# Pekka Hartikainen – Product design leader

Product design leader and design engineer in Helsinki, Finland: leads design teams, and designs and builds web products, SaaS and AI tools. Fits Head of Design, Design Manager and Design Director roles, as well as Senior and Staff Product Designer roles.

> Design leadership delivered. I lead and grow design teams that turn complex, data-heavy products into tools people genuinely enjoy using and agents can access. A designer’s craft, a business degree and hands-on frontend skills let me bring design, business and engineering together as one team — with the growth of the people as the first priority.

- Based: Helsinki, Finland
- Now: Senior Product Designer, Unity
- Education: MA New Media · M.Sc. Economics
- Focus: Data-heavy SaaS, design systems, AI

## Highlights

- **Multi-million-dollar licensing costs** saved by Unity's redesigned reporting, and payment funnel drop-off improved by double digits. The new funnel shipped with multiple payment methods for user-acquisition transfers.
- **Three design systems in production:** Nosto's ships as a private npm package, Robocorp's powers the whole platform, and the Unity payments team shipped Unity's new system first. Built with engineers — from tokens to production components, not handed over as mockups.
- **Bolder Helsinki grew to €1M+ turnover,** bootstrapped and profitable, with a team of ten hired and led as CEO. Biggest client: ING, with the brand-new Kluuvi shopping-centre project.
- **AI products since 2016:** lead designer for Nosto's machine-learning line — segmentation, insights, onsite personalization and A/B testing. At Unity I built an AI tool for querying reporting data with prompts, and AI is part of my daily workflow.
- **At home on tech-heavy platforms:** I've designed developer and data platforms at Robocorp and Unity in close collaboration with engineers. And I ship frontend to production myself.
- **Two Master's degrees** — New Media from Aalto School of Design and Arts and Economics from Helsinki School of Economics (Aalto). And the frontend fluency is current: React and Vue, with this site hand-built in Next.js.

## Selected work

- [Unity – Reporting and payments for a global ad platform](https://pekkahartikainen.fi/work/unity.md) (2022 –): Lead design for core projects in Unity's SaaS for advertisers and game studios — from requirement mapping and user testing to global launch, together with developers and product managers.
- [Robocorp – Cloud platform for software robots](https://pekkahartikainen.fi/work/robocorp.md) (2020 – 2022): Robotic Process Automation: software robots doing repetitive, rule-based computer work. Design lead for the cloud platform that orchestrates Python-based robots, at a startup with over $30M in funding.
- [Bolder Helsinki – Bootstrapping a creative agency](https://pekkahartikainen.fi/work/bolder.md) (2009 – 2011): A perfect storm: young, ambitious people starting an agency in the middle of a recession, before the startup boom, and growing it into a contender with over €1M in annual turnover.
- [Nosto – AI-powered personalization for eCommerce](https://pekkahartikainen.fi/work/nosto.md) (2016 – 2020): Lead designer for the machine-learning product line: segmentation and insights, onsite content personalization and split testing for retailers like Helly Hansen, Volcom, Expedia and Fjellsport.
- [Oppex – Search engine for public tenders](https://pekkahartikainen.fi/work/oppex.md) (2015 – 2016): Design lead and search-engine UI designer for a public procurement startup covering over 1.5 million notices a year from more than a thousand portals.
- [OmaStadi – A sports venue through participatory budgeting](https://pekkahartikainen.fi/work/voluntary.md) (2020): Planned, branded and campaigned for a local sports venue in Helsinki's participatory budgeting — 1,372 votes won a €370,000 budget, on a campaign spend of about a thousand euros.

## Contact
- Email: pekka.t.hartikainen (at) gmail.com
- Phone: +358 40 765 4634
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pekkahartikainen/
- Executive deck (PDF): https://pekkahartikainen.fi/pekka-hartikainen-executive-deck-2026.pdf
- Languages: Finnish and English

This page in other languages: [fi](https://pekkahartikainen.fi/fi.md) · [krl](https://pekkahartikainen.fi/krl.md)