Sharing my knowledge on stage is great. But what I enjoy even more is rolling up my sleeves and working closely with teams and organizations to help them build better products.
I bring more than 20 years of experience in UX design and product development – and ten years of building and enabling product organizations as co-founder of OTTO’s internal Discovery School. Since 2025, we’ve been bringing the Discovery School to other companies as well. What I teach isn’t the textbook version, but what actually works when the textbook meets a real organization.
Every organization is different, so we’ll start by talking about your teams and your challenges. And where they go beyond my own expertise, I team up with fellow trainers from Ally and my wider network – so you get the right people, not just me.
Alongside my role at OTTO, I take on a limited number of in-house trainings each year. Get in touch and let’s find out which topic and format fit you best.
🇬🇧🇩🇪 All trainings are available in German and English.
Training: Product Discovery & User-Centered Product Development
Modern product development demands more than just efficient delivery. It requires teams that understand their users, test assumptions early, and make smart decisions before writing a single line of code.
While most organizations excel at the delivery part of the cycle, they often struggle with discovery. I help your teams develop a clear, predictable, and user-centric approach to finding the right solution faster – reducing the risk of wasted investment and ensuring customer success.
This Training is designed for teams where:
- The path from problem to solution is unclear or inefficient.
- Opinions dominate decisions rather than insights, data, and user testing.
- New features and initiatives fail to “move the needle” despite successful delivery.
- Engineering-led roadmaps prioritize technical feasibility over actual user needs.
- Silos are creating friction: Business, Product, Design, and Engineering work against each other rather than as a unified force.
- Your product organization is growing, leading to scaling pains like inconsistent maturity levels across teams.
What your team(s) will learn:
- De-risk Digital Development: Identify and test the riskiest assumptions in days, not months.
- Cross-Functional Alignment: Get Product, Design, and Engineering on the same page, creating shared ownership of the “Why.”
- Proven Methods: Master actionable techniques including Auftragsklärung (Mission Alignment), Customer Journey Mapping, Design Studio, Low-Fidelity Prototyping, and Guerrilla Testing.
- AI-Enhanced Workflow: Learn how to leverage AI to support and accelerate discovery work.
- Balanced Product Development: Understand how to integrate discovery into your existing delivery rhythms without causing delays.
- Cultural Impact: Foster a “Discovery Mindset” that makes product development flexible, energizing and collaborative rather than exhausting and siloed.
This training is a high-energy mix of theory and practice. Teams work through a complete discovery cycle using a realistic use case. It’s based on 10 years of experience with the internal Discovery School of German e-commerce giant OTTO.
Interested?
Training: AI-Powered Product Discovery
Your teams know how to do product discovery. Now it’s time to do it smarter. AI tools are evolving fast – but most product teams are adopting them reactively, plugging them in where it’s convenient rather than where it creates real value. This training gives your teams a clear framework for integrating AI across every stage of the discovery cycle – from understanding through ideation and validation to delivery – while maintaining the human judgment that no model can replace.
This training is designed for teams where:
- AI tools are being used ad hoc, without a shared workflow or strategic intent.
- Teams are experimenting with AI but struggling to turn it into consistent, repeatable value.
- AI output is regularly dismissed or creates more work than it saves.
- Discovery still takes longer than it should, despite having the right methods in place.
- There’s uncertainty about where AI genuinely helps – and where it creates blind spots.
- Leaders want to future-proof their product org without losing depth and quality.
- A general product discovery process and core methods should already be in place. If your organization is still building that foundation, my training on Product Discovery & User-Centered Product Development (see above) or a combination of both trainings is the right starting point.
What your team(s) will learn:
- AI-Augmented Discovery Workflow: Build an end-to-end workflow that systematically integrates AI across the full discovery cycle – not just in isolated steps.
- Smarter Ideation & Concept Generation: How to use AI models and tools to rapidly explore solution spaces, stress-test ideas, and surface angles your team wouldn’t have considered alone.
- Prototype Anything, Fast: AI removes the bottleneck between idea and tangible artifact. Learn how to rapidly prototype not just screens, but dialogues, content, personas, interactive experiences, even marketing materials, and more – to make any concept testable within hours, not days.
- From Information Overload to Clear Decisions: How to make your organizational knowledge accessible and actionable – surfacing insights from research, staying on top of large volumes of findings, and grounding product decisions in evidence.
- The Critical View – Where AI Helps and Where It Doesn’t: Not every part of discovery benefits from AI. We take an honest look at where automation can mislead, where human empathy and judgment are irreplaceable, and how to protect the quality of your process.
This training is an engaging mix of theory, hands-on experiments and co-creation of practical solutions for your organization using up-to-date AI tools and practices. Teams work through a complete discovery cycle using a realistic use case. Accounts for all necessary AI tools and models are provided.
Interested?
Consulting: Design Systems
A design system is more than a component library. It’s a product in its own right – with its own users, stakeholders and roadmap. And like any product, it rarely succeeds or fails because of its components, but because of the system around it: ownership, governance, adoption and how design and engineering work together.
I was instrumental in establishing OTTO’s two major design systems. Along the way, I’ve seen what makes a design system thrive in a large product organization – and learned some lessons the hard way.
That’s why there’s no off-the-shelf training here. Every design system faces different challenges, so I offer the kind of support that fits yours:
- Kick-off talk – a keynote-style impulse to align your organization on why a design system matters and what it really takes.
- Review – an outside look at your current setup, from scope and structure to governance and adoption, with clear recommendations.
- Workshops – hands-on sessions with your team to tackle specific challenges.
- Ongoing guidance – a sparring partner for your design system team, over weeks or months.
Whether you’re just getting started or your design system has hit a wall: let’s talk about where you are and what would help you most.
Interested?