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 the infrastructure layer for the music industry. Collaboration, metadata, rights management, and agreements all in one place. Strong organic growth from labels and artists across 27 countries.
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.
Friday afternoon, Day 5 of the sprint. A construction-software user is testing a prototype that was built on Tuesday. Halfway through the second task they stop, look up, and say something the room hadn't heard inside the company once in the previous year of debate: which features actually mattered, and which ones the team had been about to over-invest in. The whole sprint is in that 30-second exchange. Everything before was setup. Everything after was execution.
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.
Brief lands at 09:00. Finland is in COVID lockdown, 200 Members of Parliament can't be in the same room, and the existing rules require in-person voting. The artefact has to be in front of decision-makers by 05:00 the next morning. Twenty hours, end-to-end, for a prototype that Parliament will take seriously enough to consider rule-changing legislation around. The clock starts.
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.
Day two of the workshop. A customer arrives with their own PowerPoint. UI mockups they drew themselves. A user-journey map. Two minutes in, they point at the screen: "If you built this button and this selection flow, it would save us a week of work per month." Then they say the thing the room hadn't quite expected: "I've been trying to tell the company this for years. Nobody was listening." Two years of product development, and the answer was sitting in a customer's drawer the whole time, waiting for someone to build the forum where it could be said.
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 situationMost people don’t search for “consulting engagement.” They search for the concrete mess they’re in. These are the entry points that show up most often.
Design & Validate
Before you spend another quarter building, find out whether the direction makes sense to real users.
Fractional CDO
Senior design direction for teams that need sharper judgment, better decisions, and stronger product thinking without a full-time executive hire.
Service Transformation
Map what really happens across teams, systems, and touchpoints, then redesign the parts that keep the service from working.
Service Transformation
Use AI where it removes real friction in research, operations, and product work, not where it just adds a layer of hype.