Interview with Leanlab Founder Ville Tiainen.

For this year’s STHLM Xperience Conference, we talked with Ville Tiainen, founder of Leanlab, about how emerging technologies are reshaping the way companies collaborate with their customers. Ville and his team help organizations like Nordea and Lindex build private customer labs that turn traditional user research into continuous, real time co-creation. 

In this interview, Ville shares how Leanlab blends AI-powered insights with human empathy, the importance of trust and transparency, and why the future of UX lies in designing with users not just for them.

1. Let’s start with your company—what do you do, and what’s your role there?

I'm Ville, founder of Leanlab. We help companies like Nordea and Lindex build private customer labs where they continuously collaborate with customers on product and service development. My focus is on showing businesses how to move beyond traditional surveys to genuine customer co-creation.

2. What made you want to partner with STHLM Xperience Conference this year?

Stockholm's design community gets it - experience isn't just about polished interfaces but about the human experiences that they create. This event brings together people who understand that the future of experience design is created in collaboration with users, not in isolation.

3. This year’s theme is "Emerging Technologies and Human Experience". What does that mean to you? How do you interpret this theme in the context of your work?

To me, it means using technology to amplify human voices, not replace them. AI and emerging tech should help us understand customers deeper and collaborate faster - turning faceless research into continuous conversation and making human interaction easier.

 4. How is your company working with emerging technologies like AI, AR, or immersive design? Any exciting projects or initiatives you’d like to share?

We're using AI to help teams analyse customer feedback faster. We also have some cool things cooking, and further on, we will, for example, introduce an AI assistant to help craft research faster. But the magic still happens when product teams can immediately test ideas within their customer labs - AI just enables faster human validation.

5. What role does human experience play in your approach to innovation? How do you balance cutting-edge tech with empathy and usability?

Every feature in Leanlab comes from watching how real teams struggle with customer insight. We don't just build what's technically possible - we build what helps a designer actually collaborate with their customers daily.

6. Trust and privacy are key concerns in today’s digital landscape. How do you address these in your work? What strategies or principles guide you?

Customer labs only work with radical transparency. We're GDPR-compliant by design, but more importantly, customers know exactly how their input helps shape products and services. Trust isn't just about data protection - it's about showing people their voice genuinely matters.

7. What are you most looking forward to at SXC 2025? Any talks, workshops, or moments you’re especially excited about?

The hallway conversations with Designers who are tired of survey theatre and labourious interviews. I want to meet teams ready to try continuous customer discovery - those moments when someone says 'wait, we could actually do this differently.

8. How do you see the future of UX evolving with these new technologies? What trends or challenges do you think designers and developers should prepare for?

UX will shift from designing for users to designing with them. The challenge isn't making better prototypes - it's creating infrastructure for continuous customer collaboration. Designers need to become facilitators who collaborate with their users, not just creators.

9. What impact do you hope this conference will have on the design and tech community? What do you want attendees to walk away with?

I hope people leave questioning whether their current 'voice of customer' programs actually give customers a voice. If even a few teams start building genuine customer collaboration into their process, we've moved the industry forward.

10. Finally, what does a meaningful digital experience look like to you—personally or professionally? Let’s end on a personal note: what makes an experience truly resonate?

Ιt's when a customer sees the impact of their feedback in the final implementation and thinks 'they actually listened.' That moment when someone realises they're not just consuming a product but shaping it. That's what we're building at Leanlab - making every customer feel like a co-creator.