Director of Design & User Experience

Intro:
An international home improvement company with approximately 1,370 stores, supported by a team of 78,000 colleagues. It operates in eight countries across Europe under retail banners including B&Q, Castorama, Brico Dépôt, Screwfix, TradePoint and Koçtaş.

The challenge:
Kingfisher recognised the need of expanding his digital capabilities and decided to partner up with a number of well known Agencies. The result was a very innovative team based in Shoreditch, employing a group of 200 professionals made up pretty much entirely by external consultants.
In the summer of 2018, I was asked by Fjord/Accenture, one of the agencies helping the digital transformation, to create, grow and lead an in-house design team.

My approach:
The digital HUB was vibrant, open and filled by talented individuals, but on the other hand, the design team was decentralised and dispersed across multiple Feature Teams. It took me a few weeks to understand my surroundings, learn about previous strategies, get to know the team and create a fiscal space where all the existing designers could work next to each other.
Allowing people to share a common space created a very powerful environment, which later on became the foundation for our design culture.

The delivery:

Built a design team from the ground up
Hired & managed 20+ creatives
Designed a Career Framework
Delivered a Design System
Opened a Research Lab