About

I've been designing digital products since 1997 — back when the job meant Photoshop, hand-sliced images, and uploading via FTP. A lot has changed since then. The part that hasn't is the thing I keep coming back to: understanding what people actually need, and making something clear and useful out of that.

I started at ad agencies in Finland and Sweden, moved through studios in Stockholm and Copenhagen, and worked my way from designer to Creative Director over about a decade. Then the financial crisis hit in 2009, the startup I'd joined shut down overnight, and I went independent — which turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.

Since then I've worked as a consultant and design leader — sometimes embedded with a team for years, sometimes brought in for a focused stretch to set direction and raise the bar.

The most recent chapter was Summer Health, where I joined as the founding designer and stayed for three and a half years. I led design across the full product, from the parent-facing care app to the clinical tools our pediatricians used daily. Before that, I've led design work for teams at Loom, IKEA, and a space experimentation startup, among others.

These days I'm most useful when things are still a bit unclear — when a team knows something isn't working but hasn't figured out exactly why. I like getting close to the product, making decisions that hold up, and stepping back once the team has it covered.

I also wrote a book about the parts of product design that don't get talked about enough — selling design internally, knowing what not to build, and doing user research that actually changes how you think.