Selfridges & Co

The challenge

Selfridges is an institution with an extraordinary physical experience and, when I arrived, a digital experience capability of three designers. The gap between what the brand meant in the building and what it delivered on a screen was the whole problem. Closing it needed more than better screens. It needed a function that could research, test, design and ship at the pace the business was moving, and the organisational credibility to be listened to when it did.

My role

Head of UX, Digital Design & Content Management. Led multidisciplinary teams spanning UX, Research, Digital Design and Content across the digital customer experience, partnered across Product, Technology, Creative, Marketing and Commercial.

The approach

• Scaled UX capability from 3 designers to 20+ multidisciplinary specialists, and established the UX Research function from nothing.
• Scaled customer testing from roughly three studies a year to weekly experimentation, while holding a £60k annual research budget.
• Helped lead digital transformation, introducing product and agile ways of working and moving teams from ad-hoc projects to regular sprint-based delivery.
• Led the complete redesign of the Selfridges mobile app, including app-only activations such as Yellow Drop.
• Worked with the stores team on bridging digital and physical retail, delivering digital store maps and conceptualising "Store Mode", an in-store experience with real-time product availability, wayfinding and mobile-first checkout.
• Developed and implemented a scalable design system in three phases: UX and design foundations first, then technical integration with engineering into a component library, then expanding it into a business-wide resource with documentation, governance and training.
• Led the evolution of UX from a limited capability towards an integrated, insight-led model, demonstrating ROI through customer data, testing and conversion improvement.
• Established financial tracking and resource planning to improve budget control while protecting investment in people, technology, tools and development.
• Built a coaching culture, developing talent from junior level through to management.

The outcome

The function grew from three designers to more than twenty specialists across UX, Research, Digital Design and Content, with a research practice that moved from roughly three studies a year to weekly experimentation. A scalable design system landed across Product, Technology and Creative, and ways of working shifted from ad-hoc projects to sprint-based delivery.

3 → 20+

UX grown into a multidisciplinary function

3/yr → weekly

Customer testing cadence

£60k

Annual research budget established and held

10 years

Sustained leadership through transformation

What I learned

The things I'm most pleased about from that decade aren't projects. They're the design system, the research cadence and the way the team ended up working, because those carried on doing their job long after my attention had moved somewhere else. I didn't really understand that early on. I thought leading meant being across everything.