Digital and Data Strategy Boutique

Sami is a humanist who founded his first professional online media service 25 years ago and has experience in data and AI, visionary leadership, and media. He has held positions as CDO and CTO at various companies, including the Finnish Broadcasting Company and KSF Media, where he implemented radical transformation programs in product development and leadership. He is also a Lisp coder and writes Clojure code daily. He is currently active in 8-bit-sheep, a consultancy that helps companies with digital transformation and putting data and AI into practice.

Jaakko is a full-stack developer who enjoys making the world a better place by creating the tools that enable people to level up their lives. This has included web analytics tools for journalists, visually stunning news websites for young adults and a news mobile application where you can converse and vote for things that matter. Jaakko goes nuts over test automation, code coverage, code linting, code reviews, continuous integration, infrastructure as code and other ways to build high performance quality apps that are easy to maintain and develop further.

Jaakko built his first commercial website in the age of 15, since then he has been on a ride that took him to master HTML, CSS, SQL, JavaScript, PHP and more. He got into the world of web analytics, social media, search engine optimization and marketing while working for NetBooster in Helsinki and Paris. At Yle Jaakko developed tools and products ranging from inhouse analytics to mobile apps used by hundreds of thousands of customers. In the past 4 years Jaakko has mostly been using JavaScript, Node.js React, React Native, AWS, Docker, Terraform, Redis and PostgreSQL.

Simo Ahava is a recognized expert on customizing web analytics and tag management solutions to improve the entire “life cycle” of data collection, processing, and reporting. His main areas of expertise lie with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, and Google has appointed him as a Google Developer Expert in these fields. He is especially interested in communication structures within organizations, as he firmly believes that communication breakdowns are the underlying cause to practically all data-related problems.

Simo is particularly invested in demystifying analytics development work, and his main focus is on increasing awareness, skills, and critical thinking around data and development.

Simo is also co-founder of Simmer, an online learning platform for technical marketers.

Among other things, Simo writes a popular blog on all things Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager development at www.simoahava.com. An experienced speaker and prolific blogger, Simo can be seen and heard in conferences, product forums, support communities, and developer meet-ups alike.

Taneli is a seasoned analytics expert and a former professional poker player. He has experience in doing analytics in a wide range within digital marketing & sales as well as product analytics. He's especially enthusiastic about full-funnel marketing measurement - covering the dots between the marketing channels, website and the CRM, and all the tools involved. The skills for this he has gained from having the experience from both digital marketing agency side as well as CRM and marketing automation consultancy side.

Having started his analytics career with web analytics implementations, Taneli has gradually expanded his skillset into data visualization and BI tools, data integrations and cloud computing, and data modeling and warehousing. He has the ability to go deep into technical challenges without getting lost in the details.

Taneli writes an analytics blog at tanelytics.com focusing on technical analytics solutions and is an active contributor to the digital analytics open source community.

Erik is an observant analyst and business developer who's passionate about user experience, usability and details that add value to the customer. He gets motivated by intellectual challenges, has strong hands-on attitude and makes things happen. Erik is also an eager advocate of a data-driven experimental culture and one of his mottos is “stop guessing, let's test it and see what the data suggests” (with statistical power of >= 0.80 and p-value < 0.05, naturally).

Erik has founded the Analyst magazine (Analyytikko), Finland's first expert magazine in the field of Data Science, Analytics and Machine Learning, where he also serves as Editor in Chief.

Erik built his first website in 1996 (at the age of 13) and has +20 years of experience in Web Development (PHP, JS, SQL, Linux systems), +15 years in Business and Process Development, +15 years in Analytics, Statistics, Data Science, AI/ML and +10 years in Technical SEO. Erik has background of nearly 15 years at Elisa (the largest telecommunications, ICT and online service company in Finland), where he worked in several roles during the years, including Customer Service and Process Development and Leading Web Analyst roles (B2C, B2B). Before joining 8-bit-sheep, Erik worked as a Leading Analyst, AI/ML Lead / Data & AI Architect and Data Protection Officer at Generaxion, one of the leading digital marketing specialist companies in Northern Europe.

Hanne is an experienced leader in the digital service space with background as a startup founder and working with some of the largest brands in Finland through consultancies such as Avaus and Siili. Currently she works as the COO at Avanto Ventures which works as a bridge between classic brands and the startup space.

Piëtke is the celebrated and prize-winning designer and ideas developer as well as a partner at the agency Kuudes in Helsinki. She is also the creative behind the 8-bit-sheep identity.