I design products and organisations.
Complex B2B and SaaS in demanding business domains. Data-heavy interfaces and expert user flows are my Tuesday mornings.
Twenty-five years and dozens of products — telecom platforms, broadcast services, dealer systems, meat-industry ERPs, emergency care triage simulations. Along the way, a design function built from zero, an operating model that outlived me, and an AI-assisted design practice now used across a media group.
I work best where the business itself is hard: regulated, data-heavy, expert users, decades of legacy nobody dares touch. I stay in the detail because in domains like these the detail is the strategy — the definitions and the screens are still mine.
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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Replaced three legacy dealer platforms with one flexible SaaS — by betting against rigid workflows
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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Built an AI design practice the whole product group actually adopted — a designer's week now takes a day or two
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. A 1000-person competitor acquired the design team we built.
We grew design to a quarter of the company and started taking telecom contracts off far larger rivals. Qvantel — one of those rivals — bought us, and our team became their design organisation.
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Rescued a gridlocked project and consolidated 10+ BBC login systems into one 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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Took direct control of the front-end teams to land a rebrand and a BSS migration on a date that could not move
Stores, packaging, and every digital channel relaunched on the same day — while core business systems were being replaced underneath. I ran the design and delivery of the digital half, under a deadline set by physical retail.
About
I work in three languages.
Design is my native one. Engineering I came up through — front-end, then full-stack: Java and C# as a client-side developer and software architect, LAMP work building payment gateways and single-sign-on integrations — which means I know what my decisions cost to build. It's why I could be handed direct control of a telecom's front-end teams to save a launch date, and why I build my own tooling rather than waiting for someone to ship it. Business I studied and then lived: an M.Sc. in economics with a focus on organisational theory, and twenty years since then in strategy rooms, PRDs, and business definitions.
Most designers can claim one adjacent language. The value isn't the credentials — it's that engineers stop treating design as decoration when you can talk honestly about implementation cost, and business stops treating it as a service function when you can argue in their terms.
Most of my career has been in enterprise and B2B: telecom BSS, broadcast, dealer management, industrial ERPs. These are domains where the users are experts, the rules are real, and the strange-looking practice you're tempted to redesign usually exists for a good reason. The skill is knowing what not to change.
At Onesto and Qvantel we built an operating model we called enterprise design, on two ideas. Products should be self-steering: business, design, and technology contribute equally, and the product tells you where it needs to go — not the loudest discipline. 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 actually use it, which is the harder half.
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.