Building Humblebee

When I joined Humblebee, the company needed a change.

A few of us knew each other from working in the industry. We decided to take over the company and see whether we could build its next version together.

The timing mattered.

Design was starting to take a different position inside large organisations. UX was growing quickly, service design was becoming more established and businesses were beginning to understand that digital experience could affect much more than a website.

We saw an opportunity for Humblebee there.

The idea was to build a studio around design and digital services, with enough technical capability to take ideas beyond workshops and presentations. That decision shaped most of the next decade of my working life.

You quickly stop having one job

I came into Humblebee as a designer, but owning and building a studio changes the job quickly.

There are clients to win and clients to keep. You need good people, and those people need reasons to stay. Projects must be staffed properly. The company needs a point of view. Someone has to think about what you sell, how you talk about it and where the business should go next.

Then Monday morning arrives and a project needs help.

So you help.

I worked on company strategy, recruitment, marketing and some of our largest client relationships. I stayed close to the design work and helped build new offers. At times I was in client meetings, reviewing a product or helping a team through a difficult decision. At other times the question was who we needed to hire six months from now.

That is probably the clearest description I can give of running a studio. You use everything you have learned, then keep learning the things you did not expect to need.

Agency leadership sits between the quality of the work, the health of the business and the people doing it. Those responsibilities cannot be separated neatly. A strong project that exhausts the team is not a strong project. A commercially successful relationship that produces work nobody believes in will not hold for long.

Clients rarely need another pair of hands. They need people willing to think with them, take ownership and offer a clear recommendation when the answer is uncertain.

Finding our place

We spent a lot of time working out what Humblebee should be good at.

Over the years, the studio developed around strategy, design and technology. That breadth grew from the problems clients brought to us rather than from a desire to offer everything.

A service design problem can become an organisational problem very quickly. A new product idea raises questions about technology. A customer journey exposes something weak in the business model. A prototype that works creates the next question: how do we actually build this?

We wanted to stay with the problem long enough to answer those questions.

That meant building a mixed studio. Designers sat next to developers. Service designers worked with business strategists. Architects joined conversations early enough to influence the idea rather than receiving a finished specification.

This became an important part of how I thought about Humblebee.

The studio itself was part of the product.

Its structure shaped what we could notice, which questions we could ask and how far we could carry an idea. Culture was not something separate from delivery. It was visible in every handover, critique, client conversation and decision about what not to build.

Some projects changed us too

Over time, we were trusted with larger and more complicated assignments. Those projects changed Humblebee as much as we helped change the work around us.

With Volvo Cars, we helped establish the Volvo Cars Labs initiative. The work involved shaping ways of working, organising experiments and building the team around the lab. It began inside Humblebee’s Gothenburg office and grew from there.

With Polestar, the studio became involved while the company was preparing its digital ecosystem for launch. The work expanded across digital architecture, products, services and ways of working. What started close to individual experiences became a larger question of how an emerging automotive brand should build and own its digital capability.

There were very different projects too. We worked with Mölnlycke on healthcare services, with startups on early product ideas and with teams in Shanghai on design sprints and new ways of working. Some assignments lasted weeks. Others became relationships that continued for years.

Those projects taught me the difference between consulting and partnership. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do for a client is challenge what they originally asked you to do.

That idea eventually became part of Humblebee’s own language: Build What’s Needed. Find what the situation actually requires instead of automatically producing what was requested.

I recognise a lot of myself in that.

Building people became part of building the company

Recruitment took more of my time as Humblebee grew.

Hiring a designer for a studio is difficult because a portfolio only tells part of the story. Craft matters, of course. I also cared about curiosity. Could this person sit with a developer and work through a problem? Could they speak with a senior client? Would they challenge another designer without turning the conversation into a competition?

Every person changes the studio a little.

That is both the opportunity and the responsibility. You are not filling a fixed box in an organisation chart. You are deciding which perspectives, behaviours and ambitions will become part of how the company thinks.

The same belief led to HIVE, Humblebee’s student lab. Multidisciplinary groups of international students joined the studio to spend several months researching, prototyping and developing a real digital product. They worked alongside the regular teams with experienced people acting as mentors.

I liked the programme because it made learning visible. Students learned from people who had worked in the industry for years. Experienced people had to explain why they worked the way they did. Sometimes the students asked the question that made us reconsider a habit we had stopped noticing.

A studio should create room for that kind of exchange. Otherwise experience can slowly harden into routine.

The company has to keep changing

One thing I learned over nearly a decade is that you never finish building a studio.

The market moves. Design changes. Technology changes. Clients build larger internal design teams. New capabilities alter what a small external studio can contribute. AI arrived and changed the conversation again.

Humblebee moved with that. The work expanded from service and product design into business strategy, organisational design, software development, data and AI. The AI Thinking framework grew from our need for a practical way to move organisations from an AI opportunity to a working service.

That evolution required us to question our own company repeatedly. What are clients struggling with now? Which skills should we have inside the studio? Where are we genuinely useful? What should we stop doing?

When you run your own company, those questions never remain safely inside a strategy deck. Eventually they become a recruitment decision, an investment, a new offer or a conversation where you decide to walk away from something.

There were good years and difficult ones. People joined, grew and moved on. Projects we expected to be small became important parts of the company. Other ideas disappeared quickly.

Through all of it, my role moved between designer, owner and someone trying to help a group of talented people do good work together.

Still in the work

Building Humblebee changed how I think about design. The quality of an idea matters, but so do the conditions around it: the team, the trust, the commercial reality and the organisation’s ability to keep going after the presentation ends.

A studio is built through those conditions every day. It appears in who you hire, which work you pursue, how you respond when a project becomes difficult and whether the people around you can do better work together than they could alone.

After all the strategy, leadership and change, I still get involved in the work.

That part never really went away.