What I've done

Salesforce Experience Design Group, EMEA

At the end of 2013 Salesforce approached me about taking on a role to establish and lead Experience Design as part of their growing Services arm with these ask:

• Build a consistent, best-in-class, EMEA-wide Experience Design Practice.
• Embed Experience Design and Design Thinking in the EMEA Services arm.
• Provide expert support and leadership to pre-sales and projects
• Provide creative direction and vision setting for programs.

The focus of the first year was to grow a small and highly skilled "MVP" design team in London and to establish relationships with Sales and Delivery to enable a successful integration of the new design services.

Over the next years I established 3 additional teams in Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris and pushed the internal understanding and customer engagements up the CX maturity model.

2015 saw the first stage-worthy project and the design services expanded from tactical, user-optimisation projects to strategic, enterprise-scale design engagement and advisory roles.

While the day-to-day leadership of the group took up more and more of my time, I kept being directly involved in key strategic programs for multinational customers like ING.

By the time I left the role, I had established a design leadership spread across regions capable of taking the group forward on their own.