As Head of Design & Research for Amazon Payment Products in Europe, I led the transformation of design capability across one of the world’s most complex financial services ecosystems. Managing a distributed team of designers and researchers across three competencies (UX Design, Visual Experience, Research) and 13 countries, I established the design and research function as a strategic partner equal to Engineering, Product, Marketing, and Operations within the organisation.

The Challenge: Establishing Design at Scale

When I joined Amazon Payment Products in April 2020, the European design function was essentially non-existent. The organisation was expanding rapidly across multiple markets, yet lacked the design infrastructure, processes, and leadership necessary to deliver customer-obsessed experiences at Amazon scale. With 20 products spanning 13 countries, billions of transactions daily, and partnerships with major banking institutions and regulators across Europe, the complexity was formidable.

The challenge was not merely to establish a design team, but to architect a design organisation capable of operating within Amazon’s demanding standards whilst navigating the intricate regulatory landscape of European financial services. This required building capability from zero to world-class across multiple dimensions simultaneously: people, process, partnerships, and impact.

Strategic Approach: Customer Obsession Through Organisational Design

My approach centred on three strategic pillars aligned with Amazon’s leadership principles:

1. Foundations: Building the House in Order

The initial phase focused on establishing robust foundations across five critical domains:

Process Organisation: I implemented a rigorous design operations framework that integrated seamlessly with Amazon’s existing product development lifecycle. This included establishing Design Critique methodologies drawn from established frameworks (Greever, 2015; Connor & Irizarry, 2015), adapted specifically for our distributed, multilingual context.

Holistic Audit: Conducted comprehensive experience reviews across all 20 products, prioritising interventions based on customer impact and business value. This audit revealed critical gaps not only in functional execution but in the fundamental coherence of the customer experience across touchpoints.

Capabilities Design: Structured the team across three core competencies: UX Design, Visual Experience Design, and User Research, ensuring appropriate specialisation whilst maintaining collaborative integration. Each competency developed distinct craft standards whilst contributing to unified customer outcomes.

Scaling Empathy: Established centralised research repositories, persona development frameworks, and regular customer exposure mechanisms (including ‘Voice of Customer’ programmes and direct observation sessions) to democratise customer understanding across the organisation. This systematic approach to empathy-building proved transformative in shifting organisational culture towards genuine customer obsession.

Partner Engagement: Created formal engagement frameworks with four major banking partners and multiple regulatory bodies, establishing design as the primary point of contact for customer experience standards. This included implementing Service Level Agreements for design review cycles and establishing Financial Experience Design Bar-raiser processes to maintain quality thresholds across partner-delivered experiences.

2. Integration and Promotion: Establishing Strategic Parity

The second phase focused on elevating design’s strategic influence within the organisation:

My team pioneered the introduction of Figma to Amazon, where I was the key senior advocate and stakeholder (a tool that has since been adopted organisation-wide), fundamentally transforming how design work is conducted, shared, and integrated into product development. This technological intervention served as a catalyst for broader process improvements, enabling real-time collaboration across time zones and functional boundaries.

Simultaneously, I co-developed and launched the Global Think Big innovation programme, coordinating design-led innovation initiatives across three continental regions (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific). This programme became a model for cross-regional collaboration within Amazon, demonstrating how distributed teams could achieve coherent strategic outcomes whilst respecting local market requirements.

I co-founded Design Breakfast EU and co-led the Amazon Design Community in EMEA, creating forums for knowledge exchange and professional development that extended beyond our immediate organisational boundaries. These initiatives established European design leadership within the broader Amazon ecosystem.

3. Innovation and Impact: Delivering Customer and Business Value

The third phase demonstrated design’s capacity to drive measurable business outcomes:

Leading teams working on maximum-ambiguity products—those that were both new-to-world and new-to-Amazon—I established processes for navigating extreme uncertainty whilst maintaining Amazon’s high standards for customer experience. This work achieved S-team (Senior Leadership Team) visibility, positioning design as a strategic capability for the organisation’s most ambitious initiatives.

