I lead digital transformation: the processes, platforms and teams that help organisations build the right things faster.

Work arrived without clear requirements, priorities shifted mid-project, and people were moved between projects at short notice. Projects ran late, teams worked in silos, and nobody had one view of the whole portfolio.

I also proposed a project management office for digital development, to drive projects across silos rather than inside them.

Risks were reported every week in the same format, so senior stakeholders could act on them early.

Grundfos was strong at engineering how to build things, but weaker at deciding what to build. Designers worked project by project, and customer insight had no clear home.

I organised the team around five leads, each owning an area: design operations, UX architecture, platform delivery, the design system and business design.

The divisions have taken the insights competency in-house, and the business designer role is becoming permanent in the solutions and marketing areas.

A botanical model can use hundreds of leaf and branch elements. Each one has to look natural, fit the LEGO system, and never clash with the elements around it. Existing parts could not do that.

We designed a platform of flexible elements built on three principles.

The platform has since grown with new elements and is the basis of the LEGO Botanical Collection, including sets such as Flower Bouquet and Bonsai Tree.

We could not control which sets parents bought. We could make the building experience work for the child holding the box.

My team specified the digital building instruction experience: searching for a set, saving a collection, and stepping through each build in a way that suits younger builders. We worked closely with the 3D team that turned each LEGO model into a digital asset for phone and tablet.

At the time, it became LEGO's most downloaded app for children.

Digital was becoming central to Grundfos' strategy, but each division built its apps on its own. The result was an inconsistent experience across touch points, and the same features designed several times over. Designers in projects focused on their project, so nobody owned the whole.

We built the Grundfos Design System from the ground up: one shared library of components, patterns and guidelines that every digital team can use.

A system only works if people use it. We set up platform design leads for each product family, trained the designers in every division, and ran a design community where platform and divisional designers share work.

The function has a clear mandate: KPIs for reuse and compliance, a review of user interfaces at the final development gate, and the right to block designs that break the guidelines.

The same system carried very different products. It gave the industrial monitoring platform its dark interface, adapted to the expectations of users in China for a city flood-monitoring system, and supported both light and dark modes for the homeowner app from one set of assets.

The connected iSOLUTIONS Suite won a Red Dot award for user interface design, where I am credited with the Grundfos China team, and an iF Design Award. The design system is now used across Grundfos' digital products, including MAGNA, SCALA1 and MIXIT. My team is testing GDS Studio, an AI proof of concept that turns design system assets straight into working code. In our team survey, the design system was the work people were most proud of.

We set up a shared platform, built on Dovetail, with one way of tagging and describing research. Interviews, field visits, sales notes and trade-show observations go in as raw material. They are structured, turned into insights for a domain, and finally into global insights that hold across divisions.

We trained every division and took the platform from a pilot to company infrastructure. It is now moving to IT as a standard tool, with an insights manager proposed in each division so the divisions own their own use.

The platform is being integrated into Grundfos' PLM system, linking what customers need to what gets built.

Requirements arrived at the start of development unclear or incomplete. Teams waited on each other, reworked what others had built, and documented in different ways. It was hard to trace a feature back to the customer need behind it.

We defined one reference model from strategy to phase-out, with clear gates and what each gate needs. Before development starts, a project must show readiness on three fronts: the business case, the customer need, and the technology.

With the project management office, we modelled the new process, redefined the development gates, updated the templates and gate checklists, and trained technical and business product owners. I sat on the leadership team that ran the gate reviews.

We also moved from SAFe to a dual-track delivery model, so discovery and delivery run side by side and software, hardware and design work the same way.

Business designers, a new role at Grundfos, are now becoming permanent in the solutions and marketing areas.

As interim Head of AI, I set priorities for the AI portfolio, introduced Scrum and brought UX into AI development. The aim was simple: solve real customer problems, not run experiments for their own sake. Use cases included predicting sewer overflows, estimating flow in water networks and finding leaks.

I secured a two-year extension of the strategic AI budget from Group Management, beyond my own time in the role. I also argued that AI and UX belong together, and Grundfos is adopting that model from 2027.

With Group Management, I helped put Grundfos' first AI policy and guidelines in place. For R&D, the standard sets out which tools are approved, when a proof of concept needs sign-off, and how we measure speed, quality and cost.

The agent pilots and GDS Studio are still running. I will share results as they come in.