Design, research and strategy usually sit in three different teams.
In my work, they’re one.

Business problem

A €650M business serving 60,000 European companies on legacy platforms that drivers and fleet managers were quietly working around. Product decisions ran on assumption. Design was a service function, not a strategic capability.

My role

Embedded as the lead designer of Edenred Mobility’s digital function. I owned design strategy, set the research practice, ran the design system, and hired and shaped the team — and still did the hands-on work when the work needed doing.

Key actions

• Built the “5‑minute pit stop” research method — intercepted truck drivers at fuel stations during refuelling. Traditional research had failed because drivers are always driving and fleet managers are always busy. The method became the team’s default.
• Localised an existing design system from another Edenred geography rather than rebuilding from scratch. Pragmatic, fast, consistent across customer apps and internal tools.
• Stripped design sprints to their essentials for distributed German teams. Validation moved from months to days. Political debates became problem-solving sessions.
• Embedded designers inside product teams instead of running a separate design department. The design org became invisible — on purpose.

Outcome

What changed for the business

From no user research to continuous validation panels across Germany. From a one-person design service to four designers embedded inside product teams. From shipping by assumption to shipping from tested, reusable components.

Business problem

mobile.de had a working sell-to-dealer business. The open question was commercial, not visual: would people accept a valuation for a car they had never sold before, and trade it against the next one, in a single motion? Nobody knew what that proposition was worth to a seller.

My role

Prove or kill the proposition fast, with a squad of four. I owned the value case, the service architecture, the design, and the dev handover — and absorbed product management when the team grew rather than waiting for a hire.

Key actions

• Tested the value proposition on site, with real sellers. On-site smoke tests at dealer locations before the engineering team was fully staffed. Stated interest is cheap; behaviour at the point of handing over a car is not.
• Built the service blueprint across six teams and five platforms first. Not as a deliverable — as the artefact that made six teams agree on what the product was before anyone built it.
• Refused the design-system sidequest. Reused existing components so the team shipped rather than styled.
• Held the lean squad against scope pressure from adjacent teams until launch.

Outcome

What changed for the business

The trade-in became a permanent part of the mobile.de portfolio rather than an experiment that quietly stopped. The evidence came before the build, which is why there was something to keep.

Business problem

An in-house startup with a hard mandate and a six-month runway: let farmers cut emissions, convert the reduction into sellable carbon credits, and stay compliant with certification rules. No platform, no system, no users. Two very different audiences — growers and their advisors — who had to feel like one product.

My role

Lead product design across three features and own the design system as an asset other teams would inherit. Run the interviews with advisors and growers. Set the validation rhythm for a team with no product proof yet.

Key actions

• Shipped one feature at a time as its own MVP rather than attempting a single launch. Rhythm beats scope when nobody has evidence yet.
• Ran Advisor and Grower flows in parallel against one system — two surfaces, one language, no forked codebase.
• Contained the legal complexity in the flow, not the user. A step-by-step contract sign-up that handled property rights and payment schedules without losing the farmer mid-funnel.
• Productised the design system in Figma so the next hires were useful in week one instead of month two.

Outcome

What changed for the business

The constraint was never design quality. It was whether a farmer would complete a legally binding agreement on a screen. Solving that is what made the business possible.

Business problem

Zalando had run a partner marketplace for years, but onboarding and merchant operations still leaned on manual work that did not scale. Every new partner cost people-time the business could not keep spending.

My role

Lead design on the partner platform inside a three-person team. I owned the partner journey, the onboarding and article-list flows, and the executive dashboard — and ran the handover to engineering end to end, including motion specification.

Key actions

• Mapped the partner journey with the whole team, not just design. The pain points came out of the map; the roadmap came out of the pain points. Alignment was a by-product rather than a separate workstream.
• Wireframes first on the complex flows. Faster feedback, fewer arguments about pixels, and a cleaner handover at the end.
• Built the executive dashboard around action, not reporting. Partners could act on what they saw immediately instead of scheduling a meeting about it.
• Served multiple user types — Head of E-commerce, marketplace manager — without splitting the codebase or the system.

Outcome

What changed for the business

A three-person design team shipped an enterprise platform because the journey map settled the scope argument early. The constraint forced clarity rather than compromise.