Mikko Väänänen

Developing Kenno, a modern property management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, tailored for rental housing companies and property managers in Finland.

My role is to design and develop key modules of the system such as ledger, contracts management, invoicing, housing, and debt collection while developing both GraphQL and REST APIs to support seamless frontend and backend integration. I have also led the delivery of several large cross-module features, working closely with the development teams and business stakeholders from requirements to production.

Alongside product development, I built the first version of an AI-assisted development workflow based on Claude Code, on my own initiative, because I saw that our team could develop Kenno much faster. In the workflow, a team of specialised AI agents takes each task from clarified acceptance criteria through architecture planning and implementation to a strict code review and verification against the acceptance criteria. The developer stays in control of every business decision. The workflow is being adopted across the organisation to raise developer productivity and keep code quality consistent.

Developing and maintaining customer portal Aina for Elenia, the second largest distribution system operator in Finland, serving hundreds of thousands of customers. Aina is a platform for customers of Elenia to manage their electricity contracts and consumption.

My role was to design and develop new features such as a landing page with interactive widgets, combined graphs for consumption and production metering points, and energy price calculations. I also delivered new integrations for customer and metering data, expanding the platform’s data connectivity.

Redesigned a website for a client in healthcare, with all content served from a headless CMS.

Maintained and developed a web application for a client in public sector for food import/export certifications. The work involved serving a wide range of stakeholders including administrative staff, veterinarians, and import/export companies, each with distinct needs and workflows within the same system.

Development of productized industrial applications that are delivered with DNAe automation platform to various customer industries. Work focusing on User Interface applications.

Developed and maintained an award-winning (Best Mobile Service in Android One category at Slush, 2018) HSL mobile application and its backend services, used daily by hundreds of thousands of commuters. The HSL application integrated ticket purchasing and management, a journey planner, and personalized news into a beautiful app.

I focused especially on the ticket purchasing feature on the app and backend. I also took care of migrating from the old municipal regions to new ABCD zones in the HSL area in April 2019 on the HSL app and backend domain.

The work involved close collaboration with a broad set of stakeholders: HSL business representatives, the company responsible for payment processing, and the company responsible for ticket delivery, coordinating across organisational boundaries to keep a complex, interdependent system moving forward.

Following my time as an employee at eTasku, I was asked to continue developing the product as a consultant, a continuation built on the trust established during the employment period.

As sole developer, owned the full stack of Accountor Go, a financial web application and mobile app for SMBs, covering infrastructure, development, and customer and accountant support. This was a part-time role alongside another full-time project.

As sole developer, owned the full stack of Accountor Go, a financial web application and mobile app for SMBs, covering infrastructure, development, and customer and accountant support.

I participated actively in customer piloting, working closely with customers and accountants to understand their needs and ensure the product solved real problems. That direct feedback loop shaped priorities and kept development grounded in what actually mattered to the people using it daily.

Following the specialist role, I moved into a tech lead position within the Windows and Devices Group, leading a team responsible for asset delivery across the phones development pipeline.

The role was about keeping the delivery chain reliable under the pressures of a large-scale product organisation: CI, automated testing, system integration, and final release. I drove improvements across each of these stages, tightening delivery speed, reliability, and quality at a time when the organisation was navigating significant structural change.

I also worked closely and actively with software development teams to identify and remove blockers from their pipeline, acting as a bridge between delivery infrastructure and the teams depending on it.

When Nokia’s devices division became Microsoft Mobile in 2014, I transitioned into a specialist role focused on the build system for the Nokia X Software Platform — Nokia’s Android-based product line derived from AOSP.

The core challenge was flexibility at scale: the platform needed to support product variants for different markets and operators without manual overhead. I designed and implemented content image support on top of the AOSP build system, giving product programs and technical sales the ability to create market- and operator-specific variants efficiently, streamlining what had previously been a friction-heavy part of the release pipeline.

Fifteen years at Nokia, building and shipping mobile software for the Series 40 platform — code that ran on hundreds of millions of devices around the globe.

I joined in 1999 as a software developer specialising in the WAP stack, working on S40 at a time when mobile internet was just beginning to take shape. By 2002 I had moved onto a global integration team, coordinating contributions from multiple R&D sites worldwide, an early lesson in the complexity of large-scale distributed development.

Responsibility grew toward platform-level challenges in the years that followed. In 2007 I led critical integrations with third-party baseband software suppliers, working at the intersection of hardware and software where the cost of mistakes is high. In 2010 I led the integration with SmarterPhone, delivering a major overhaul of the S40 UI framework. In 2013 I led a team to replace the aging GNU Make-based build system with a Python-based WAF framework, delivering measurably better performance, maintainability, and reliability, and the kind of infrastructure improvement that quietly makes everything else run faster.

Throughout, I worked deep in the platform stack: debugging embedded systems with a Lauterbach JTAG debugger, writing simulation tools to reproduce problems that standard tooling couldn’t reach, and contributing to the CI infrastructure that kept platform releases on track.