Key product launches under my leadership included:

• Co-brand Credit Cards (2× UK, 2× Germany)
• Buy Now Pay Later services (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain)
• Insurance Store (UK)
• Seller and Vendor Central Financing
• NDA covered initiatives

These launches required coordinating across 11 product teams, five departments (Marketing, Product, Engineering, Operations, Legal/Compliance), and multiple regulatory regimes—demonstrating design’s capacity to function as the integrative force in complex, highly-regulated product development.

Measurable Impact: Transforming Outcomes at Scale

The design organisation I built delivered quantifiable improvements across customer, business, and organisational dimensions:

Customer Impact:

• Reduction in customer contact rates by [redacted]% through improved user experience design
• Consistent delivery of record-breaking Prime Day performance, year-on-year from 2020–2022
• Creation of the Unified Payments Brand, incorporating Amazon Pay and Amazon Wallet UX, establishing coherent customer experience across previously fragmented touchpoints

Business Impact:

• Acquisition increase of [redacted]% year-on-year
• Management of £x.xxm+ [redacted] annual research budget with demonstrable ROI through risk reduction and opportunity identification
• Successful navigation of complex regulatory requirements across 13 European markets, enabling product launches that competitors struggled to achieve

Organisational Impact:

• Growth of design team from zero to xx [redacted] world-class professionals across three competencies
• Establishment of design as strategic partner with equal standing alongside traditional product functions
• Achievement of top 25% performance metrics across Amazon’s design organisation globally
• Maintained 100% manager satisfaction ratings throughout tenure
• Team recognition for exceptional process excellence, innovation, and knowledge sharing (consistently scoring 22% above benchmark)

Methodological Rigour: Evidence-Led Practice

The design organisation I established was distinguished by its systematic approach to generating and applying evidence. Drawing upon established frameworks from Human-Centred Design (ISO 9241-210:2019), market research standards (ISO 20252:2019), and contemporary design research methodologies, I implemented practices that elevated design from aesthetic craft to strategic capability.

Research programmes combined qualitative depth (ethnographic studies, longitudinal user research, thick data analysis following Geertz and Wang) with quantitative rigour (statistical validation, A/B testing, econometric impact assessment). This integrated approach to evidence generation enabled design to engage credibly with engineering, product, and business stakeholders on their terms whilst maintaining fidelity to customer needs.

I established formal mechanisms for translating research insights into actionable design principles, product requirements, and strategic recommendations. This included the creation of ‘Insights Central’—a centralised repository and analysis framework that commoditised customer understanding across the organisation, dramatically reducing duplicative research efforts whilst improving insight quality.

Leadership Philosophy: Servant Leadership for High-Performance Teams

My leadership approach centred on creating conditions for exceptional performance rather than directing activity. This servant-leadership model (Greenleaf, 1970) proved particularly effective in managing highly distributed, senior design professionals operating across complex problem spaces.

Key practices included:

• Psychological Safety: Establishing environments where disagreement was encouraged, failure was treated as learning, and challenge was viewed as contribution rather than insubordination
• Contextual Empowerment: Providing strategic context and constraints whilst preserving autonomy in execution—the “aligned autonomy” model that balanced coherence with creativity
• Player-Coach Approach: Maintaining hands-on capability whilst operating at leadership level, role-modelling behaviours and remaining credible on craft dimensions
• Radical Transparency: Communicating organisational realities, strategic rationale, and decision-making processes openly, enabling team members to understand not merely what was required but why

Performance outcomes validated this approach: I was the longest-tenured design leader in Amazon Payments, ultimately serving as proxy Global Head of Design & Research—an informal recognition of the capability and credibility the European design organisation had established.

