Selected work
Patrik Jensen · Director of UX & Research · Copenhagen, Denmark
Right now, I do that at group.one. In more than 15 years of product design and research, the last five have been about building and leading teams, including roles at Capture One and Airtame.
Selected work
Full case study
group.one's product teams used to decide on gut feel. I built the model that replaced it, scaled with AI instead of a bigger research team.
Read the case studyExperience
I design for startups and large companies alike: start simple, and add complexity only when it's truly needed. That same instinct shapes how I lead, blending human-centered design with team leadership and strategic thinking to build strong teams.
What you get from me is clarity: clear expectations, honest feedback, and real, consistent support for your growth. My style is practical and supportive, and I give people the trust and space they need to do their best, most confident work.
Research, rebuilt for AI organisations
Taking on UX and research meant building evidence into a shared foundation, one built for how we actually work: empowered teams, deciding fast, using AI as a first-class source rather than a survey tool.
The shift
From siloed research to a stream of customer evidence that helps product teams make better decisions.
The tools introduced along the way
Before any of this could work, the teams needed to agree on what counted as a hypothesis, a signal, and what "good" research looked like. That took a shared playbook, training, and a lot of repetition. It also meant redefining UX's role: less time on wireframes for handover, more time understanding problems and protecting quality across teams.
We introduced three new sources: AI-assisted interviews connected to important moments in the customer journey, an unusually rich stream of conversations between customers and AI products, and AI-assisted triage of support tickets, previously fragmented and only visible once escalated to second-line support. Combined with the usage data and research interviews we already had, the challenge changed from getting enough evidence to making sense of all of it.
The five sources every decision draws from: conversations, tickets, usage data and research, feeding one shared evidence base.
New sources
Follows both non-converting and successful journeys through open-ended interviews.
Surfaces what customers ask, expect, and struggle with, straight from AI conversations.
Reveals recurring friction and unmet needs straight from support.
Existing sources
Shows where behaviour changes or drops off inside the product.
Adds the depth and validation the other sources can't give alone.
Each team runs on its own trio, a Product Manager, a UX Designer and an Engineer, who own the decision together and use the evidence to turn signals into insights and decide what deserves attention. One example: the trio expected feedback on a new builder to focus on missing features. Instead, customers turned out to be positive about creating sites but frustrated, over domains and upgrades, which redirected where the trio focused its effort.
The trio owns every decision that comes out of it, UX and research sharpen the evidence going in, not who has the final say.
Raw input from interviews, AI conversations, support tickets, usage data and research.
What the signals mean for users or the business, once a pattern is clear.
A shared bet, framed by the trio together: doing X for Y will result in Z.
Impact weighed against effort, with the trio deciding what earns the team's attention.
Empowered teams own different parts of the same customer journey, and customers don't care how we're organised, an experience can't behave one way in one area and differently in another just because a different team owns it. The job is to get the right evidence to every team, so they can make the right call themselves.
The same structure and relationships every team relies on, no matter which one owns a given part of the experience.
One shared library of design pieces. Every team builds with the same blocks, so nothing looks different by accident.
The same standard applies to every product. Quality does not depend on which team built it.
Weekly critiques and Senior UX Designers collaborating closely within the same product space keep the standard honest.
The system keeps evolving as more teams put it to work: each cycle sharpens what counts as good evidence, and makes it faster for the next team to pick up than it was for the last. The next phase isn't about inventing new process, it's about perfecting and refining this way of working, agile and circular rather than waterfall and linear.
The proof
Some of this structure already existed. Gravity, our design system, is managed by our Design Ops. What I added was the research side: one shared quality bar, and clear words for what counts as a hypothesis, a signal, or an insight. This helps one team's decision make sense to the next.
Structure and processes alone are not enough. People need to trust them, not just follow them. We use weekly design critiques across teams, regular one-to-ones, and coaching for teams and trios. Together, these support the new way of working and build trust in product decisions.
In any organisation, one person approving every decision becomes a bottleneck, work slows down, and the team cannot grow. So I built a system that gives teams the empowerment to decide well on their own. My job is protecting that system and our quality standard, not being the judge of taste who approves every choice.
One trio expected feedback on a new builder to be about missing features. Instead, customers were positive about creating sites but frustrated with domains and upgrades, and that evidence changed their priorities, not just someone's opinion. This is what now decides where teams focus, not the loudest voice in the room.
Giving teams freedom without support does not work: without a shared standard to check against, small differences turn into real inconsistencies. We created the environment where Senior UX Designers collaborating closely within the same product space could flourish, and that is what keeps evidence the default across our product teams, not the exception.
