Düsseldorf to Amsterdam, by way of São Paulo and London.
Now · Amsterdam
Since 2023 I’ve led service design at an innovation hub; for most of that time, I’ve been guiding the transformation of a large mobility provider. For the past 18 months the work has been AI, hands on. The full chapter is below ↓ — or start with what it produced.
A Diploma at Master level in Communication Design in Düsseldorf, focused on corporate design and user experience. I graduated with distinction — and with questions the craft alone could not answer: how do people, products, and systems fit together?
Following the old German journeyman tradition — the Walz, where trainees leave home to work among strangers and return changed — I closed my studies in São Paulo, art-directing campaigns at AlmapBBDO in 2006.
My graduation project: six months interviewing forty-two creative people across advertising, design, street art, and social projects, bound into a 432-page book — my first long-form research, and my first lesson in what a good question can gather around itself.
At Mediamatic and Mattmo in Amsterdam I designed complex digital products — among them a self-publishing platform connecting artists across Africa and Asia.
I worked with teams split between Amsterdam and Shanghai. It taught me early that the hard part of digital work is rarely the screen: it is getting people with different pictures in their heads to build the same thing.
The 2012 Global Service Jam introduced me to service design: the whole journey in the context of its ecosystem, not just the interface at the end of it. It also moved facilitation to the centre of my practice — designing the conversation as carefully as the artefact.
Facilitation between people is the core ingredient of real progress.
Inside London product teams and enterprise transformation, I learned to take the separate pictures leadership, technology, and delivery each carry and pull them into one everyone can see — and challenge.
A twelve-week MVP across London and San Francisco taught me to earn trust through small, safe experiments. Scaling a bank's onboarding from three days to five seconds, and one team to twelve global teams, taught me to grow what works without losing coherence or culture.
I took a Business Design MBA (d.MBA) to think in value models, governance, and adoption, and a REFORGE programme in Digital Product Management to stay close to how modern product teams operate — alongside advanced service-design and ideation-to-prototyping certifications. Not for the certificates: the work keeps changing, and I would rather update my toolkit than defend it.
As Product Director, I drove company strategy and sales and built new propositions and partnerships. I hired, coached, and promoted designers, data scientists, and product managers.
With the rest of the leadership team, I wrote the playbooks that describe how we run the business — how we hire, promote, and position the organisation. Writing down how a company works is humbling: it forces you to say what you believe, in a way a team can hold you to.
As Course Director at Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm, I designed and led a twelve-week UX and Digital Product programme — 20 students a term, consistent 5-star ratings — around themes from circular service design to digital health. For five years I also taught Innovation and Creative Problem Solving at King's College London, judging and coaching its Business Innovation Challenge. Teaching is how I test whether I really understand something. I still sit on Berghs' International Advisory Board.
Three of them, none of it quite planned. After a decade, we traded double-deckers for bakfietsen and moved to the Netherlands, our second time in the country and the first as a family of five.
I lead a multidisciplinary team here — business design, product, UX, engineering — guiding a large mobility provider through its transformation toward integrated sales and service. For the past 18 months the work has been AI, hands on, and the interesting questions are practical: how it behaves, where it helps, and what it takes for an organisation to adopt, trust, and govern it — not just applaud the demo.
My AI Sandbox is where client questions get stress-tested: what an opportunity requires, where a concept breaks, and what has to be true before it becomes a product, service, or programme of work. Field notes from summits and hackathons feed it; what survives feeds the practice.
A coffee, a meetup, a conversation — and you leave with an idea that reshapes the work. Most of what I know arrived this way: someone was generous with their thinking, and later I could be generous with mine.
Twenty years, four countries, one habit: getting people with different pictures in their heads to build the same thing. These days the material is AI, and the question is practical — what it takes for an organisation to adopt, trust, and govern it.
I work from inside a consultancy in Amsterdam. I’m open to the right leadership or advisory conversation — especially where AI has to earn trust, not just ship.