I am Esko Lehtme – design executive and coach

Design leadership and impact

My approach comes down to one shift I’ve made in every role: moving design from a delivery function to a strategic one. That meant restructuring how UX fits into product development, embedding generative research before anyone asks for it, and building the measurement practices that let design speak in business terms. The goal is not a better design process – it is an organization that makes better decisions because it understands its customers.

At SEB, this produced concrete results: a restructured UX team with specialized career paths, measurably improved design maturity across the product organization, optimized workflows that moved UX earlier in the product cycle, and service design training that moved customer understanding from a UX responsibility to a shared organizational practice.

Earlier, at CGI, it meant introducing structured UX design practice to Estonian government services for the first time – across institutions including Maksuamet, Häirekeskus, RIA, and SMIT, delivering measurable improvements in task completion speed, completion rates, and satisfaction scores for citizen-facing digital services. At Häirekeskus, dispatch form completion speed is measured in seconds. Through observations and interviews with dispatchers, we improved it significantly. The design has been updated many times since. The underlying design principles we defined have not. I know this work has saved lives.

Coaching and mentorship

I work with professionals at turning points. My coaching practice started with design people and has grown through referrals into something broader. Offering private thinking space for people to process through their internal conflicts, lost confidence, a career path that feels too narrow for who they have become. It is a deep introspection, and people surprise themselves in many ways during these conversations.

Speaking

I speak on customer-centric design – from organizational leadership to applied design methods in everyday business development. For business leaders and educators, the focus is on how customer-centric thinking becomes a competitive advantage – not a design department concern. Past events include Baltic e-Commerce forum, Refresh Conference, Tallinna Ettevõtluspäev, and Impact Day.

Career

My background covers front-end development, advertising and publicity, cognitive psychology from Tallinn University (2006), and an MBA from Estonian Business School (2024).

SEB (2017–present)

• As the Product Owner of UX – the design executive role at SEB – I own the end‑to‑end digital customer experience – vision, strategy, design standards, and consistency – across all customer‑facing digital channels. To achieve this, I govern the digital experience and align UX strategy with business objectives across the organization.
• As the Head of UX, I restructured the team around specialized roles and moved UX into product planning – before features were scoped, not after.
• As a UX Designer, I introduced the first structured user research practice at SEB, shifting the team from assumption-based to evidence-based design decisions.

Previous experience

• As a UX designer at CGI (2011–2017), I established the UX approach from visual design to comprehensive strategy, building and leading a team of four designers. My customers were corporations and state institutions in Estonia and Finland. ¹

For a full career history, view my LinkedIn profile. For what I am working on right now, see /now.