Case Studies
Some clients let me use their names. Others prefer anonymity. Either way, the pattern's the same: start with real users, get answers fast.
Building my own product from scratch. Co-founder and CDO. Every method I use with clients, I test here first. Music collaboration platform. Slush Top 50. Google HQ demo.
Co-founder, CDO · 2023 - Present
A Finnish manufacturing company with 300+ employees and decades of technical documentation. Their support team of four handles queries from architects, builders, and construction professionals. Each answer requires manually searching through document management systems for the right PDF or CAD drawing.
Visma Sign started as a Finnish startup (Onnistuu.fi) before being acquired by Visma Solutions. It needed to grow from a basic signing tool into a full document management platform serving enterprise customers across multiple Nordic markets.
Kuntarekry.fi is Finland's job matching platform for the public sector, connecting job seekers with municipalities, hospitals, and schools. Around 500,000 job applications flow through it annually, serving 1.5 million users. FCG wanted to improve the job seeker experience and learn the Design Sprint methodology.
Admicom is a Finnish software company serving the construction sector. Their product family had grown: multiple tools, each with its own interface, dashboard, and way of presenting information. Users switching between products lost time and context.
Seppo is a Finnish learning platform where teachers create mobile games from their materials. The browser version had technical limitations. They needed a native app that worked offline in classrooms and corporate training rooms where internet connectivity isn't guaranteed.
March 2020. Finland went into lockdown. Members of Parliament needed to vote on critical legislation, but many were in COVID risk groups and couldn't be physically present. Existing parliamentary rules required in-person voting.
A Nordic infrastructure company with €510M revenue and 1,000+ employees had a fragmented system landscape: SharePoint, safety forms, time tracking, certifications, financials, scheduling, and client-mandated systems. Nobody had a complete view across projects.
An engineering software company had spent two years building a new product version. When they finally showed it to customers, the reaction was confusion. No user testing during development. A backlog full of tickets with no clear way to prioritize.
A family-owned materials company with €15 million in revenue serves industrial customers who operate storage silos requiring regular replenishment. Customer systems automatically send fill-level reports via email every six hours. Structured data, arriving reliably. But a person manually opened every email, extracted numbers, and entered them into Excel spreadsheets — multiple times a day.
Avate ry represents audiovisual creators in Finland: screenwriters, directors, actors. They needed a digital Creator Portal where rights holders could manage work metadata, verify crediting, and connect to global ISNI identifiers. Credits get lost. Names get misspelled. Roles are incorrectly attributed.
What I've Learned
They're in the support tickets. In the sales calls. In the frustrated sighs during standups. The information exists. What's missing is a structured way to surface it.
That's what validation sprints and co-creation do. Get the right people in a room. Create conditions where honesty is easier than politics. Let the insights emerge.
Average outcome: 2-4 major product decisions made in the first week. Validated new directions, reduced support load, redirected wasted effort.
See if this approach fits your situation