Kuehne+Nagel is one of the world's largest logistics companies, with 77,000+ employees operating globally. Yet when we started, design maturity was near zero. There were no design systems, no centralised design team, no design governance, and almost no understanding of design's strategic value. Individual product teams were making design decisions in isolation, resulting in fragmented, inconsistent user experiences across customer-facing and internal platforms.
The design challenge was existential and organisational: How do you build design capability from scratch in a 160-year-old logistics company? How do you establish design governance without creating bureaucracy? How do you hire and onboard designers? How do you build executive buy-in for design investment? How do you create design maturity as a journey rather than a destination?
We needed to establish a four-level design maturity model—Aware, Structured, Integrated, Strategic—and execute a systematic transformation that would evolve from recognising design as a value-add, to embedding design in product teams, to driving business outcomes through design-led innovation. This required simultaneous work on design operations, team building, process design, governance frameworks, and executive alignment.
"Design maturity isn't a destination — it's a discipline. You don't arrive; you iterate."