing partner and co-founder
Brothers in Art
- Founded and led a multidisciplinary design and development studio serving national and international clients.
- Built and ran the official Black Eyed Peas community platform into the band's digital home for millions of fans, and the live mobile broadcasting that ran on it.
- Owned product direction, delivery and client relationships end to end.
1999 to 2012
Co-founder
- Co-founded a social platform for digital artists that grew to roughly 44,000 members: profiles, forums, galleries, peer voting and community moderators, years before the phrase social media existed.
- Designed it, wrote the front-end, and moderated the community alongside the members.
Expertise
Education
1999 to 2003
MA Digital Media Design
HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Hilversum
1998 to 1999
Multimedia Design
Mediacollege Amsterdam
1993 to 1998
HAVO
Huizermaat, Huizen
Awards
- Silver Craft Lion, Cannes Lions, for Airforce.com
- Three Gold ADDY Awards, US Air Force
- Grand Prix Digital, Epica, for Google Night Walk Marseille
- Gold Interactive CLIO, Yes We Can
The case studies carry the rest, alongside what the work was for.
Alongside
Networks. Design Leadership Forum, ADCN, and the Team Leads Community at Monks.
Writing. The Infinite Union, a guide to Kashmir Shaivism as modern day tantra, published on Amazon in paperback and as an ebook.
Off duty. Acrylic painting, live-fire cooking, and a daily nondual meditation practice.