People

People

Friends, collaborators and people whose judgement I trust enough to recommend — including a few who do things suspiciously close to what I do.

Side Notes does not pretend to contain every useful skill under one tasteful roof. This is simply a fragment of my professional world: people whose work, thinking and judgement I genuinely value.

the overlap is quite deliberate

Gustaw Jakubowski

A friend, a problemologist and one of my favourite people to disagree with.

Gustaw works somewhere between innovation, new ventures, product thinking and turning ambitious ideas into things that can actually exist. He describes himself as a problemologist, which is annoyingly accurate.

We have known each other long enough to skip the polite agreement phase. I value him because he asks uncomfortable questions early, thinks beyond the obvious business answer and has very little patience for ideas that exist only to decorate a slide.

Meet Gustaw

Piotr Mach

A friend, a strategist and my favourite partner in connecting dots that probably should not connect.

Piotr works around product strategy, marketing and product discovery.

We have worked, talked and argued our way through enough ideas that I know what happens when Piotr enters a problem: the frame usually gets wider. He is particularly good at connecting product, business and communication without reducing any of them to a checkbox. He is also one of the people I call before an idea is ready to be shown to anyone else.

Meet Piotr

Weronika Rochacka Gagliardi

One of the people I trust with genuinely complicated problems.

Weronika works across service design, design strategy, research and facilitation.

What I value most is her ability to combine empathy with structure. We work on overlapping territory, which makes conversations with Weronika particularly useful: she tends to see both the human mess and the system underneath it.

Meet Weronika

Nowe Narracje

Karolina Michałkowska

A pragmatic idealist — someone who can discuss the future without producing science fiction for boardrooms.

Karolina works across transition design, innovation, foresight, service design and systems thinking. She helps organisations notice possibilities they could not previously see, then builds a bridge between the long view and what can usefully be done now.

What I value is that the future is not a trend deck in her hands. It is a way of restoring agency: questioning the status quo together, widening the available choices and finding evidence that change might, inconveniently, be possible after all.

Meet Karolina