Building the Service & Experience Design Discipline

The Problem

Nike EMEA's planning and supply-chain analytics organization ran on data, but had no established UX, UI, or Service Design practice. I was brought in to establish it.

What I Did

I ran a UX maturity assessment against the Nielsen Norman model, then wrote the recommendation: the plan for the discipline, the team, the capacity, the goals, and the path to get there.

To justify and fund it, I built the case in front of leadership, quantified the current state, and won the funding: a program that delivered a +10% jump in UX maturity in year one and grew into a design system used by 1,100+ planners and developers. I hired and directed an Ernst & Young team, roughly €90k for the foundational round and €250k for the service-blueprinting round, and embedded them alongside my own people so the capability stayed in-house.

Impact

A Service and Experience Design discipline that did not exist before, stood up from a maturity assessment to a funded, staffed program, and then used to deliver the analytics and supply-chain work in the other EMEA case studies here.

Creating Buy-In

Standing up a discipline is half design, half persuasion. I ran talks with teams across EMEA to build buy-in for focusing on design practice in the products we make for our internal consumers. The "Why Design System?" deck below is what was on screen: the Nike brand's value, how it carries internally, that our users sit at the center, and the shared Enterprise Design System that makes products make sense together.

The gallery holds the full UX Maturity Assessment and Recommendations deck: how the discipline was assessed against the Nielsen Norman model, the current-state scorecard (EMEA I&A at Maturity Level 2, average 2.80), and the short, mid, and long-term recommendations and maturity targets. It closes with the "Why Design System?" buy-in slides used to win support across the EMEA teams.