Los Angeles

Engineer by training.Designer by identity.Marketer by scar tissue

Currently focused on how people find and understand care.

UCLA Anderson MBA · Former Director of Marketing Communications, Snapp! (50M+ users) · Eight international design awards, 2026 · Level-A international freestyle snowboard judge

Story

The path makes more sense backward.

I trained as an engineer: the kind of training that makes you optimize everything. Then design: 1st of 1,002 on the national exam, a national championship. Everyone expected a studio; I chose marketing instead, and spent nine years growing some of the Middle East's largest tech platforms, at the scale of 50+ million users.

People ask which one is the real me: the engineer, the designer, or the marketer. Wrong question. The design championship needed the engineer's discipline. The fifty million users needed the designer's eye.

Now: Los Angeles, UCLA Anderson, and looking into the industry where all of it matters most, healthcare.

Legally Shahab Askarian — Shan to everyone since the mountain years.

Questions? The good answers require coffee →

Shan Askarian (Shahab Askarian) at UCLA Anderson School of Management, Los Angeles — The bench at UCLA Anderson. Los Angeles, 2026.

Design · 2026 · Five designs. Three juries. Eight awards.

Full record →

KINTop Design + Winner, EPDA · Silver, NYPDA

AsterionTop Design, EPDA · Silver, D'Light

OndaGold, D'Light

DrewdropsGold, NYPDA

GlowormGold, NYPDA

Teaching

Fundamentals first. Tools second.

Lead instructor, digital marketing bootcamp, Tehran. Teaching marketers to build from first principles, in a market where the standard tools never worked.

Judging

Creativity, scored in seconds.

Level-A freestyle snowboarding judge, national contest founder. Structure applied to taste, with an athlete's season on the line.

Making

The sketchbook never closes.

National champion in industrial design. In 2026, five designs went from a Los Angeles sketchbook to three international juries.

Campaigns

Fifty million people were watching.

Nine years of brand and growth for the Middle East's largest platforms.

Selected work

Multiple disciplines. One habit: measure what others only feel.

Design & Art

Sketchbook, never closed

Five designs, three international juries, 2026
National championship, industrial design
1st of 1,002, national master's exam

What I sketch when nobody assigns it.

Enter the studio →

Marketing

Brands at scale

Two brands unified for 21M users
MMM + attribution at 50M scale
Trust, measured, for 45M users
Accessibility for 5M+ users

Nine years, four platforms, one lesson: measure everything.

On LinkedIn, for now →

Tech & AI — current engagements

Machines that learn. Me too.

AI personalization, piloted in production
Zero to 450K users, q-commerce
Now: AI × healthcare marketing research

This section changes the most. That's the point.

On LinkedIn, for now →

Juried recognition · 2026

Brands I've worked with along the way

What I'm working on

Growth is a system. Most teams run it as a series of guesses.

Nine years of growing platforms, a design championship, and a season of judging athletes left me with three working hypotheses. I keep testing them.

Measure what others only feel.

Creative work can be scored. Judging snowboarding taught me that; marketing mix models proved it at fifty-million-user scale. What isn't measured isn't improved, only argued about.

AI lowers the cost of making, not the cost of judging.

When anyone can generate a hundred options in a minute, the scarce skill is choosing the right one and knowing why. Taste, with a scoreboard.

A brand is a system people experience, not a campaign they remember.

Every touchpoint is a design decision. The ones nobody designs are the ones that cost the most.

Right now I'm applying all three where the gap between the product and the people is widest: healthcare.

The mountain years

“I built and judged national freestyle snowboarding competitions: creativity, scored in seconds, under pressure. Still my job. I just traded athletes for brands.”

Level-A international judge · founded a national freestyle contest, ran it for three years

Now

Based in Los Angeles. Coffee is a great idea.

MBA at UCLA Anderson through 2027. Always curious how things look from your side of healthcare: clinician, operator, builder, student. Happy to trade perspectives and share what I've learned. First coffee's on me.

This season: studying how AI changes the way things grow · preparing the next round of international design entries · collecting stories from healthcare operators. (updated quarterly)

Askarian@ucla.edu