Philipp Sackl-O’Neill

Squalify allows enterprises to quantify cyber risk in financial terms, using a model that its parent company Munich Re (one of the world’s largest cyber reinsurers) has long used in insurance pricing. I joined as an external UX and product consultant to turn this internal capability into a product for the first time. When Squalify was spun out into its own entity, my role expanded to building the brand, shaping the team, and developing the initial go-to-market plan.

I designed the first version of the product myself. The most important (and at the time most controversial) decision was to move away from a wizard-style interface where users had to enter all of their data step by step. In most companies, the information needed for a risk assessment is spread across different departments and only becomes available over time. So I designed the product to let users add data whenever they had it. The model would then produce results right away, filling the gaps with statistically likely values and being open about where it did so. This matched the reality of our customers much better than the wizard ever could.

After joining as an employee in 2024, I continued to drive the evolution of product, positioning, and go-to-market together with the team. We moved the product from one-off quantification projects to a true SaaS offering. The positioning shifted to focus on quantifying risk for corporate groups with multiple entities, an area where the product had a unique advantage, and the go-to-market approach moved from a partner-centric model to one where we approached large corporations directly.

Alongside my other work, I design, build, and ship my own apps, handling product, design, development, and marketing myself. It keeps my craft sharp and reminds me what it’s like to be the one who has to make every decision.

I built and released two apps: DoRepeat, an iOS app for managing repeating checklists, and Tempy, a streamlined quick notes app for macOS.

PUSH Conference was born out of a desire to bring user experience designers into a room with creative technologists, researchers, and business professionals.

At the time, there were hardly any UX conferences in Europe and the ones that did exist focused on a very narrow domain like web design. We wanted to break up those silos and show people how much there is to learn from adjacent fields.

Since then, PUSH Conference has become a staple event for the design and UX community in Europe. Based on the feedback from our guests, we continuously evolved the program to include new formats like Lightning Talks or the Lean Coffee Discussion.

Product Masterclass is an 8-week program that helps product managers and product leaders sharpen their craft. This included both public cohorts, open to product people from different companies, and in-house cohorts run for a single company’s team.

As one of four coaches, I worked with participants on product discovery, rapid prototyping, and product leadership. A frequent theme was the shift from a project-centric to a product-centric model.

I joined Freeletics, the company behind Europe’s leading fitness app, as Director of User Experience, leading design, research, and content strategy. I had been a user myself since 2013 (my first workout took almost 40 minutes, and I had to replace several exercises). Freeletics had built a strong position with what we called “hardcore athletes.” The challenge was to appeal to a broader, more casual audience without losing that core group.

To get there, we needed a better understanding of what motivates people. I had our research team go deep on self-determination theory (the idea that motivation comes from competence, autonomy, and relatedness) as the foundation for how Freeletics delivers value. The results shaped decisions in product, UX, marketing, and strategy alike.

I brought all of this together in a north star vision, which I presented at our annual company offsite. Its core idea was that people don’t buy a fitness app, they buy better versions of themselves. So instead of structuring the product around our departments (training, nutrition, audio), we structured it around the goals and needs of our users, with self-determination theory as the backbone of the app. The point was not to spec out exactly what we would build, but to vividly show us our direction.

This put Freeletics in a strong position to grow through the pandemic-driven surge in at-home fitness demand, and to close a Series B funding round.

As Head of Design, I led the team that designed and delivered the products and services under the Firefox brand. Our work spanned all form factors from phones to desktops and from TVs to voice assistants, with a team spread across Europe, North America, Taiwan, and (surprisingly) Vanuatu.

I originally joined Mozilla as a Senior Interaction Designer in 2013 and moved into a leadership role after less than a year. Over the following years, I helped double the size of the UX team and worked with my peers in product management and the leadership team to reframe business problems as design problems.

Much of our work was about privacy and security (from Tracking Protection to Firefox Accounts and Lockwise). Features like these come with a huge number of edge cases. If you design for each of them individually, you end up with a product that nobody understands. The work was a constant exercise in zooming in on the details and back out again, until we found an experience that was both understandable and secure.

In 2009, I founded the multidisciplinary design studio envis precisely together with two like-minded friends. We helped clients ranging from small companies like the ebook startup Skoobe to large enterprises like BMW in improving their interactive customer experience. Our work included apps, web and desktop applications as well as embedded systems and interactive exhibits.

Founding a studio was also an intensive course in business, customer development, and leadership at the same time. This is where I gained first experience in leading creatives when managing our team of up to eight designers and where I learned how to look at design through the lens of business.

I joined BMW Advanced Design through an internship. At the time, I was the only interaction designer on that team. In fact, the concept of an interaction designer was so foreign to the team that it took almost half a year until people stopped referring to me as “the programmer.”

Within that half year, I invented a layered holographic 3D display system which eventually was shown to the world in the BMW Vision Efficient Dynamics show car.

After a year, I moved on from BMW to start my own design studio.