About Junaed Numan, Senior Product Designer in Finland

My Story

Where I come from, and where I'm headed

I started designing over a decade ago, working across agencies and product companies in Bangladesh before moving to Finland. The range, from ride-hailing and food delivery at Pathao, to intranet software at Happeo, to transfer pricing and tax compliance at Aibidia, taught me that good design is less about the domain and more about how precisely you understand the problem.

What I've found consistent across all of it: the harder the problem, the more important it is to slow down, structure the thinking, and separate real constraints from assumed ones. I'm not someone who jumps to screens quickly. I spend time understanding how the system works, who uses it, and what they're actually trying to accomplish, before I start designing anything.

Today I lead product design at Aibidia in Helsinki, building tools used by tax professionals at global companies. It's a space where finance, law, data, AI, and UX all overlap, and I find that genuinely interesting. Outside my main role, I mentor designers through ADPList and occasionally advise early-stage teams on design process and product thinking.

Career

2025 – Present

Aibidia Oy · Helsinki

Senior Product Designer

Leading end-to-end product design for TPDoc, Aibidia's transfer pricing documentation platform. Redesigning complex compliance workflows (functional analysis reports, Master File, entity management) for tax professionals at multinational organisations. Heavy stakeholder research, high ambiguity, high stakes.

2021 – 2024

Happeo Oy · Helsinki

Senior Product Designer

Led design across search (45s → 7s), analytics, people directory, and admin settings for Happeo's enterprise intranet. Owned full design cycles from discovery through to shipped product, including usability testing, success metric definition, and post-launch tracking. 46,000+ employees across client organisations.

2020 – 2022

Compuco

Digital Product Designer

Designed accessible digital products for charities including Disability Rights UK and World Heart Federation. Led design of a CRM platform and design system for non-profits, and a CiviCRM self-service portal that drove a 20% increase in member engagement.

2019 – 2020

Teamlance

UX/UI Designer

Designed and managed a comprehensive design system for Tixio's collaboration tool. Built component libraries, design tokens, and documentation that bridged design and engineering teams.

2018 – 2019

Pathao · Dhaka

Product Designer

Designed mobile experiences for Bangladesh's largest super-app, covering ride-hailing, food delivery, and the driver-side delivery app. Worked on products used by millions of users daily.

2014 – Present

Independent Consulting & Ventures · Bangladesh · India · EMEA

Consulting & Entrepreneurial Experience

Partnered with startups and organisations across SaaS, e-commerce, mobile, gaming, fintech, and digital products, contributing product design, UX strategy, branding, and delivery. That has included end-to-end design support for a fintech brand across brand system, product UI, and workshop facilitation, and designing and building the web application and brand system for Bangladesh's largest e-commerce platform, covering both the consumer storefront and the merchant-facing experience. Earlier in this period I worked in-house and with agencies, including Bashundhara Group Ltd (Dhaka, 2017 to 2018) and DeviserWeb (Sylhet, 2014 to 2017).

Since 2025 I have also co-founded and run a short-term rental business in Finland, managing guest experience, pricing, booking channels, cleaning operations, and workflow automation across multiple properties.

How I Work

Structured, not rigid

I start with understanding, not screens: research, stakeholder input, and problem framing before any design work begins. Getting the problem right matters more than moving fast, and most of the risk in complex products sits in the framing, not the pixels.

From there I explore quickly, using rapid prototypes and AI-assisted workflows to synthesise research, generate workflow and IA alternatives, and build front-end prototypes for interactions that are hard to communicate in static Figma. AI speeds up the exploration and helps me catch edge cases and error states early. It does not replace research, user validation, or product judgement, and I am deliberate about that line.

Then iteration and validation: decisions get tested, challenged, and refined with real users before they ship. I stay close through delivery, because a good design that ships badly does not count.

What I Bring

End-to-end on complex workflows

I take products from fuzzy brief to shipped feature. Discovery, information architecture, detailed design, testing, and iteration across workflows with multiple user types, high data complexity, and real regulatory stakes.

Design systems that hold up

Inconsistency in enterprise products erodes trust fast. I build component libraries and design tokens that hold up under real engineering constraints, not just in Figma. Reducing inconsistency is a measurable outcome, not a side effect.

Working at the edges

The best design decisions often happen between roles. I stay close to engineers, domain experts, and business stakeholders. Not to manage alignment, but because that's where the real constraints surface. That means staying in conversations longer, and being willing to reshape a design when the actual problem turns out to be different.

AI as a thinking tool

I use AI to synthesise research faster, explore workflow alternatives early, and build front-end prototypes for complex interactions. I'm careful about where it reduces user control or creates false confidence, especially in enterprise contexts where the stakes are real. Using it well and knowing when not to is part of the job.

Outside Work

When I'm not designing, I like to stay active. I play table tennis, cricket, and volleyball, anything that gets me moving and out of my head. I also spend a lot of time outdoors: hiking, exploring cities on foot, and looking for those quiet spots that don't show up in travel guides.

Living in Finland has changed how I travel. I've trekked through the Austrian Alps, stood at the Rhine Falls in Switzerland, hiked through snowy forests in Lapland, and wandered Hallstatt at golden hour. Moving slowly, without a fixed itinerary, is how I recharge and get perspective on things.

Travel & Outdoors