Making things got cheap. Deciding what is worth making did not.
I advise on where products and businesses should go, and where they shouldn’t.
Right now I’m advising Grönloop, a Swedish circular-economy startup, on moving from a reporting tool toward an operational layer.
I also teach and shape curriculum on the product design programme at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Currently building Jon and BTO, and doing an Executive MBA with AI at Arden University, UK.
I’m most drawn to work around wellness, education, equality, kids, and deep-tech.
How can I help?
When the team splits
Your team disagrees about what to build, and the disagreement is really about what the product is for.
After it works
The product works, and nobody can say why someone would pay for it, or why they could not get it somewhere else.
Before the build
You are about to build something expensive and nobody has checked whether it is the right thing.
When there is nobody to build it
You know what needs to exist and there is no team to make it. What you need is a working version, not another document describing one.
I work at the point where it gets decided. Sometimes that is a position written down and the criteria behind it. Sometimes it is building the thing, because a working version settles an argument a document can only prolong. What stays behind is the reasoning, so the team keeps deciding after I leave.
If one of these is your situation, tell me which one.
I set up GrönLoop's first MVP and ran the pilots that validated the basics. The product sits on top of how the work actually happens instead of inside it, so I'm working out where the business goes next, what it stops selling, and what it builds later rather than now.
- Product direction and positioning
- What to build now and what to leave manual
- A two-track plan for revenue and long-term position
- Revised targets and a pricing approach
- Which rules and partners the work should line up with
BTO, Estonian Academy of Arts
Defence grading is usually a mess of paper sheets, private spreadsheets, and numbers reconciled after the fact. Evaluators can't see where the committee stands, aggregates are calculated by hand, and the reasoning behind a grade is gone the moment the session ends. BTO replaces that with a single live system, in use now and still being built out.
- Product definition and scope
- Interface and interaction design
- Built and shipped on my own
- Real-time grading for the whole committee
- In use at the Estonian Academy of Arts
Jon, a tool for deep learning
Jon turns your own material into daily practice. You write your concepts in your own words, then Jon hides the source and asks you to explain them back from memory. It is built on a 2013 study that ranked ten ways of studying by evidence. Rereading and highlighting came out lowest. Jon uses the ones that came out highest.
- Retrieval, teach-back and spaced repetition, the methods with the strongest evidence behind them
- The material stays on screen while you build. It is hidden while you practise
- Jon reads your concepts against the source and tells you what you missed, but never writes them for you
- In testing with four people, on their own material
Building something deliberately unglamorous. Not the work that looks impressive in a portfolio, but the work people actually need. It pulls together everything I already do, and it buys me the agency to choose the rest.
Exploring what design education should be in the AI era. I build courses on the product design programme at the Estonian Academy of Arts and use them to test what holds. The research and the writing are where I work out which part of design survives the automation, and what has to change in how it is taught.
- Course design and curriculum
- Product design, portfolio and product management
- Admissions and thesis committees
- Mentoring
