Helping companies ship better digital products, faster.

What I walked into: A hugely successful global product – and a company that couldn't say who it was really for. Design and research existed, but weren't shaping decisions.

What changed

• Strategic research that reframed the business: our core customer isn't the sports fan, it's the bettor. Validated with one of the largest user studies in the industry (100k+ responses, global personas, a 20k-respondent Brazil market deep dive) – executed in-house by Daniel Nádvorník – and communicated until it changed how the whole company thought about the product.
• Built a global research capability from the ground up with the talented Carolina Rosa, with Kateřina Hanzalová running the ResearchOps side — so insight kept flowing long after the big study ended.
• Company-wide culture shift: suddenly everyone knew who we build for. Personas became a shared language across teams.
• Complete rebuild of the design team – hiring international talent, cost-effectively and only as needed.
• A tokenized multibrand design system able to cover any future product the company launches – built with Petra Javorková, a brilliant DesignOps lead without whom it wouldn't have happened.
• Relentless push on delivery speed: rapid design iterations, validation cycles measured in days, not months.
• Foundations of product growth (A/B testing, product communication), then handed over to Tomáš Voves to lead.

What it added up to: During my tenure, revenue grew double digits after years of stagnation. I won't claim that number as mine – many hands made it happen. But the mindset shift, the shared understanding of the customer, and the speed were the nudges I was there to deliver.

References: Tomáš Pondělík (CPO), Ondřej Machart (Head of Product)

What I walked into: A traditional retail bank finishing its very first mobile app – one of the last on the market – with no in-house design at all. I was hire number one.

What changed

• Within nine months, I earned the mandate to build and lead the bank's first in-house design & research team, in the middle of a McKinsey-led digital transformation.
• Together with Běla Beránková, who owned the research side, we grew it to a 30+ specialist team – including some of the best people on the Czech market – that became the design and research backbone for every product team in the bank. (We talked about this at WebExpo, MKB Fintechlab and more.)
• In about a year and a half, we turned the off-the-shelf app into the best banking app in the country.
• We built an in-house research center with a usability lab that is still in weekly use today. Users have never been closer to the bank.
• I led the unified onboarding initiative across channels and products, and pitched management the app concept the bank still runs on years later.
• When COVID hit, we designed and shipped a brand-new internet banking to production in nine months – unheard of in banking. Credit where it's due: Adéla Hádl (now UX lead at Make) and Tomáš Báňa (now design lead at Livesport) made it happen with me.
• We matured design systems as the tooling matured – continuous iteration, top DesignOps hires (Petr Moravec, Robert Poláček, Tomáš Kakáč), eventually a dedicated design-system product team.

What it added up to: Smart Banka became the most awarded banking app in the country: absolute winner of App of the Year 2017, four consecutive "Banking Innovator" titles (2018–2021), and #1 in Czechia in Deloitte's international Digital Banking Maturity benchmark (2018, 2020). I left in 2022 – and the app has won the Zlatá koruna public vote every single year since, still rated 4.8/5 by clients. The strongest result isn't the trophy shelf; it's that the whole thing kept winning after I left – now in the hands of Filip Benda, whom I found and grew as my successor.

References: Andrew Gerber (CPMO), Dalibor Šajar (Head of Digital Channels), Jakub Komenda (PO Banking & Experience)

What I walked into: Bindworks is the Czech eHealth challenger taking on entrenched hospital-software monopolies – last year's absolute App of the Year winner with IKEM Online. In September 2025, they brought me in to lead product on Orbiso, a platform for evidence-based digital health interventions. Design work on the authoring interface was already underway – but without solid grounding in what its authors actually need.

What's changing

• First move: an honest audit of what we actually knew. Verdict: not enough to justify what was being designed. So I stopped the authoring interface work – never a popular decision – and redirected the effort to the straightforward part: the user app, which went from zero to active development in two months. The time saved went to the people who matter: intervention teams, and academics from Masaryk University, in workshops distilling what makes a behavioral intervention succeed.
• Rebuilt the way of working around AI from day one. By Christmas it stabilized into a single monorepo where product, research, design and development live together – custom workflows connecting research, specs, vibecoding, task management and GitHub.
• Hired Adam Melničák, the perfect product/design/research specialist for the authoring side – together (and with FI MUNI) we turned the findings into a viable concept of AI-assisted intervention creation.
• Expanded the intervention portfolio for launch (NUDZ and others), and set up the research engine: a cost-saving collaboration with the KISK program and a large quantitative study of intervention acceptance across the Czech population.
• The app and backend were production-ready roughly six months after development started. Now we're building the authoring interface again – this time grounded in real authoring teams' needs, validated in a nine-session usability program.

Why this one matters: The entire product runs on a team you can count on one hand. Not a pilot, not a deck – a live product in production. It's also the working model I bring to every client.

Reference: Vít Svojše (Founder)