Service design, product strategy, prototyping
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
Three fixed-size ways to work together. Each one ends with a decision you can act on, not a deck that gathers dust.
Three to four weeks to find out where your service really breaks, and where AI should and shouldn't help. I shadow the people doing the work, prototype the fix, and finish with a short presentation your board can act on.
One to two weeks to turn a new product idea into something clickable you can put in front of real users. Built fast with AI tools, judged by people. You'll know whether to back it, change it, or kill it.
Four to six weeks to redesign how the work gets done: what software and AI should take off people's plates, what stays human, and how compliance and engineering agree on it. Often follows a discovery sprint.
Also: product strategy training for leadership teams, one-to-one mentoring, and short interim leadership roles (three months, four at a push).
How I work
Each offer takes the slice it needs. 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.
Modernisation, leadership training, mentoring, or a short interim role, 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.
Wherever it takes the boring bits off people's plates. The technology is the easy part. The hard part is deciding which steps should go to software, which should stay human, and where that line sits, without adding new risk. Automate the drudgery, not the judgement. It's where I'm spending most of my energy right now.
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.
Most work comes in fixed sizes: one to two weeks for a prototype sprint, three to four for a discovery sprint, and four to six for modernisation. Fixed scope, fixed fee. You'll get a price on the first call, once I've understood the shape of the problem.
Not usually, and that's deliberate. I'm most useful at the start: the blueprint, the prototype, and the standards. The people who'll live with the service should be the ones who build it, so I hand over to your team or delivery partner and make sure they're set up to carry it on.
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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