Senior design direction for teams that need sharper judgment, better decisions, and stronger product thinking without a full-time executive hire.
Your team can ship. What is missing is experienced judgment at the moments where product, design, and business decisions need to connect.
Working with Vitali is educational, pleasant and inspiring. He's a great personality and a true creative professional.
Artifacts, interfaces, and workshop material from the kind of work this page is about.
Vitali facilitates the room, frames the decision, and keeps the work close to the evidence instead of presentation theatre.
Visma Sign
2M+ signers, 50K+ orgs
#1 E-Signing Platform in Nordics
Engineering Software Company
1 week saved per user per month
The Two-Year Mistake
Vandall
€550K raised, paying customers
Infrastructure Layer for the Music Industry
Trusted by teams at
These are the patterns that usually appear before a team admits the direction is under-questioned.
Good people are doing solid work, but the team still feels reactive.
Design gets involved late and mostly decorates decisions that were already made elsewhere.
The team debates quality and priorities without a trusted decision-making frame.
Senior leadership wants more from design but cannot describe what that means operationally.
The point is not abstract insight. It is a smaller and more confident next move.
A stronger link between business priorities, user needs, and design decisions.
Better design critique, clearer prioritization, and fewer avoidable product mistakes.
A more capable team because feedback and coaching happen in the work, not outside it.
Less dependency on guesswork or founder instinct alone.
This is structured to surface signal early, while the cost of changing course is still low.
Step 1
Understand where the team is stuck before prescribing process.
Step 2
Work inside real product decisions, not in parallel advisory theater.
Step 3
Raise the quality of judgment through critique, mentoring, and sharper framing.
Step 4
Build capability so the team gets stronger rather than more dependent.
The quiz is the fastest way to tell whether this is the right format, whether another route makes more sense, or whether the team simply needs execution support.
You have designers and product people, but nobody is consistently setting the direction.
Leadership wants design to influence business outcomes, not just interface quality.
You need a senior perspective across product decisions, team development, and ways of working.
These offers are anchored in actual projects, real stakeholder rooms, and visible change afterward.
Visma Sign
Enterprise customers needed advanced capabilities. New markets were opening across the Nordics. EU regulations like eIDAS kept raising the bar. All while keeping the experience simple for everyday users sending a single document.
Working with Vitali is educational, pleasant and inspiring. He's a great personality and a true creative professional.
If you built this, it would save us a week per month.
Working with Vitali made me a better product thinker. He doesn't get distracted by noise. He finds the real problem, articulates it clearly and then moves fast. What sets Vitali apart is not only his design capability, but his ability to teach while doing.
Visma Sign
Visma Sign became the leading e-signing platform in the Nordic market. 2M+ signers, 50K+ organizations, up to 20K signatures per day. Saves 90% of signing time compared to paper.
Engineering Software Company
The team restarted development of the new version with a user-informed approach. They changed their operative methods entirely based on the two-day experience.
Vandall
€550K raised. ~1,500 MAU with 40.9% month-1 retention. Slush Top 50 selection and Google HQ demo. First B2B customer (Nordic Bridge Music) signed December 2025. Full music industry infrastructure built from zero.
Below is the fuller breakdown of where leadership support changes momentum, how the work embeds with product teams, and what usually shifts first.
There is a phase many companies hit where the team is no longer small enough to run on instinct, but not mature enough to steer itself.
The symptoms are subtle at first.
Design work looks fine on the surface. People are busy. Features ship. The roadmap moves. But underneath, there is drift:
That is where fractional design leadership becomes useful.
Not because the team is weak.
Because experienced design judgment is hard to fake, and expensive to hire badly.
Many teams hear “fractional design leadership” and imagine occasional feedback sessions.
That is too shallow.
The real value is in the places where design is supposed to shape outcomes:
In other words, the role is not about policing pixels. It is about improving the quality of the decisions that pixels are downstream from.
At Visma Sign, the work stretched over years because the need was bigger than a few screen-level improvements. The company needed enterprise-ready product evolution, team growth, and user-centric methods that would last after the external support reduced. That is what good fractional leadership does. It improves the product, but it also upgrades the team’s ability to keep improving it.
Usually because the work keeps revealing it.
Leadership expects design to contribute to strategy, but design is brought in too late.
Designers want to influence the product, but nobody has taught the team how to connect user evidence, business priorities, and design tradeoffs in a disciplined way.
Product managers want better collaboration, but critique is fuzzy and research is inconsistent.
Engineers want clearer decisions upstream, but receive churn instead.
These are not separate problems. They are often one leadership gap showing up in different places.
It means you do not need a full-time executive footprint to get senior leverage.
The work is usually structured around:
The key is that the work sits close enough to day-to-day decisions to matter. If it becomes abstract advisory, the value drops quickly.
That is also why I do not come in with a fixed process and force a team into it. Some teams need stronger critique. Some need better research behavior. Some need clearer decision rights. Some need help using AI tools without losing judgment. The leverage point is different each time.
Bad consulting creates dependency.
Good fractional leadership increases the team’s own capability.
That means:
The goal is not “you need me forever.” The goal is that while I am involved, the team gets stronger in visible ways.
This is why I like this model more than vague advisory arrangements. The improvement should show up in the work itself.
Because internal teams get stuck in their own patterns.
People normalize weak critique. They normalize sloppy prioritization. They normalize bringing design in too late because “that’s just how we work here.”
An outside leader can challenge those patterns without carrying the same internal baggage.
That matters especially when the team is already capable. Capable teams often do not need inspiration. They need someone who can see the pattern faster, name it clearly, and help them change it without drama.
The engineering-company example shows the cost of the opposite. Two years of building without the right user-informed leadership upstream. Once the team experienced a different way of working, the method stuck. That is the point. Better direction changes not only the product, but the organization’s behavior around product decisions.
If you can already feel the cost of missing senior design judgment, but you are not ready to commit to a full-time executive hire, this is usually the right middle path.
It lets you:
In some companies, that ends with a hire. In others, it creates enough maturity that the team can operate better with a lighter leadership structure.
Either way, the value is the same: stronger judgment where it matters most.
These are the pieces most likely to sharpen the conversation if this page already feels familiar.
Thinking
AI doesn't replace your judgment. It replaces your repetition. What being AI-first really means.
Thinking
How designers and developers can work better together.
Thinking
I've been building AI systems where the feedback doesn't just inform the human. It teaches the AI. What happens when those loops start compounding.
The practical questions tend to be less about process and more about timing, scope, and how much certainty a team actually needs.
The same service often enters from different angles. These pages are the adjacent decision points.