About us

Our story and our mission.

Who we are?

Paula Ylisassi

Paula is a change maker and an entrepreneur with an MBA degree, certified board member and certified product owner. Paula has over 20 years of versatile experience in digital business and leadership from different industries in big corporations as well as in start-ups in Finland and abroad. Paula has for instance built international business and brand from virtual assets over a decade before the metaverse, as well as been responsible of Finland’s biggest online bank’s market launch. Energy, inspirational authenticity, holistic business thinking and courage to challenge the status quo are Paula’s superpowers.

Jenni Saarenpää

Jenni is a change maker and a serial entrepreneur with a Master of Science degree in Information Processing Science as well as a Bachelor degree in Visual Communication. Jenni has over 18 years of experience creating strategies, innovating business models, processes and services as well as leading customer experience. Her professional career has consisted on discovering new business opportunities as well as innovating ecosystems both in start-ups as well as with big international corporations. Jenni’s superpowers are creative problem solving, systems thinking and an ability to change from helicopter view to details as well as challenging the status quo.

Change Makers’ Society was born from our own pains as leaders and experts. As change makers, we have experienced the challenges both inside companies and from the outside as consultants. Again and again we bumped into thinking and actions that hinders companies, businesses and people to grow and be creative. We found some common nominators across different industries and company sizes:

  1. Old fashioned leadership that is focused too much on promoting personal interest instead of enabling others’ success 

  2. Siloed goal setting and strategy, inside-out operational setup

  3. Lack of innovation culture and digital age business

As eternal optimists and change makers we believe that these fundamental problems can be flipped into opportunities by changing indiviuduals’ thinking and behavior. However acknowledging the fact that the ones who would need these trainings most, are usually the ones who are not actively looking for opportunities to change.

There are change makers like us in startups as well as in established organizations, actively driving change in various roles. Often it is very hard, and there’s not much support around or available. We believe in these change makers and think that it is exactly these people who are key in impacting those companies and leaders who need change most. So we provide change makers with training, tools and support to make this change happen.

Our story

What others are saying?

  • "Paula led a half day workshop for Siili Solutions Finance BU, in which we deep dived into the current situation of the financial industry, future trends and the industry's top companies globally. This resulted in a really rewarding discussion, from which we got good practical tips for daily activities and for creating a longer term strategy. We got a much-needed external perspective on what we do and the profiling of our work in the financial and insurance sector."

    Markku Savusalo, Director Services Business Unit, Siili Solutions Oyj

  • “I had the honor of having Jenni on my team as a lead-designer for many years. She demonstrated her skills as an all-round designer, doing everything from UI design to facilitating and sparring business strategies, as well as leading other designers. Jenni helped us across the organization to see the importance of customer focus and sparred the management team to take customer focus from words to action. Jenni’s true passion is design thinking and customer focus, combined with an interest in the secrets of the business thinking. She is ready to question existing models and customs and to present a vision for the future as well as solutions for continuous improvement. Jenni also digs out and analyzes the available information and supports her decision always on data. Jenni has a constant hunger for learning new things and developing herself. At the same time, she helps her colleagues see things in new ways and from different perspectives. I really enjoyed working with Jenni and hopefully our roads will meet again in the future.”

    Arto Turunen, Director, SME Retail Banking at OP FInancial Group

  • "Paula has brought a genuinely new perspective to our work and business. She has the ability, with insightful questions, to let people think and decide for themselves what they could do or try. In my opinion, this is coaching at its best. Paula is very well on the map all the time, so to speak. The experience is very positive from my side. As a star rating, full five *****."

    Joni Ranta-Eskola, CEO, Rajobit Oy

  • “Jenni is both a skillful full-stack designer and a business strategist and she can easily navigate between a helicopter view on the business and the details of a user interface. Her appetite for learning is endless. Her skill of creating and visualizing frameworks to explain complex environments facilitates learning and creating together especially when participants come from different backgrounds. She is also fun to work with!”

    Pia Hannukainen, Head of Design at OP Financial Group

  • "Paula has the capability to challenge the status quo and related familiar operating styles in a constructive way, which helps the company to grow and develop. If your company needs a new direction, a strategy update, an innovative approach, an organizational change, or support in modern marketing and sales strategies or tactics, I sincerely recommend contacting her and discussing possible cooperation opportunities."

    Teemu Puumalainen, Investment Director, Nordic Option Oy

  • “We worked closely for two years at OP and during this time I learned from Jenni new perspectives and methods for strategic level design work, which I’m very grateful. Jenni is a truly wide-ranging and experienced design professional who can create high-quality solutions for both strategic and operational levels. One of her best skills is to notice and understand wholes ie. systems thinking. Thanks to this way of thinking, she can outline very complex entities and the parts that affect it. She is also able to crystallize and visualize these complex entities in a form that is easier for others to understand. Jenni knows that understanding customers' activities and behavior is a startin point for planning successful services and developing valuable business. Her way of combining customer understanding with perception of the competitive field allows the company to find customer value and a hard-to-copy competitive advantage. In this way, she is able to help companies with both short- and long-term strategic vision work. As a colleague, Jenni is straightforward and fun, easily approachable and whose help and support can always be relied on. She uses a variety of design tools and methodologies and design thinking. Jenni is open-minded, fast, and efficient in her work. Her desire to learn is endless. At her best, she is in a position that requires vision and strategic planning.”

    Heli Haapakoski, Senior Service Designer at Bittium Technologies

Our mission is to grow digital age change makers by helping them build innovations that change the world and by offering them the tools and training to make a change.