Getting design a real seat at the table inside a global B2B rebuild across 12 squads.
Teams risked duplicating work and making technology decisions without a shared service view.
Set up shared insight routines and supported decision-making across squads.
Gave teams a clearer view of priorities, duplication, and user impact.
Helped align design, research, product, technology, and operations around shared evidence.
This work sat inside a major B2B digital transformation programme for a global energy organisation. The programme involved multiple product areas, business-unit sponsors, technology partners, internal users, and customer-facing services.
I joined after the programme had already been running for several months. Some work was already in flight, but the programme lacked a stable shared vision and design was not yet operating as a strategic discipline. My role was to lead insights and experience across the programme, helping teams use design and research to make better decisions under real enterprise constraints.
The programme had many motivated teams, but their goals were fragmented. Product owners, business units, technology teams, suppliers, and designers were often optimising for different outcomes. Business priorities shifted, funding came from multiple sponsors, and teams were under pressure to deliver while the definition of value kept moving.
In that environment, "doing good design" was not simply a matter of running more research or creating better journey maps. The harder problem was structural: how do you create enough shared evidence, plain decision routines, and prioritisation discipline for design to influence a volatile transformation programme?
Without that structure, the programme risked solving problems locally, duplicating capability, underusing major platforms, and making technology decisions without enough understanding of the impact on customers, staff, and operations.
Research was a scarce, high-leverage asset, so I focused on making existing evidence work harder rather than commissioning more of it. I coordinated with wider marketing and insights teams to reuse studies already in flight, added design-relevant questions to planned research, and avoided duplication. I also established a shared research repository so findings across squads could be tagged, searched, and elevated when the same themes appeared in more than one workstream, turning isolated insights into programme-level signal.
Rigorous research showed their problem statements did not hold up. Retiring them freed budget, headcount, and attention for the use cases that actually mattered.
Three agencies, not always working well together, with overhead running ahead of output. The fix was moving the work in-house, not better supplier management.
Even where customer journeys did not connect, the underlying patterns did. A reusable component library across design, process, and technology cut duplicate work.
Treating them as UX problems would have produced prettier screens on top of services that still did not work. Integrated Deal Making needed end-to-end service design to land properly.
The work helped shift design from a downstream delivery function into a programme-level discipline. Teams gained shared ways of working, reusable design templates, a cross-squad support model, a consolidated research repository, and a shared view of digital capability that made duplication and reuse opportunities visible.
Senior stakeholders began using design evidence to challenge priorities, ask sharper questions of suppliers, and assess whether proposed work moved the programme towards its shared North Star. This created a more disciplined basis for prioritisation in an environment where business goals, funding routes, and delivery pressures were constantly shifting.
The programme was recognised with a Silver Award for Best Digital Transformation at the International Customer Experience Awards 2023.