Companies I've worked with
Hi, I'm Christophe —
The rare mix — design-led innovation, hands-on delivery, and regulated-environments experience in one person. I've led teams, shaped visions and corresponding roadmaps whilst staying close enough to the day-to-day work to produce most of it myself.
Team builder (8+ specialists) · Executive MBA, EPFL — top of cohort · FR / EN / IT
Coordinator → Director in two years. Built and led teams, and delivered complex projects end-to-end under tight deadlines.
Co-founded an innovation consultancy. 100+ workshops, 30+ trainings.
Head of Design Thinking (VP) — innovation leadership in regulated banking.
Senior Consultant, UX & Service Design — redesigning wealth-management front-office.
Building Propfolio; innovation consulting for a leading swiss watchbrand via Le Labster.
When a problem is unclear and some stakeholders already have a favorite solution, things can quickly turn contentious. That's where user research becomes a powerful alignment process: by surfacing the status quo and the real pain points, I help organizations focus on the problems worth solving.
Where I take on projects — and where I leave them.
"Risk managers driving change" sounds like a contradiction — change is inherently risky, and caution was their whole mandate. Reconciling the two was my day job. I did this from inside senior management — in the Chief Compliance Officer unit, answering for the approach at MD level. Take the Lombard credit journey they owned: phone calls, paper trails, postal mail taking weeks to reach clients. Here's how we turned it — and them — around:
The real lever was never the research — it was putting a price on the pain. Once the cost of a broken journey is on the table, change stops being a debate and becomes the obvious move — and teams that used to guard their turf start pulling together to build the fix. That's the practice that scaled past my team, until senior sponsors wanted every project user-centric by default.
End-to-end redesign of the wealth-management front-office ecosystem, inside a two-century-old bank. The hard part wasn't the design — it was that nobody reported to me. My counterparts were the bank's product, engineering and business leadership — the vision held because their names were on it, not mine. Five functions, five agendas, one way through:
Influence is a deliverable. When you can't mandate change, you make people want it.
I co-founded an innovation consultancy to attack a gap I kept seeing: business imposing untested solutions, engineers waiting for specs that never came. Our flagship training wasn't written — it was prototyped in public:
IATA · Groupe Mutuel · EPFL · EHL · Chamber of Commerce of Vaud · 20+ orgs — plus venture validation from ideation to go/no-go.
Every offer is a prototype. Fifty free workshops taught me more about product-market fit than any business plan.
Thirteen years shoulder-to-shoulder with engineers, architects, designers and product owners taught me how each role thinks — well enough to now build an end-to-end tool myself, every decision aimed at one thing: user value.
Propfolio is the proof. A live, multi-stakeholder platform — frontend, API, server — built by directing an LLM the way I've always directed specialists. I'd barely written a line of code before — which is exactly the point. It works today: secure, and advanced enough to run agentic AI workflows.
And it exists before I've raised a franc — which is the real point. I can carry a venture from insight to a working, de-risked product — then decide whether I even need outside capital. Proof first, pitch second.
Four convictions that run through everything I've built.
If you write it before you research the topic and understand the status quo, you'll probably develop your favorite solution to the wrong problem. The right answer to the wrong question doesn't move the needle.
A vision people can rally behind, regardless of background or hierarchy, outlasts any org chart. At Pictet it aligned 600 bankers who didn't report to me around business outcomes instead of mandating change.
Ship the smallest sellable version — then let reality edit it.
Traction is cheaper than a deck — and far more convincing.
Venture-building mandates, fractional innovation leadership, or interim delivery — startup speed with bank-grade rigor. I take on one or two engagements at a time — so each one gets my full weight.
christophe.pian@gmail.com