Director of UX & Research
group.one helps small businesses succeed online, website building, email, hosting and control panels. I lead our UX and research team across that whole product portfolio, spanning both visual and conversational UX.
group.one helps small businesses succeed online through website building, email, hosting and control panels, including our Aida AI Website Builder.
I report to our SVP of Design, sit in the DSP's leadership team with our SVP of Engineering and VP of Product, and lead UX for every product in the organization.
We use AI to move faster and answer questions with more confidence than we could before, without losing the insights to that new or unproven work requires.
My job is making sure our product teams decide from real customer evidence instead of opinion, and that quality stays consistently high across everything we ship.
In our last employee survey, my team rated my feedback and leadership above the company average, by 18% and 20% respectively.
I keep headcount lean by design and reinvest what we save into training, stretch projects and internal promotions, growing capability, not just size.
Shipped under my leadership
We moved our website builder from a typical drag-and-drop editor to a fully AI-supported experience, where customers describe what they want and Aida builds it. That meant rediscovering almost every convention and inventing a whole new way to interact with the software for our users.
The scale of this project meant decisions couldn't all run through me, so I had my three senior designers lead the day-to-day calls, with the rest of the team supporting them, trusting their seniority to get it right without detailed oversight.
64%
showed strong satisfaction with Aida's speed and output quality
Even if you charged five times the initial price of Aida, I would still use it because I find it such a valuable tool.
User, Open feedback interview
Product Design Lead (Manager)
Capture One builds professional photo editing software used by photographers worldwide. I led our Copenhagen design team through a shift from rigid release cycles to a faster, more collaborative way of working.
From 2022 to 2023, I managed a four-person design team in Copenhagen, and partnered closely with Athens's own team and mentored their researcher.
I built clear, documented career paths for the team, which raised motivation, supported promotion conversations, and made people happier in their roles.
Capture One used to ship four big releases a year, in a process inspired by SAFe. I drove the shift toward shipping features as soon as they were ready.
I moved the team toward hypothesis-driven work: every team wrote a hypothesis of what we wanted to achieve, with designers facilitating higher-impact decisions.
These changes raised our employee engagement scores (eNPS) and strengthened the design culture, with user research part of the roadmap from the start.
Built under my leadership
I built a three-level career ladder for the design team, Associate Product Designer, Product Designer and Senior Product Designer, each with clear scope, accountabilities and skill expectations, so progression was a documented path rather than a manager's judgment call.
Alongside it, I introduced a 12-skill personal assessment covering delivery skills like visual design, interaction design and user testing, and discovery skills like user research, analytics and business understanding, scored 1 to 5 to guide growth conversations, not to chase a perfect score.
Patrik helps a lot in this area, and I'm really happy with the talks and progress we make regarding my career advancement.
Very satisfied with the first conversations with Patrik about personal development etc.
I felt listened to when voicing my opinion regarding salary adjustments. And my questions about it was answered honestly. I appreciate that.
Lead Product Designer (Manager)
Airtame builds wireless screen-sharing and hybrid meeting hardware. I grew our design and research team and helped launch Airtame Rooms, replacing the broken tablets in meeting rooms with one-click hybrid meetings.
From 2019 to 2022, I worked at Airtame, joining as Senior Product Designer and later becoming Lead Product Designer, reporting to our VP of Product.
When I joined, our design team was just me and one midlevel designer, coming out of a turbulent startup period. I grew it to four: myself as lead, two senior designers, and one midlevel.
I worked closely with our director of engineering, our director of hardware, and on several occasions our CPO.
Together, we launched Airtame Rooms, our first new product pillar: one-click hybrid meetings that replaced the broken tablets in meeting rooms.
This was also my first time working closely with hardware designers, connecting their work with the daily experience of our users. A new and challenging field, but a rewarding one.
I initiated Airtame's first internal design system, which one of my designers brought to life, making our product teams more consistent and faster.
Shipped end to end
I led the research and design for Airtame Rooms from the first customer visit to launch. We visited more than 20 organizations, from small teams and co-working spaces to enterprises like Danske Bank and Neiman Marcus, mapping every step of a meeting: booking the room, joining the call, sharing a screen, and everything that goes wrong along the way.
That research shaped what we built, and just as much what we chose not to: not a room booking system, not another laptop app. Airtame Rooms became one solution that runs the call and connects the room's camera, mic and speakers, working across Zoom, Teams and Meet.
Airtame Hub itself and the whole approach is just amazing. The approach that the meeting processing is running on Airtame Hub and my computer is just a link to the meeting is great!
Toms Cirvelis, VP of Products at Catchbox
2022
Airtame Rooms launched, starting with Microsoft Teams support before adding Zoom that same year
