Role: Head of Product Experience, embedded leadership
Company: Position Green, B2B sustainability management, scale-up, newly merged with consultancy
Scope: Two product lines
Team: 6–10 FTE, the EPIC team: experience designers, design system designers, UX researchers, UX writers
When: 2024–2025
Result: A performing design organisation, an increase in qualified leads, key experience touchpoints aligned to shared principles, and design finally perceived as value rather than decoration.

THE MOMENT

Position Green was moving fast: a new merger and investment, a product organisation just starting to take shape, and very little sense of what design was beyond looks. When the CPO brought me in to start a design organisation, I realised product, advisory, marketing, sales and customer success were all growing, but not growing together.

The fragmentation was easy to see. Website, sales meetings, consultancy messaging, and each product experience were built on a different story and a different set of principles. Each one felt like a different company. The challenge was bigger than design. It was foundations, identity, and harmony.

THE BET

While the product experience organisation was growing and turning the products into usable, meaningful experiences, I looked outside the product and understood the real problem. It wasn't the quality of the work; it was that nobody shared a definition of what good meant.

So the bet was to make design the bridge between the silos, and to make the customer experience agnostic of whatever the internal structure happened to be that quarter, scale-ups are in constant internal motion. Not designers delivering a good experience in the product alone, but the tools, relationships and principles that let everyone deliver it, on every customer interaction. One experience, one story.

Three principles carried it, and each had a business consequence attached:

• It looks good → someone took the time and cared → trust

• It works well → it does what it says, clearly → retention

• It's PG → it feels like us → differentiation

WHAT WE BUILT

The EPIC team was my structural piece: an organisational model for design that ran as a matrix bridge between Product, Marketing, Operations and Advisory, connecting functions that were struggling to work together, each with a named partner on the design side.

The team foundations, so it could run without me holding it

• A growth framework for the product experience organisation: fair, transparent evaluation, clear paths at every level, and a way to make hiring decisions that raised talent density and diversity.

• Products repositioned around evidence-based ICPs and user archetypes, feeding directly into the suite-and-Solutions story below.

• Every major asset refreshed, with accessibility accounted for: sales decks, onboarding, advisory documentation, and the company website.

• An Insights Hub, so knowledge stopped living in people's heads and teams could find it themselves.

• Standardised tools and language, which cut the fragmentation at its source.

• Early validation practices embedded in the product tea

Reframing the product story: from one platform to a suite

The most consequential move came out of the UX research. The evidence pushed us away from a monolithic, single-platform story and toward a connected-services story: one sustainability suite made of five products, including packaged solutions like ESRS and an AI analyst, covering the full range of a sustainability team's needs. The financial mission sat deliberately outside it, as a separate product. Sustainable Investments, which we split off because it served a different ICP than the suite.

This reframing: platform to suite, and standing the financial product up on its own, was done with the CPO. It became the basis for repositioning the whole portfolio and, defining a new product category: sustainability management, with clear ICP's. Instead of selling one platform that tried to be everything, we told a story of connected products that each did one job well and added up to more than their parts. It gave sales a coherent narrative, product a shared architecture, marketing a clear message, and customers a way to buy into the PG ecosystem one step at a time.

THE EVIDENCE

Two things we could count. Language and core stories, built once and reused across a 300-person organisation, products and touch points. And qualified lead generation up 40% over the same period.

The rest was diffuse. Foundation work like, a team being built, customers being met, products repositioned, a category redefined, a suite and its verticals given shape, a shared language assembled, and executive product-speak translated into something a young product organisation could act on, mostly resists measurement while it's happening.

What you can see instead is what stopped happening. Nobody rebuilding the deck from scratch. Nobody arguing about which words to use. Nobody waiting for design to be available. Because design was part of the team.

WHAT LASTED

I stepped in to build the foundation, and stepped back when the team no longer needed me to hold it.