Context
The Postcode Lottery is one of Europe’s largest and most socially impactful lottery organizations, operating in markets like the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, and the UK. While their product vision was ambitious, the day-to-day reality was more fragmented.
Global Product, Tech, and Data teams were pushing digital transformation. But local Marketing teams, who owned execution across markets, were siloed, each with its own way of launching, structuring content, and interpreting goals. The absence of shared frameworks, systems, and rituals made it difficult to scale consistent, user-centered experiences across regions.
My Role
I was brought in as Experience Director, responsible for leading multidisciplinary teams across product design, research, content strategy, motion, and brand design. My mission was twofold:
Build clarity around how global and local teams could work together, and
Create a shared experience foundation that empowered execution, rather than policing it.
I partnered closely with Global Product, Tech, and Data leads, while embedding myself in the workflows of each local market, from in-market discovery and content architecture to executive-level presentations with MDs and Heads of.
My Approach
A strategy is only useful if it enables people to move forward with clarity and confidence.
1. Start with the real barriers to collaboration
We began by interviewing stakeholders across global and local teams to understand not just how work was happening, but how it was feeling. We heard stories of slow approvals, duplicate content efforts, unclear ownership, and misaligned goals. These weren’t just workflow issues. They were symptoms of deeper experience governance gaps.
I helped surface and reframe these tensions as a lack of strategic infrastructure, rather than execution failure.
2. Define what experience strategy should enable
Instead of delivering a generic vision or “north star,” we defined the functional role of experience strategy for this team. It needed to:
Enable content to scale without losing coherence
Align GTM efforts across countries
Create a shared language around experience maturity and success
We grounded every strategic decision in these outcomes, anchoring outputs in practical behaviors like briefing, prioritization, and cross-team collaboration.
3. Make it practical, not theoretical
We created tools that people could use, not just presentations to read. The content playbook gave markets flexible templates and decision frameworks. The discovery report synthesized cross-market insight and translated it into clear priorities and focus areas.
Everything we built was designed to enable action, not just alignment.
4. Coach leadership toward new rituals
One of my most impactful contributions was helping senior stakeholders develop new ways of working together. I co-created rituals for collaboration across Product, Tech, and Marketing, from experience roadmapping with Global Product to content planning with local teams. These regular touchpoints gave structure and confidence to what had previously been ad hoc and reactive collaboration.
Outcomes
Delivered a cohesive experience strategy adopted across four international markets, enabling cross-functional alignment between Product, Marketing, and Tech
Established a strategic operating model for digital experience, integrating scalable content frameworks and collaboration rituals across global and local teams
Shifted the perception of experience design from delivery support to strategic capability, influencing roadmap and org-level planning at the leadership level
Empowered markets to launch with more autonomy and speed, while remaining aligned to a unified experience vision
Maintained high visibility and trust with senior stakeholders through weekly leadership presentations and strategic advisory support
My takeaway
This work was a clear example of how experience leadership is about more than design. It’s about creating the conditions for strategy to be operational, and for teams to feel confident, capable, and connected in how they deliver.
What I took away most was the importance of leading with empathy and structure at once. Experience strategy is only valuable when it helps people make better decisions, faster. My role wasn’t to define the experience alone, it was to build the system that made great experience work possible at scale.
