Jacob Christiansen knows what it’s like to build for convenience. Before Penneo, his world was e-commerce and B2C, products where the goal is simple: make it easy, make it fast, make it forgettable.
Then he joined Penneo. And the stakes changed.
Jacob is a Principal Product Manager at Penneo. On paper, the job description looks similar to any other PM role: talk to customers, talk to stakeholders, define strategy, work with engineers and designers, measure results, repeat. But ask him what Penneo actually does, and the answer stops you in your tracks.
“We provide authentic evidence of who approved what and when,” he says. “Authentic meaning we use cryptographic technology, and we are certified according to international standards. But we make it easy enough that customers and signers never have to worry about those details. They just use their electronic ID.”
That gap, between the complexity underneath and the simplicity on top, is where Jacob lives. And it turns out, building something that has to be both legally airtight and genuinely easy to use is a very different challenge from getting someone to click “buy now” faster.
Critical infrastructure
Ask Jacob what sets Penneo apart and he could talk for hours. But what reframes everything is something he mentions almost as a footnote: ‘We’re legally defined as critical infrastructure.'”
It’s not a marketing claim. It’s a regulatory designation, and it changes how you think about every decision you make. When your product is the thing that makes signatures and data legally valid, ensures a document hasn’t been tampered with, and gives a compliance officer the evidence they need to pass an audit, getting it wrong isn’t just a bad quarter. It’s a real consequence for a real business.
“That’s actually the nature of our product,” Jacob says. “It is the promise we have given our customers, the evidence they need if something is ever disputed.”
The weight of that became clearest for Jacob in conversations with compliance officers and senior decision makers at organisations handling high-value, high-risk transactions. People discussing eIDAS compliance and digital signature validity with very specific requirements and very little tolerance for ambiguity. These aren’t users who need onboarding tips. They need to know that what they’re signing will hold up in court.
The question behind every decision
Ask Jacob what question he always comes back to when evaluating whether to build something, and the answer is disarmingly simple.
“What problem are we trying to solve? And what happens if we don’t do it now?”
It sounds obvious. But in practice, he says, the hardest part of the job isn’t answering that question, it’s making sure you’re asking it about the right thing in the first place.
“Customers come to us with ideas. But an idea is really just a representation of a need. Once you understand the need, you can often find solutions that help more customers or work better than the original idea. We want customers to bring us the need as well as the idea.”
At Penneo, compliance, stability and security aren’t trade-offs. They’re the baseline. “You can’t compromise on those things the way you might in other contexts.”
The decision he’s most proud of
Not every product decision carries the same weight. But when Jacob thinks about the one he’s most proud of, not for its technical elegance, but for what it meant for the people relying on it, he points to international signing. He is referring to how Penneo introduced ways for signers to use their passports to identify themselves, when they did not have access to the national electronic IDs supported by Penneo (such as MitID and BankID):
“We went from covering most cases to covering all cases. That sounds simple. But what it really means is that the same signature process will always be usable for Penneo’s customers, consistently and regardless of where a signer is based.”
Because identity verification isn’t optional. It’s a necessary part of signing a deal. Before, when a signer in another country couldn’t reliably confirm who they were, the contract didn’t just slow down, it stopped.
For customers operating across Europe, that shift wasn’t a feature update. It was a fundamental change in the promise Penneo makes.
What’s coming next
Jacob doesn’t shy away from the bigger picture. Trust in digital processes, he believes, is only going to become more important.
“AI makes it easier to fake things, documents, data, identities. The question of how you trust who approved what and when is going to become more critical. That’s the space Penneo is building for.”
For companies still handling critical business processes without a proper trust layer, his message is direct: “It’s possible to operate that way. But you have to ask yourself how much you’re willing to risk, financially, legally, and reputationally.”
It’s not a scare tactic. It’s just what happens when you spend your days thinking about what’s at stake.
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