Elevating Design Excellence

I took the initiative to organise a large cross-functional workshop with stakeholders across the group, including design, product and the senior leadership team. The goal was to address a key challenge: we currently have multiple similar products across the organisation, but teams don’t always have a good way to share learnings, data and best practice between them.

The workshop was structured around open discussions and different facilitation techniques to help people communicate, challenge each other’s assumptions, and bring different perspectives into the conversation. Rather than having the discussion only around individual products, we looked at the bigger picture: who are our users, what contexts do they work in, and where do we have opportunities to work more closely across products?

One outcome was a new way of thinking about how to organise our small but growing design team. Rather than splitting designers by product, I suggested structuring the team around user contexts:

• A designer could focus on passenger experiences across channels, such as web portals, bus displays and apps.

• Another could focus on professional or operational contexts, such as customer-service portals or ticket-office point-of-sale systems.

We also discussed how to create closer guilds between people working on similar things across different products. This would give designers and product people a more natural space to share knowledge, compare approaches, and bring learnings from one product into another, instead of solving the same problems separately.

The structure allows designers to immerse themselves deeply in a specific user context, building stronger empathy and understanding. The idea comes from a principle I strongly believe in: designers often get lost in their products, but true impact comes from obsessing over the user.

By organising design work around user needs rather than product boundaries and creating stronger connections between people working on similar problems, we aim to build a more user-centred and scalable design organisation while improving cross-product consistency and sharing lessons across products throughout the group.