We’re delighted to welcome Maximilian Relam Wide to Ambition in Gothenburg. Maximilian joins us from recent work with Volvo Cars, Telia, and Coop, with a broad background in Product,UX, and UI design. We sat down with him to talk about how he got here, what drives him, and why thoughtful design means so much to him.
Welcome Maximilian! How did you find your way into design?
– When I was in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew about interfaces and GUIs, they were just part of using software. It never crossed my mind that someone actually had to design them, or that UX was even a thing. Then I watched a documentary about a Danish furniture designer. The idea that a piece of furniture should serve a clear purpose, but also be beautiful, just clicked.
– I’d always been drawn to things that solved problems well… clothes, furniture, products that felt like someone had really thought them through, and watching that documentary I knew straight away that I wanted to learn more about this kind of “thoughtful” design.
And that led you to Hyper Island?
– My closest friend had started there a year or two before me and told me about the program. He was studying app development. “You’ll work out what you want to do once you’re there.”, he said, so I applied. I got into the Digital Media Creative track, and he was right.
– There was a lot of learning by doing, with a real emphasis on soft skills and building genuine connections with the people around you. Teams came together quickly because of that. And the projects were real. Actual clients, actual briefs, not work that disappeared into a folder somewhere. Near the end of the program I bought a Sketch license and remember thinking, THIS is what I want to do.
But you went on to study again after that?
– I didn’t quite feel ready to start working, so I did the Digital Designer program at Yrgo here in Gothenburg. Motion, frontend, design. I like having a broad skill set and understanding many different sides of design work. It’s served me well.
What happened when you finished?
– I did an internship in Stockholm. My sister was living there at the time. Then covid hit, and finding work was genuinely hard. I ended up helping the agency Fab in Gothenburg with UX and UI projects for clients. Through them I came across Koalitionen, mentioned I was looking for something permanent, and got taken on.
– My first client there was Coop. They had an admin portal used by suppliers to manage orders and campaigns. The job was to improve the UX and UI across the board and explore how AI could surface useful insights for suppliers based on trends. I worked closely with a designer who had built much of Coop’s design language, and really learned to think in terms of components and design systems. It was intense, but I took a lot from it.
Which other projects have stayed with you?
– Telia was significant. I worked on their logged-in experience… the area where customers manage invoices and account settings. A colleague in Gothenburg handled the app while I focused on the web, but the development team was based in Lithuania. We also built out “Telia Familj”, a set of services for people sharing a household. I spent a lot of time interviewing users to understand what they actually needed, with a strong commercial focus throughout.
– Then Volvo Cars. I worked on an internal system for production planning across their factories. The challenge wasn’t making something that looked good. It was understanding how the business actually worked. When I interviewed users, I learned that they regularly used only a small part of the system. Some features were utilized maybe twice a year, others barely at all. The real insight was that people need help getting quickly to what matters. Being an old system with tons of technical debt we couldn’t decommission anything, so building clear shortcuts to the most-used functions ended up being the most important thing we did.
What are you working on right now?
– I’ve just started with our client Timewave. More on that to come!
What are you most looking forward to here at Ambition?
– Having so many design colleagues around me. That means a lot. I really want to learn from everyone here, and I’m looking forward to digging into Ambition Empower. I know I’ll grow a lot. The goal is to become the kind of designer that everybody genuinely wants to work with.
Thanks Maximilian, and welcome to Ambition!
