Grow experience design organisation and increase design maturity

After 21 years in London (1999-2020) I moved to Copenhagen and in the middle of the move I was approached by H&M Group to join as part of what is arguably one of the biggest digital transformation programs in the retail industry.

I joined a year into the transformation journey with three specific goals:

1. Grow the experience design capacity.
2. Increase the design maturity of the organisation.
3. Expand and strengthen the current transactional experiences with the emotional values of the individual brands in the Group (being H&M, COS, Arket, Weekday, Monki, &Other Stories, aFound).

A year and a half into the journey we have:

• Grown the capacity of the core Stockholm design team, across both customer- and internal facing products, to get be able to address demand from product teams.
• Established a design team in Shanghai, Berlin and Bangalore.
• Introduced both specialist design roles like researchers, UI designers and design system, as well as associated career paths and communities with a design ops function.
• Strengthen collaboration with brand identity work to input digital thinking and consideration.
• And we are on a journey to move from designing for tactical functions to designing for end-to-end experiences.

A note on, growing a team in the middle of the Covid 19 pandemic

Making a company a destination company for the designers in the middle of a global pandemic is not an easy task and I am grateful for the experience of managing a remote group from my previous job at Sage.

It was hard for new designers to join in the middle of a transformation, and hard for existing designers to be part of such an explosive growth. But at the end of 2021 we had a chance to bring the majority of the designers togerher in Stockholm for the first time.

And the buzz and cameradery between people, who in many cases had never met in person, blew me away.