As digital was becoming an increasingly important channel for H&M Group, in 2019 the business brought digital development inhouse with the newly established product organisation called “Business Tech” that would service all the Group’s brands (H&M, COS, Arket, Monki, Weekday, &Other Stories) as well as internal bespoke apps for departments like the fashion designers, supply chain and planning.
In 2020 I was brought into the H&M Group leadership as Global Head of Experience Design to modernize, mature and scale the local Experience Design team to match the recent investment and growth of Product Management and Engineering orgs.
I approached this from three parallel work streams:
- Hiring
- Maturing the group’s skills mix and make up
- Leadership and embedding design
1. Hiring
The capacity of the small, local design team in Stockholm was nowhere near what was needed to service all the digital interfaces of the group so hiring was a priority.
To increase the global perspective, I established design teams in Beijing, Bangalore and Berlin.
Top management gave me budget ownership, which meant I was not at the mercy of group budget holders with multiple, competing budget asks to consider. Instead, I could review the individual groups and make an assessment as to what they needed from the Competence and hiring the right staff in with no red tape.
2. Maturing the group’s skills mix and make up
Design Ops running a “red thread” tapestry activity during yearly offsite. The tapestry was sent between offices. There was a need to mature the group’s skills mix as everybody roughly had the same job and the same title: Product Designer. This meant introducing specialist roles such as Researcher, UI Designer and Strategic Designer.
I stood up a Design Ops team, the first Ops team in the Business Tech organisation, which in turn created a modern, two-track career framework allowing both managers and individual contributors to grow. They also helped bond the competence in the middle of the pandemic.
And I modernised the existing grassroot Design System team to increase collaboration and adoption of it into the product.
Design Ops ran a “red thread” tapestry activity during yearly offsite where each designers created a patch. The tapestry was sent between offices to complete the tapestry.
3. Leadership and embedding design
With the increase in both staff and maturity, I established Design Leadership from losely structured management to formal Design Leadership equal to Product Management and Engineering Management.
I changed the role of the craft from being focussed on tactical delivery, to research— and journey driven strategic design to the point where customer journeys became to “roadmap” for how to introduce external brands across the HM.com experience and where the emotional experience of the brand was considered on equal footing with the functional experience.
A final note on growing a team during the pandemic
Scaling a Design org this fast is challenging under normal circumstances, but the pandemic added additional challenges both for current colleagues who had been used to working together in the office, and to the new employees who would not meet their new colleagues in person for months to come.
But as soon as we could, in 2021, we brought everybody together for our very first design offsite and it was a truly wonderful experience for all.
The first design offsite in 2021 - Most designers had never met before at this point.
