I design products and organisations.
I design complex B2B and SaaS products. I specialize in data-heavy interfaces and expert user flows.
I've worked in design for over 20 years and created dozens of products, from telecom platforms and automotive dealer systems to meat-industry ERPs. I've bootstrapped design functions and built several design systems for clients ranging from start-ups to multinational enterprises.
I work best where the business itself is hard: regulated, data-heavy, and with expert users and decades of legacy practices.
Design lead on a SaaS platform replacing three legacy systems across 400+ dealerships, and one of two designers representing product design on Alma's group-wide Core AI team.
"Pekka is a brilliant creative mind, that can connect the dots of UX, Business, and Technology like only very few can."
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Consolidated three legacy dealer platforms into a single SaaS.
Vehicle retail runs on regulation, VAT rules, and contract law, and no two dealerships work alike. Rather than force one process on all of them, we made the system flexible and made behaviour visible instead.
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Implemented an AI-assisted design workflow across an enterprise product group.
Four generations of tooling, from throwaway Python scripts to a five-agent workflow. The hard part was never the technology; it was three groups who each had a good reason to resist it.
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First design hire at a ten-person company. Built the design organisation acquired by Qvantel.
We grew design to a quarter of the company and started taking telecom contracts off far larger rivals. Qvantel — one of them — bought us, and our team became their design organisation.
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Consolidated 10+ BBC login systems into a single account.
One account across BBC Online, replacing a fragmented estate of memberships. The project arrived politically stalled; the technical consolidation was the easy part.
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Architected five distinct design systems for five different domains.
A design system isn't a house style. Dense and high-contrast for investment management, deliberately recessive for a triage simulator so the simulations held the view, dataviz-led for an analytics product. Each one answered its own problem.
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Solo career
Before Alma I ran an independent practice, working as the first concept and MDP designer for a series of Finnish startups, taking products from nothing to launch. In several cases the business definition and brand came with it. Concept design for an AI-powered customer communications analytics platform through to MDP. Product concept and launch design for an investment project management platform. Several more, not all of which survived — those taught me the most.
About
I work in three languages.
Design is my strongest one. But before design, I started in front-end and full-stack engineering: Java and C# as a client-side developer, LAMP work for payment gateways, and single-sign-on integrations. I studied business and graduated with an M.Sc. in economics with a focus on organisational theory and human-computer interaction, and spent years in creating strategies, products and portfolios.
I discuss implementation costs directly with engineering. I argue strategy using business terminology.
Most of my career has been in enterprise and B2B: telecom BSS, broadcast, dealer management, industrial ERPs. I work in domains where users are experts. Existing practices often look strange but serve specific operational needs. I prioritize understanding these workflows before altering them.
At Onesto and Qvantel we built an operating model we called enterprise design, on two ideas. Business, design, and technology contributed equally to the roadmap. We prioritized requirements based on user data. And experience runs in layers: usability at the core, service design around it, and around that the experience of employees, support staff, and stakeholders. Support staff working against a system they hate cannot deliver good support. Ordinary enough now; distinctly uncommon in 2012.
I'm doing a version of the same thing again with AI-assisted design: building the practice, then getting people to use it.
Design lead on a dealer management SaaS at Alma, owning product definitions and PRDs alongside UX. One of two designers representing product design on Alma's group-wide Core AI team, where I mentor other teams building their own AI-assisted workflows.
Based in Jyväskylä, Finland. I work in Finnish and English.