Practice building, Leadership, Research-driven strategy

Building the first UX practice at Pantel

The Situation I walked into

• There was no UX practice at Pantel before me — I was the first hire. That meant no user research, no analytics, no product manager, and no business or marketing function to pull target-user or market data from.

• Investors were closely involved in design decisions, and the company needed to move fast, not spend months in discovery.

So the job wasn't just "design the app." It was: figure out what UX even means for this company, earn the trust to act on it, and build something that outlasts me being the only person doing it.

What I did

Setting up the practice, not just the screens

Before touching a single flow, I sat down with the CTO and CEO to explain what UX design actually is, what they could expect from me, and what I needed from them in return. I decided early that I wasn't going to stay a team of one — more services were clearly coming, so I made the case for a UX team and built one after the first design cycle, stepping into the lead role for it.

With no product manager and no formal research budget, I worked guerrilla-style: documenting everything, setting my own timelines, and — since investors were hands-on — leaning on data and user research to justify design decisions rather than asking for trust on faith.

The design work happened in two phases

• Phase 1 — Fix what's obviously broken. A first audit showed most of the app's problems were basic usability and IA issues, not things that needed deep research to diagnose (settings, profile, call history, account security). I ran card sorting to reorganize the settings IA, benchmarked against WhatsApp, Telegram, and regional competitors, then moved through wireframes and prototypes to get fixes into the pipeline fast.

• Phase 2 — Understand who's actually using this and why. Once the obvious issues were cleared, I ran a proper research round: a survey (260 respondents out of ~2,000 active users) and 12 phone interviews, built into personas, an empathy map, and journey maps.

The research surfaced something bigger than any single screen fix:

• Users found the app genuinely hard to learn,

• A lot of adoption was driven by short-lived contests, raffles, and prizes rather than the app's actual capabilities,

• Weak network effects (few friends already on the platform) meant people had little reason to stay.

That reframed the whole product conversation — the answer wasn't more features, it was repositioning Pantel as a clear "super-app" with cleanly separated services, rebuilding the home page as a proper service hub, and designing onboarding that actually explained what Pantel was for.

What came out of it

• Pantel's first UX function and practice — built from nothing into a team, in six months

• A shift in product strategy, backed by evidence, from "keep adding services" to "fix and reposition what exists" — with investor buy-in

• A research-backed unbundling of messenger, social, and map services, including a redesigned home page and onboarding flow

I relocated to Finland before the new versions fully shipped, so I don't have final KPI numbers to point to here — this is a case study in setting direction and building a practice from scratch, not in closing the loop on results.

Looking back

This role taught me that in an early-stage company, the hardest UX problem usually isn't the interface — it's building the case, the process, and the trust for change to happen at all. If I were doing it again, I'd push for lightweight analytics much earlier; a lot of the first months went into research that basic tooling would have shortened considerably.