The Shell Chapter
Some engagements leave a mark. Shell was one of those.
I joined Shell at a moment when Experience Design did not formally exist inside the organisation. What followed was six years of building, from the ground up, at scale, inside one of the most complex organisations on the planet.
The brief was simple enough on paper. The reality was something else entirely. Building a design function inside a global energy company means navigating competing priorities, deeply embedded ways of working, and the kind of institutional inertia that defeats most attempts at change before they begin.
We did not let it.
Building a design function at the scale Shell required was itself an act of design. The approach was never to deliver design outputs and hope the organisation would follow. It was to design the capability as a service in its own right, with the organisation as its user. Every element had a purpose within a larger system. The methodology defined how design engaged with product delivery. The career pathway gave practitioners a visible future. DesignOps provided the infrastructure. The Experience Academy built the culture. The Shell Design System gave the whole organisation a shared language. Each one depended on the others. None of it worked in isolation.
The principles running through all of it were the principles of service design, applied one level up. Making the invisible visible. Understanding the system before attempting to change it. Building front stage credibility on back stage infrastructure. Iterating continuously rather than delivering once. The object of design was the design function itself. That is what made it last.
By the time I left, Shell had a world-class Experience Design capability. Hundreds of practitioners across Asia, Europe and North America. A design system built to enterprise standards with accessibility at its foundation. Teams that did not just deliver. They influenced strategy, shaped product direction and changed how the business thought about its people and its customers.
This page is not a case study. It is an account of what was built, how it was built, and the people who built it with me.
It's been said that Ben Jones the brilliant illustrator we had, based the character to the right on me…. Lets just say I'd be flattered if that was the case.
Interested in how these principles can be applied with AI inside your organisation? Register your interest.
Purpose
Assess
Every environment has its own logic and its own unwritten rules. The first job is to read it accurately.
Strengthen
Making the invisible visible is half the work. The other half is making sure the right people are in the room when it happens.
Nurture
Budgets follow belief, and belief follows evidence. Show what worked, what it cost and what would have been lost without it.
Strategy
What we built
Five foundations. Methodology. Career pathway. DesignOps. The Experience Academy. The Shell Design System. Each one written, built, and operationalised from scratch.
Full documentation is available on request.
Methodology
Design without a shared language is just opinion. The Experience Design Methodology gave Shell a clear, agreed framework for when and how design engages with product delivery. What to do in Discovery. What to do in Delivery. Which type of designer to deploy at each stage and what they would be accountable for producing. From first conversation to post-launch support, every step defined, every role clear.
Career pathway
Talent leaves when it cannot see a future. The Experience Design Career pathway gave every practitioner in the function a clear view of where they were, where they could go, and what getting there required. Two tracks — technical leadership and management — with defined competencies at every level from Associate to Distinguished Designer. Grounded in both practical skill and academic achievement. Built to retain the best and develop the rest.
Design Ops
Scale breaks things that worked at small size. DesignOps was introduced as the operational backbone of the function — the governance, structure, tooling and process that allowed a design capability spanning hundreds of practitioners across multiple geographies to function as one coherent practice. A dual-track agile model. Figma as the approved enterprise tool. Standardised workflows, defined roles and a consolidated application landscape. The infrastructure that made everything else possible.
The Experience Academy
Good design capability dies quietly when the organisation around it does not understand what design is for. The Experience Academy was the internal vehicle for evangelism and education — turning practitioners into advocates and giving the wider business the language and the confidence to engage with design. Talks, workshops, learning programmes and community. The cultural engine of the function.
The Shell Design System
Before the Shell Design System SDS had a dedicated team, the work had already begun. Across the organisation, I had unearthed over forty disparate design systems which had accumulated. Each one a product of isolated decisions made without a shared standard. Understanding how that had happened was the first task. Rationalising it was the second. The goal was to bring that number down to two, or three at most. When it became possible to give SDS its own dedicated team, the system had something to build from. A small, focused group took ownership, nurturing it from a rationalisation exercise into a governed, enterprise-scale capability.
The Shell Design System gave the entire organisation a single, governed visual and interaction language built to enterprise standards with accessibility at its foundation. Over 40 components built in both Figma and React, rigorously tested for accessibility and structured to meet WCAG AA 2.2 standards out of the box. The estimated annual cost saving to the business exceeded $2.5 million.
What is a design system?
An introduction to what a design system is, why it exists, and what it gives an organisation.
What is a design system?
An introduction to what a design system is, why it exists, and what it gives an organisation.
How does SDS help?
How the Shell Design System supports teams to move faster, more consistently, and with greater confidence.
Where can I find SDS?
Where to access the Shell Design System, its components, documentation, and the team behind it.
