Miemo Penttinen

After running into technical problems with our Indian software vendor during our earlier product lead's watch, I took over the overall product responsibilities, first focusing on acting as interim CTO to make our tech platform more up-to-date and future-proof.

I looked into high-quality software vendors in Europe and started collaborating with Funzi to have a modern tech stack. Instead of the Android app we had developed earlier, we went with a robust mobile web solution that allowed us to tap into a much larger audience in the emerging markets, including users with feature phones and ultra-low bandwidth connections. This allowed us to quickly grow our audience from a few hundred thousand users to millions.

Under my direction, we fully revamped our back-end from PHP-based custom solutions to modern CMS contentful with Node.js and MongoDB as critical components. This stack has served Funzi well for years, which allowed quick pivots of business models, and enabled Funzi to attract top developer talent.

With two of my colleagues at Funzi, we authored a chapter to a Routledge-published academic book titled critical mobile pedagogy. Our 17-page chapter explained Funzi's pedagogy, technology, and impact, where I covered the first two mentioned areas in my writing. The book was peer-reviewed, providing academic validation for the educational model I had designed for Funzi.

In 2007, Nokia, which was still the number one phone player before iPhone and Android took over, acquired global map and location data with the massive acquisition of Navteq. I was the design lead of a team at the digital agency Frantic, tasked with figuring out what Nokia could create with this new data.

This was a fascinating and challenging new territory for a designer since no best practices had yet emerged. Mobile technology was still a limiting factor since Nokia's devices didn't have touch screens. We designed and built a fully functional prototype in just a few months. The prototype paved the way for Nokia's future in location services. The key ideas in our prototype centered around enriching the POI data with social elements and were later integrated into Nokia's initial maps product, which was a relatively simple online mapping tool. I worked in Nokia's Berlin office as a part of the design team leading the development of the whole map.

Many of the ideas and designs from this project are still in some form currently live at HERE WeGo navigation apps, even though Nokia no longer owns the product.

The Donald Duck magazine is hugely popular in Finland and has been the number-one weekly periodical for decades. In 2012 the publisher wanted to update the publication to the 21st century with a unique subscription-based iPad app that provides access to the full back-catalog of all the comics they've ever published. It was the first of its kind in Finland for any magazine or comics content and one of the first globally.

The main design challenge was to make sure different readers find exciting content quickly with an overwhelming catalog of 100,000+ pages spanning six decades. My solution was to provide the users with exciting and varied content highlights through an editorial selection with complete search and browse capabilities for fans. I created a UI that is easy and pleasing for kids and adults while still providing the playful feel of the original comic.

After its launch, the iPad app was on the top five list of books in the Finnish AppStore, and it still has a solid 4-star rating average. The UI design has since been remade, but the overall concept and most of the flows are still based on my original designs.

I was part of a team of ten seasoned professionals in the digital industry in Finland who joined forces to provide unofficial support for the green party presidential candidate Pekka Haavisto in the 2012 elections. I created the main concept for the campaign, provided the initial design work, and ran the editorial desk during the campaign. Our campaign sites generated a virally unprecedented amount of media coverage and online social media buzz, with 1.6 million page loads and 600,000 unique visitors, leading to the top 20 positions in Finnish site charts.

This helped boost Pekka Haavisto's visibility and raise his ratings from 5% in the polls to 37% in the second round of the election, a historic result for a liberal candidate from the green party. With zero ad purchases, we collected over 25,000€ in donations for the campaign.

In 2020 we secured funding that allowed us to finally build a proper in-house product team, which was also highly necessary to make the transition to a B2C business model happen. All of this needed to occur during the pandemic to increase the difficulty level. Everything from recruiting and workshopping to organizing as a newly founded team had to be done remotely.

I ran all the recruitments myself with the help of a great headhunter, first focusing on hiring a designer to continue the design from the wireframes I had created for the B2C feature set. After that, it was time to tackle the challenge of hiring a new CTO and a PM to take care of the daily product routines. With the recruitment done and the new CTO getting a new outsourced tech team on board, we were able to get the B2C features released in early 2021. By that time, we also had three internal junior developers. In the end, I managed a product team of six in-house members and external developers.

With the 2015 migrant crisis in Europe, our mobile learning startup Funzi decided to help by offering mobile courses to ease the settling-in of the refugees.

As product and design lead at Funzi, I made the changes needed to the product. Thanks to the tech platform transition I had completed earlier, we were in a position that allowed us to maneuver quickly, as the need for the solution was pressing. Previously they only offered courses in English, and multi-language support was now needed, including languages like Pashtu, Urdu, and Persian, many of them written in right-to-left Arabic script.

I made the multi-language designs myself, coordinated the tech development with a local agency, got translators on board, and in the end, got everything up and running in just a couple of weeks and had the first courses created and translated. The refugee initiative got support from ministries, cities, universities, and corporations in Finland, and we established similar local operations in Sweden, Estonia, Germany, and Turkey. This gathered a respectable amount of press for Funzi from media like Wired and Financial Times.