Work

Over nearly 4 years at GfK, I led design transformation efforts across 3 different business areas, each time improving design adoption and process from the ground up.

GfK and NielsenIQ use SAFe — 10-week cycles with quarterly planning. In theory, a good structure for design. In practice, design was still an afterthought. Teams only saw us as people who could produce pretty UI, which meant we were brought in too late with no time for research or discovery.

The second challenge was fitting our design process into SAFe, especially with designers working across multiple teams in a decentralised model. A byproduct of both was poor design system adoption — hard to build shared ownership when teams don't yet see design's value.

By embedding research into a live modernisation project, I showed how user research could cut through uncertainty and help teams prioritise with confidence. This became the blueprint for how we approached discovery across teams going forward.

I started attending team scrum ceremonies and created design-specific ceremonies with product and delivery leads. I also introduced design workshops for structured problem-solving — design sprints, ideation sessions — which were well received as they generated outcomes in meetings that would often derail.

I ran open talks and education sessions. A highlight was a UX Myths session where, together with a colleague, we debunked common misconceptions using examples from our own products. I also ran sessions for teams without designers, giving them practical tools to incorporate good UX practices into their work.

I improved documentation, aligned Figma components with Storybook, and worked with delivery leads to build the case for long-term investment. The main lesson: design systems fail in silos. By the end, adoption had grown and our tools were gaining consistency.

We had no visibility on what designers across the business were working on. I worked with the UX Directors to create UX Scrum, a lightweight system for logging design work in JIRA. I trained the teams and rolled it out across the group, giving us (and the business) a clear picture of design work in progress for the first time.

Visibility alone wasn't enough — we were still reacting to last-minute requests. Working with the Directors, I helped create UX PI Planning, modelled after SAFe's own PI Planning so the business could immediately understand it. It gave us a way to protect time for research and discovery, show stakeholders our capacity, and proactively pitch UX improvements rather than waiting to be asked.

Levi's go-to-market process relied on manual data entry across multiple systems, creating duplicated work and errors. Merchants needed a collaborative, visual tool to act as a single source of truth — making their processes more efficient while eliminating the fragmented tooling.

The goal was ambitious: deliver a production-ready MVP in 10 weeks with a lean design approach.

I facilitated a vision workshop to align stakeholders on pain points and goals, producing a shared vision statement and a clear landscape of users. From there, I put together a research plan and conducted interviews and shadowing sessions with 11 people — from end users to stakeholders. I mapped the full go-to-market process and identified the biggest pain points in less than 2 weeks.

Research findings were played back to the team and together we defined a feasible MVP feature set. I designed the key user journeys, drawing on familiar mental models like Google Photos and Spotify to make the experience feel intuitive.

With the MVP live, we shifted into iterative discovery–design–testing loops for each new feature, with the UX team leading requirements gathering through user story mapping sessions and discovery.

One of the biggest features I designed post-MVP was Visual Assort — a digital whiteboard for editing assortments, which replaced the hacky workarounds users had developed during the pandemic.

When COVID-19 restrictions came in, Nando's needed to move fast — launching an order-at-table service to reduce contact between staff and customers. My team was already working on the app order journey, so we adapted that work while also designing a new portal to help restaurants manage incoming orders.

Using existing research, I created a service blueprint of the existing eat-in experience, mapping all touchpoints between staff and customers. This gave us a clear picture of what could be replaced by a digital solution.

I visited 3 restaurants to conduct contextual inquiry, observing how orders flowed in practice. I followed this with interviews with 4 managers to uncover pain points around managing orders from multiple channels: delivery, collection, and eat-in. A recurring theme emerged — there were too many different systems and that was hard to manage in busy periods.

I created a customer journey map to play back to the team, which became our reference for decisions on tools and vendor. I then facilitated ideation sessions with senior stakeholders to define an MVP for the portal and adapt the existing app journey. From there, I created wireframes and final designs for both.

We delivered two things: an updated app journey for customers (adding table instructions and table number capture at checkout), and a new orders portal for restaurant staff — initially for eat-in but designed to eventually consolidate delivery and collection too.

After 2 weeks of beta testing with real customers, both were well received and released to all restaurants.