# Sami Surakka - Product Designer Portfolio

> Lead Product Designer at Cambri. I help companies turn design into business leverage. Focus: B2B, complex systems, and safety- or mission-critical product design. Red Dot Design Award–nominated work; craft and taste are the bar for what ships. Case studies span product design, UX design, design sprints, and design leadership across healthcare, infrastructure, maritime, emergency response, fintech, and market research. Much of my work is under client confidentiality; the portfolio shows what can be shared.

## Main Sections

- [Home](https://samisurakka.com/): Portfolio homepage with work overview and case study links
- [About](https://samisurakka.com/about): Background, approach, and experience
- [Contact](https://samisurakka.com/contact): Contact information and inquiry form

## Case Studies

- [Cambri Reporting](https://samisurakka.com/work/cambri-reporting): Leading product design at Cambri, an AI-powered market research platform. Designed a WYSIWYG reporting editor that pulls data across studies into one workflow, reducing report creation from days to hours. Responsibilities span product strategy, UX design, and UI development, including AI-assisted features that simplify reporting and insight discovery. Client feedback: "Sami has a great ability to turn complex ideas and constraints into clear, intuitive solutions. He challenges when needed, always keeps the user in focus, and is incredibly easy to collaborate with."
- [Tietoevry Patient Monitoring](https://samisurakka.com/work/tietoevry-patient-monitoring): Built a design system from scratch and designed 5+ new clinical workflows for a remote patient monitoring product family used across hospital districts in Finland. Started with a Figma and component library; a survey showed 69% of developers were already using it daily or weekly, which justified scaling to a full Storybook design system (implemented by the lead dev) adopted by 2 teams. The system covered foundations through templates with light and dark themes and remained in active use after departure. New workflows included patient group management with alarms, goal setting, PROMs/PREMs questionnaires, remote device configuration, and a complete daily dashboard redesign. Client feedback: "The development team greatly benefited from Sami in planning the implementation, and based on the teams' feedback, Sami iterated the designs as needed. Over the year, the appearance of the products evolved in a more professional direction, making them pleasant to use."
- [Groke Fleet](https://samisurakka.com/work/groke-fleet): Groke Fleet, a real-time fleet monitoring tool for maritime operators providing comprehensive oversight of vessels and voyage data. Designed the system's user experience and visual interface, focusing on surfacing the right information at the right time. The challenge was making complex spatial and sensor data readable and actionable from a distance over multiple vessels, resulting in a Red Dot Design Award nomination. Client feedback: "Before Sami joined, the design work was expensive and significantly slower. With Sami's help, Groke's design process became twice as fast and half as costly."
- [Groke Pro](https://samisurakka.com/work/groke-pro): Redesigned the interface for Groke Pro, a mission-critical maritime navigation system using AI-powered object detection and sensor fusion. Replaced an expensive 2–4 person agency setup with an embedded design process, making design twice as fast at half the cost. Established the design language for the full product family, implemented selected UI elements in Unity, and directly led to an invitation to work with Zeabuz on their autonomous navigation UI. Client feedback: "Before Sami joined, the design work was expensive and significantly slower. With Sami's help, Groke's design process became twice as fast and half as costly."
- [Insta: Emergency Response System](https://samisurakka.com/work/insta-emergency-response-system): UX lead for Insta Response, a product used in Finland's national emergency response system handling approximately 3 million calls per year. Joined as a trainee covering maternity leave and became the de facto UX lead, rebuilding UX from the ground up: established a research practice, created a living design library, designed operator workflows for risk analysis, caller guidance, and dispatch, and grew the UX team from 1 to 3. The percentage of calls answered within 30 seconds improved from 92–94% to 97–99%. End-user satisfaction has consistently rated above 4.3 out of 5.
- [RISE Concept](https://samisurakka.com/work/rise-concept): RISE is a crisis-management concept designed for humanitarian agencies and governments monitoring natural hazards using satellite data. The design won a competition against 226 entries from 32 designers. The concept focuses on surfacing situational awareness at a glance with progressive drill-down, built as a fully interactive coded prototype. The app has since launched at rise.wasdi.net, closely following the original concept in structure and interaction.
- [Infrastructure Project Management](https://samisurakka.com/work/infrastructure-project-management): Two-track engagement for a Finnish infrastructure startup: redesigned a technically demanding 3D error-tolerance workflow to reduce friction for expert users, and designed a new public-facing communication tool that pulls live data from the project database to keep the public informed about large infrastructure projects. The public communication tool is now in use across the Nordics and Baltics.
- [WeatherTech Demo](https://samisurakka.com/work/weathertech-demo): Led a small design team to create an end-to-end interactive demo for a Finnish weather technology company, tasked with turning a fragmented multi-service offering into a unified, compelling experience for internal stakeholders. Directed visual style and motion design, collaborated on UX copy, and delivered a clickable site that secured executive go-ahead for the initiative. The design language established in the demo was reused in later internal concept work.

## Additional Resources

- [Sitemap](https://samisurakka.com/sitemap.xml): Complete sitemap of all pages
- [Robots.txt](https://samisurakka.com/robots.txt): Crawler instructions

## Skills & Expertise

### Core Design Disciplines
- Product Design
- UX Design
- UI Design
- User Experience Research
- Design Strategy
- Design Sprints
- Design Leadership
- Design Systems

### Technical Expertise
- AI-powered interfaces and automation
- Data visualization and analytics dashboards
- Complex data-driven applications
- Enterprise software design
- Safety-critical interfaces
- Real-time monitoring systems
- Spatial data visualization

### Industry Experience
- Healthcare systems (patient monitoring, remote care)
- Maritime navigation and fleet management
- Emergency response systems
- Infrastructure project management
- Financial services (KYC, investment platforms)
- Market research and analytics platforms
- Crisis management tools

### Design Approach
- User-centered design methodology
- Craft and taste as the bar for what ships (Red Dot Design Award–nominated work)
- Pragmatic, context-aware solutions
- Cross-functional team collaboration
- Process modernization and optimization
- Design system establishment
- High-stakes, regulated environments

## About the Designer

Sami Surakka is a Lead Product Designer (currently @ Cambri) with a focus on turning design into business leverage. His work has been nominated for the Red Dot Design Award; he treats craft and taste as the bar for what ships, not just process. His approach is pragmatic rather than dogmatic: building understanding and delivering meaningful, working solutions across B2B, complex systems, and safety- or mission-critical domains—from emergency response and maritime navigation to healthcare, infrastructure, and fintech. Design is not just the process; it's the end result.