Systems delivered for twenty-plus years, deep across four disciplines.
I design and build complete systems for some of the world's biggest brands, across product, tech, strategy, and design. The rare part is not the breadth. Plenty of people are broad. The rare part is the depth, held in many areas at the same time.
Henrik Hallengren · Barcelona Deep in four at once — and a straight answer to every doubt.
The front page states the doctrine: four disciplines that normally need four people, one head deep in each. A claim like that earns questions — these are the four I actually get, answered plainly. The rest of this page is the proof behind the answers.
And to be clear about one thing: solo is a choice, not a ceiling. I have led deliveries of twenty-five people across client and agency for the world’s biggest brands. I build alone now for the same reason a solid-state drive outlives a mechanical one — fewer moving parts, fewer places to fail.
"How do we trust you on UX?"
Because I am a designer at root, and I have designed many systems exactly that way.
"Can you really architect this?"
Architecture is product strategy, and I make that call because I own both sides of it.
"Do you understand the business?"
Real P&L, go-to-market, and pricing, behind global-brand accounts.
"And the visual craft?"
Visual work since the age of twelve, formally trained. Have a design language already? I follow it to the letter.
What is actually in the four.
A polymath is not a generalist who is vague about everything. It is depth in each discipline, with no translation loss between them.
Builder-first product leadership.
Across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C, from zero-to-one to scaling. Thirteen brands and eighty-plus products at Candy People; a multi-tenant platform for twenty thousand-plus users at Kverneriet. ZINQ to fifteen per cent market share in its first quarter. Roadmaps tied to outcomes, not output.
A hands-on architect, not an advisor with slides.
Multi-tenant SaaS, production AI, multi-agent orchestration, knowledge graphs, multi-provider LLM platforms, RAG, entity resolution: built and shipped, not theorised. Five hands-on AI systems, one in production on AWS. Architecture is product strategy, and I make that call because I own both.
Real P&L behind the strategy.
Go-to-market, pricing, stakeholder work in complex matrix organisations. Grew Google Sweden three hundred and fifty per cent at Dentsu, from four hundred thousand to one point eight million. Delivered platforms for Mondelēz and Panasonic, and ran a five hundred per cent digital pivot at Kverneriet.
Visual craft since the age of twelve.
Branding, UX, and packaging, formally trained at Grafiska Institutet. Few technologists can design; few designers can build production systems. I do both, and that is the rare pairing. Have a design language already? I follow it to the letter. Need more? I can build whole brands from scratch.
Outcomes, not output.
Early, and durable.
A first website and first code in 1996. A first commercial system shipped in 2002. A bespoke inline-editing CMS in 2004, when WordPress was still only for blogs. Machine-learning code in 2015. The throughline is the same throughout: build for differentiation, build it to last, and tend to be early. This is a thread pulled for decades, not a trend picked up late.
The eye and the engineering, together.
Studio photography in the family business as a kid, then a first website and first code. Both start here, at the same time.
Building for the web when most weren't.
Visual communication and web design at Christian 4:s Gymnasium. The craft and the code, side by side.
First commercial system shipped.
Built and delivered an e-commerce platform on OS Commerce. The first thing that shipped for real.
Founded my own studio, Strategic Design.
Branding, UX, packaging, and early system work. Clients including Vattenfall, Absolut, and Ubisoft.
WebXP my own CMS, years early.
A CMS for any kind of site, not just blogs, with groundbreaking inline editing: log in and edit directly on the live page, plus its own mail server. Years ahead of when WordPress became the standard around 2010.
Design, strategy, and the technical side, in parallel.
Grafiska Institutet for design craft and graphic production, IHR at Stockholm University for brand and business strategy, plus standalone innovation courses at KTH. Built formally, all at once.
Student of the Year.
Sweden's Media & Communications Student of the Year, awarded in Blå Hallen, the Nobel dinner venue. The case described ML-driven content personalisation roughly a decade before it became standard.
Built the strategic digital offering.
More than running global brand accounts (Google +350%, Mondelēz, P&G, Panasonic): I built the entire strategic digital offering. The business line that delivered websites, apps, and digital products didn't exist in the Nordics before me.
Thirteen brands, eighty-plus products.
Brand and product and packaging built end to end. Grew the portfolio from 169M to 451M SEK, +167%. ZINQ to fifteen per cent market share in its first quarter.
CTO, CIO, and CMO at once.
A multi-tenant operations platform, AI operational intelligence, and a +500% COVID pivot with zero layoffs. Reconciliation from days to forty-five minutes, a reduction of more than ninety-five per cent.
Started writing machine-learning code.
Trained the classic handwritten-digit models — a network taught on the standard dataset until it could read digits from my own photos — to genuinely understand the technology while autonomous driving was making it real. Not to ride a trend. AI is not new to me.
The first ML-shaped product.
Co-founder and CPO of a FinTech for buy-to-let landlords: a model trained on UK tax rules, making tax recommendations from each landlord’s actual situation — entered into a tech competition, five years before LLMs existed. The 2015 understanding, productised. The thread, not a pivot.
Started building with LLMs.
The natural next step on the same thread: from ML to language models to what comes after.
Full-time at the AI frontier.
Own production builds plus an enormous volume of testing, to establish real, hands-on knowledge of applied AI and AI-assisted system development. Five systems built, and counting.
Three worth naming.
I won more or less everything going as a student, and stopped chasing awards the moment I started working for real. Awards validate a student; once you are shipping, the work says what needs saying.
Student of the Year
Sweden's Media & Communications Student of the Year, awarded in Blå Hallen, the Nobel dinner venue. The case described ML-driven content personalisation roughly a decade before it became standard.
Merit Award
For a forward-looking digital e-commerce concept, not a print piece. Early to where the work was heading.
Integrator of the Year
Awarded as one of very few people working across all of the group's brands, brought in as a holistic digital strategist even on the biggest accounts. The clearest proof of the cross-vertical span.
Solo by default. Not alone when it counts.
The systems on this site are mine, built end to end by one person. The four disciplines cover almost everything a system needs in one head. When a problem sits clearly outside them, I don't fake it: I bring in a specialist I trust, for that edge. I'm the node, not a team I'm fronting. Each of these is a genuine top expert in their field, and they strengthen the work where it needs a different kind of depth.
Seven years in growth data science, most recently as product data scientist at Glovo. MSc from Barcelona School of Economics. A decade in China, fluent Mandarin. For deep data work and the China market.
LinkedIn ↗
Ran traffic acquisition at Klarna through its IPO, SEO and paid across twenty-plus markets. Twelve-plus years, IPO-scale growth.
LinkedIn ↗
Evaluates AI, health, and biomed innovations for the European Innovation Council; four hundred-plus technical due diligences. Twenty-plus years from King.com to mission-critical health systems.
LinkedIn ↗
Lead cybersecurity architect and former CIO who sees the problem from both the customer and the supplier side. When a system has to be hardened against real threats, this is the head I bring in.
LinkedIn ↗They strengthen the work. They do not replace the single point of accountability, and they are never the reason a system gets built. That is one person.
The calibre of room.
Worked with across roles and projects over the years, not a claim that I built their internal systems. The point is the calibre of room I've operated in.
The thread runs forward, too.
The same thread that started in 1996 is pointed at what comes next: a growing house of systems built to one doctrine, and the tools that make building them at this depth possible. If you want to see where the work is heading, that is the place to look.