Cross-Functional Integration: Design as Organisational Bridge

Perhaps the most significant impact of the design organisation I built was its function as connective tissue across traditionally siloed domains. By establishing design as the integration point for customer experience across 11 product teams, four banking partners, multiple regulatory bodies, and seven external agencies, I demonstrated design’s capacity to function as strategic orchestration capability.

This integrative function required developing fluency across multiple organisational languages—speaking credibly with engineers about technical constraints, with product managers about business models, with marketing teams about brand positioning, with legal teams about regulatory compliance, and with partners about operational feasibility. The design organisation became the forum where these perspectives were synthesised into coherent customer experiences.

Notably, I served as primary design point-of-contact for four major banking partners and multiple regulatory authorities, representing Amazon’s customer experience standards in high-stakes negotiations and compliance discussions. This elevated design from internal craft function to external-facing strategic capability.

Innovation and Invention: Pioneering New Approaches

Throughout my tenure, I maintained focus on innovation within design practice itself, not merely in product outcomes:

• Figma Adoption: Championed and implemented Figma across Amazon Payment Products, creating the demonstration case that enabled organisation-wide adoption
• Global Think Big Programme: Invented and scaled an innovation programme coordinating design-led initiatives across three continents
• Unified Payments Brand: Led the creation of Amazon’s first coherent payments brand experience, establishing design patterns now deployed globally
• Customer-Obsession Programme: Co-created comprehensive frameworks for systematically building customer understanding across product organisations, addressing the persistent challenge of maintaining customer focus in complex technical environments

These innovations extended design’s impact beyond immediate deliverables, influencing how design work is conducted across Amazon more broadly.

Reflections: Design Leadership in Complex Organisations

This experience reinforced several convictions about effective design leadership in complex organisational contexts:

Design Must Earn Strategic Authority: Authority cannot be claimed; it must be demonstrated through consistent delivery, methodological rigour, and engagement with organisational priorities on their terms.

Complexity Requires Systems Thinking: Operating across 20 products, 13 countries, and multiple regulatory regimes demands approaches grounded in systems science—understanding feedback loops, emergent properties, and interconnection rather than merely optimising individual components.

Leadership is Primarily About Creating Conditions: The highest-leverage leadership activities involve removing obstacles, providing context, establishing standards, and protecting team capacity—not directing specific design decisions.

Evidence Disciplines Intuition: Design intuition remains valuable, but its impact multiplies when supported by rigorous evidence generation and analysis. The most effective design organisations master both.

Scale Requires Systematic Approaches: Craft excellence alone cannot deliver at Amazon scale. Systematic processes, shared frameworks, and explicit standards enable distributed teams to achieve coherent outcomes without centralized control.

Conclusion: From Zero to Strategic Capability

Over four years, I transformed design capability within Amazon Payment Products from non-existent to strategically essential. The design organisation I built delivered measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, business performance, and organisational effectiveness whilst establishing design as a credible strategic partner across the organisation.

This work demonstrated that design leadership in complex, highly-regulated, global organisations requires capabilities extending well beyond traditional craft skills. It demands facility with organisational design, systems thinking, cross-functional integration, evidence generation, and strategic communication—alongside maintaining high craft standards.

The ultimate measure of success lies not merely in the products shipped or metrics improved, but in the institutional capability established. The design organisation I built continues to function as a strategic asset for Amazon Payment Products, with mindset, processes, standards, and practices that outlive individual tenures. This represents design leadership’s most significant contribution: creating self-sustaining capability that continues generating value beyond the founder’s direct involvement.

References

• Greever, T. (2015). Articulating Design Decisions. O’Reilly Media.
• Connor, A. & Irizarry, A. (2015). Discussing Design. O’Reilly Media.
• Greenleaf, R.K. (1970). The Servant as Leader. The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.
• ISO 9241-210:2019. Ergonomics of human-system interaction—Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems.
• ISO 20252:2019. Market, opinion and social research—Vocabulary and service requirements.