Pekka Toppi

Modernising a mature design organisation — a product operating model and a shift from handovers to overlapping co-working — while steering design on Alma's largest development undertaking to date.

Design lead on a dealer management SaaS replacing three legacy platforms serving 400+ Finnish dealerships. Own product definition and PRDs alongside UX/UI; line-manage one UX designer, who joined as a junior and has grown to intermediate through mentoring.

• Rebuilt an early-stage project — ~25% of views, an outdated requirements document — into a shipped product: new PRDs and business definitions, new design language, essentially every view redesigned. The platform is Alma's largest development undertaking to date.

• Modernised how a mature design organisation works: a product operating model, and a shift from handovers to overlapping co-working that broke down the last walls between business, design, development, and QA.

• Drove the core architectural decision to abandon enforced sales workflows in favour of flexible deal-building with heavy activity monitoring, winning over resistant architects, executives, and clients through prototypes and sustained argument.

• Now in production use, with dealerships migrated from our own legacy systems and others won from competing platforms.

• Built an AI-assisted design practice across four architectural generations (Python/Azure scripts → skills → agentic workflow), now in daily use by design and PO staff across two enterprise SaaS products; reduced a designer-week of work to 1–2 days.

• Member of Alma's group-wide Core AI team, one of two representing UX and product design across the group's companies; mentor other teams building their own AI-assisted workflows.

Ran my own design practice, helping Finnish startups and SMEs brand, build, and launch their first products — several end to end, from business strategy and brand through product and UX design.

• Delivered full 0-to-1 engagements spanning brand, product definition, and UX, as well as focused UX and strategy mandates.

• Clients ranged from startups to large multinational corporations.

• Continued as expert design consultant to Qvantel following my departure.

Replicating a small company's design-first culture at enterprise scale — and shifting the design target from single products to entire telco BSS portfolios.

Following Qvantel's 2014 acquisition of Onesto and full integration in 2015, our design team became Qvantel's central design organisation, covering ~12 core products in a ~1000-person company.

• Grew the design organisation to 14, and established UX as a core role in every product team — a permanent change to how products were built.

• Created Qvantel's first design system, adopted across all new products and still in place today; refreshed brand and style guides.

• Scaled the enterprise design operating model across multiple product teams, pairing each designer with a business architect and solution architect for joint product definition.

• Supported and mentored designers embedded in customer teams outside my reporting line.

Reimagining a small expert consultancy as a design-first development powerhouse.

First design hire at a sub-10-person company with no design function; built it to a quarter of company headcount.

• Headhunted and hired the entire design team, including the creative director; split leadership so I retained design and content leadership while he took line management.

• Established design as the company's competitive differentiator, enabling a small firm to win international telecom IT contracts against far larger incumbents — and a direct factor in Qvantel's decision to acquire.

• Developed the enterprise design operating model: product-led definition with business, design, and technology contributing equally, and experience considered in layers from usability through service design to employee and stakeholder experience.

• Most designers from the team went on to leadership roles elsewhere; many stepped from mid/senior to lead level during their time on the team.

• Concept creation and solution design for large enterprise clients; also acted as product owner and project leader for the mobile concept creation team.

• Core design team, London. Designs and guidelines for pan-BBC design patterns and main website elements, and the unified membership platform consolidating 10+ separate login systems into one account. Shipped and still in production.

• Usability specialist in the industrial sector; software developer and client-side architect (Java, C#); self-employed front-end developer (LAMP, payment gateways, SSO integrations).