Ilkka Särkiö

In practice, I think and work a lot like a product manager, with transformation as the overarching product I deliver together with my colleagues and clients.

It means not getting stuck in models, methods, tools or practices. Any successful transformation relies on clear focus and alignment on what is the value we create, for whom and why.

Besides working on the big picture and high-level strategies, I don’t hesitate diving into the nitty gritty. Frameworks, templates and approaches only work if they are applied situationally and taking the nuances of each situation into account. That is where I thrive.

While my background is technical — mathematics, machine learning, systems analysis — I’ve actually spent the majority of my career working with business: as a consultant, as a SaaS founder, as a product manager with business responsibility. I look at things first through a business lens before thinking about technology or solutions.

It’s a triple shake. In January, I was amazed by the leaps AI-assisted software development took and developed internal tooling for project management even though I am not a software engineer, and it worked. A few weeks later I understood my approach with strict rules and checks was outdated and that Claude is the new “Excel” of the working life and ditched all the past work of AI-coded tooling. Finally, I understood that we may not even need or want to use a rigid ERP-style system as the foundation, and that solution is in fully AI-native, “company brain” thinking not founded on a stack of functional 3rd party SaaS tools.