Product Explorer
Strategic product design
Connecting long-term company goals with deep user needs — and designing products that replace uncertainty with confidence.
I’m Max Jóhann, a Product Explorer — Senior Product Designer & Strategist who works with complex products where the hard part isn’t designing the interface, but figuring out what the product should actually do.
#1 Bilnex
Bilnex is a next-generation invoicing platform helping entrepreneurs and businesses across the Baltics — without the compliance headaches or clunky software that usually comes with it.
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I led Bilnex from zero to a live product — from the first sketch and customer conversations to the first invoice sent and a platform now used by 2,000+ companies across the Baltics.
My role went beyond product design. I worked across product strategy, discovery, UX, business logic, technical decisions, prioritization, delivery, and QA — turning an ambitious idea into something a small team could actually build and ship.
In practice, that meant I wasn’t there simply to design the product. I was there to help figure out what the product should be — and then make sure we actually built it.
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Team
A lean core team of 2–3 developers, with support from marketing and commercial teams.
Scope
Building a new FinTech platform from zero — combining AI/OCR digitization, PDF and e-invoicing, national and Peppol infrastructure, ERP integrations, and cross-border onboarding across multiple European markets.
The goal isn't fewer clicks. It's fewer doubts.
#2 Bürokratt
Bürokratt is Estonia's national AI initiative — a government-wide virtual assistant platform that helps public institutions handle citizen requests, automate repetitive queries, and deliver more human, accessible public service.
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I joined Bürokratt as a product and UX design partner, working part-time with the team on the back-office behind Estonia’s national AI assistant network.
My focus is the system behind the conversation: the tools case workers and administrators use to configure, monitor, and improve how AI assistants respond to citizens.
I entered a product that had evolved without dedicated design involvement — complex workflows, fragmented design files, and very different institutional needs. My job was to understand the system, give it structure, and translate that complexity into Vera, Estonia’s shared design language for public services.
One of the core challenges is scale. The same product needs to work for institutions managing just a few domains and for those managing close to a hundred.
The work is ongoing: simplifying that complexity into a back-office that remains understandable at both ends of the spectrum.
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Team
Product development is coordinated by the Estonian Information System Authority (RIA / NCSC-EE), working with multiple external development partners — typically small, 3–5 person engineering teams.Scope
Back-office tools used across Estonian state institutions to configure and manage AI assistants, case handling, and the workflows behind citizen-facing services — designed within Estonia’s shared Vera design system.
#3 Finbite
Finbite's platform had grown over 15 years into a patchwork, serving some of the largest organizations in the Baltic region — government institutions, telecoms, and banks.
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I led the Finbite redesign end-to-end — from understanding complex legacy workflows and rethinking the product experience to interaction design and a new design system.
The goal wasn’t simply to modernize how Finbite looked, but to make a mature, complex product clearer, more consistent, and significantly easier to use across devices.
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Team
Finbite’s internal engineering team + an external development partner.
Scope
Rethinking a complex, 15-year-old enterprise invoicing platform while preserving the critical workflows its customers depended on — from businesses to government institutions, telecoms, and banks.
Design principle
Good design doesn't create quality.
It reveals it.
HOW I THINK
I’m a Product Explorer — a Senior Product Designer & Strategist working at the intersection of long-term company goals and deep user needs.
I like problems before they become briefs.
The interesting part is figuring out what’s actually going on: asking questions, challenging assumptions, mapping the complexity, and finding the decisions that matter most.
I work across strategy, product, and design — from early direction to the details people eventually touch. I like moving between the big picture and the interface, and staying close enough to delivery to see whether the thinking survives contact with reality.
EVERY PRODUCT DECISION COSTS TIME AND REVENUE.
Get in touch
If your product decisions need to be right, not just fast.
We should talk.
