Case studies
Some clients let me use their names. Others prefer anonymity. Either way, the pattern is 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
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.
Tuesday morning, Day 2. A Big Four audit team is watching its compliance lead draw a state machine on a whiteboard. By Friday afternoon the screen she is describing will have stalled five auditors at the same column header. The fix will be a single word. A design sprint runs on a fixed shape. Monday the expert is in the room with the whiteboard. Tuesday and Wednesday are the prototype. Thursday the prototype meets real users. Friday the fixes land. The audit roll-forward project ran on this shape. The firm was about to rebuild the screen its audit teams used daily, the one that moves a client's job from last year into this year. The default path on a tool like this is to design in isolation, build, ship, and discover the friction six months in. By then the fix costs ten times what it cost on Wednesday. The sprint was the cheaper bet.
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.
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.
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.