Service design, product strategy, design ops
When backstage operations are held together with duct tape and goodwill, teams burn out, delivery stalls, and buyers end up noticing.
I’m Mirren Fischer. Drawing on ten years in architecture and fifteen in tech leadership, I help companies envision new products and fix broken handoffs between teams, technology, and customers—so new initiatives ship faster, margins hold, and good people stay.
Government and private industry. Enterprise to startups. Banks, publishers, law firms, and climate-techs. Different sectors and sizes, but the same problem underneath: new opportunities hamstrung by inappropriate products and processes. I helped them move forward.
What I do
Figuring out where your hard bits are and helping you turn them into strengths. I can run the strategic room and still do the blueprinting.
Understanding where processes should be automated, including which of those should be AI, and which should always be managed by humans.
Interim product & design leadership, training, ops, and hiring. I build high-functioning, happy teams.
How I work
You’ll know the point of every bit of work before it starts. No stage exists to fill a calendar.
Workshops with your people and your customers, interviews, shadowing, and a map of the processes, touchpoints, and tech as they actually are.
We agree the essence of the problem, and what better would look like in commercial terms you would defend to a board.
Imagining the future service, including where AI fits, prototyped fast enough to test with real users.
Embedded interim leadership, design ops, training, or hiring, until the change holds without me.
About me
Before spending fifteen years untangling digital products and enterprise services, I practised as an architect for over a decade.
That background fundamentally shapes how I design for business. Architecture taught me that a structure isn't tested by the blueprints, but by gravity, weather, and the people walking through it. I look at service ecosystems the same way: an operational diagram might look neat on a slide, but if it doesn’t account for how people actually work under pressure (or the odd things customers might want), it collapses.
I am:
FAQs
Including the ones consultancies normally dodge.
The unglamorous answer: I look at how your business really works, agree what needs to change, and design it. Usually that’s the process and the software that carries it. I'm not here to do a rebrand and leave.
AI isn't magic; it's infrastructure, and it's where I'm focusing most of my energy right now. Much of the work is deciding which steps should be done by software and agents, which should stay human, and where that boundary sits. I look at where automation genuinely removes friction without introducing hallucinations or regulatory risk.
Both. Some engagements need someone to run the strategic room and hold the executive line; others need me deep in the blueprinting with your product, operations and engineering people. Usually it is a mix, and I leave them able to carry it on.
You will get a range on the first call, once I understand the shape of the problem. What I will not do is quote a number before I have seen it.
London, and anywhere in the UK or Europe when the work warrants it. For US companies I work remotely, with in-person sessions in California where that helps. (I'm from Northern California originally, so I'm generally happy to go back.)
No, it is often the best time. I will test it against how the work actually happens before another quarter goes into building the wrong thing.
Get in touch
A few lines is plenty: what’s happening, and what you’d like to be different.
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