Personally recruited by SAP Co-Founder and Chairman Hasso Plattner, I was brought in to lead a company-wide transformation embedding customer-centricity into the DNA of SAP’s global operations. Partnering directly with Plattner and then-CEO Henning Kagermann, I launched and scaled a design thinking initiative that reshaped SAP’s products, processes, and culture, repositioning the company from an enterprise software incumbent to a recognized innovation leader. The Design Services Team worked across the organization, as well as with SAP customers and partners, to deliver business value by blending customer needs and emerging technologies. The resulting organizational transformation changed both SAP’s brand, its portfolio, and its bottom line. Additionally, the Design Services Team played a key role in establishing the Stanford d.school, and its sister program at HPI in Potsdam.
SAP Design Services Team
Challenge
SAP had grown into a global powerhouse, but its processes and culture were engineering-driven, leaving it disconnected from customer needs. The challenge was to:
Reorient SAP’s product development and go-to-market strategies around customer value.
Demonstrate measurable business impact through co-innovation projects with top customers.
Scale customer-centric practices across a 60,000+ person organization while evolving recruiting, training, and workplace design.
Transform SAP’s public perception into that of an innovation leader.
Solution
To drive the transformation, I established the Design Services Team (DST), a 35-person global organization blending internal SAP talent with external experts. Within two years, the team scaled through a network of over 100 dotted-line contributors, enabling broad organizational reach. Our approach combined hands-on project delivery, leadership coaching, and structural change to embed customer-centricity into SAP’s operations.
40+ Product Redesigns – We applied design thinking methods to SAP’s core product suites, running deep user research, iterative prototyping, and co-creation workshops with customers. By starting from actual customer workflows, we rebuilt ByDesign (HANA) and the HCM suite around modern business practices and evolving team dynamics.
Customer Co-Innovation – We partnered directly with strategic customers like Siemens, Coca-Cola, and Steelcase, embedding multidisciplinary teams on-site. Using facilitated workshops and rapid prototyping, we reframed their business challenges and co-developed solutions, demonstrating the value of customer-centered development inside and outside SAP.
New Go-to-Market Motions – Instead of relying on traditional sales enablement, we designed experience-driven GTM strategies. For SAP A1S, this meant creating live sandboxes, online communities, and trial experiences that allowed prospects to engage with the product hands-on before committing.
Infrastructure for Innovation – To institutionalize the practice, I created SAP’s first “incubator” in Palo Alto, creating physical and cultural space for experimentation. This became the blueprint for SAP’s AppHaus network, establishing hubs worldwide where teams and partners could explore and scale new ideas.
Capability Building – We designed a “train-the-trainer” framework, equipping SAP leaders and employees to coach their peers in design thinking. This cascaded knowledge organically, building a global network of more than 3,000 internal coaches across sales, support, and development.
Academic Partnerships – To ground the movement in broader thought leadership, I collaborated with Hasso Plattner and David Kelley to shape the early Stanford d.school and later the School of Design Thinking at HPI in Potsdam. These institutions provided both inspiration and credibility for SAP’s design-led transformation.
Results
Product Redesigns – Led end-to-end redesigns of core suites like SAP ByDesign (HANA), improving its customer satisfaction by 17%, and SAP’s HCM suite which was modernized for distributed workforces, increasing its bookings by 4%.
Customer Co-Innovation – Delivered 40+ projects with partners including Siemens, Coca-Cola, and Steelcase. For Business Objects, redesigning the contracting process alone saved $7.3M in the first year.
New Go-to-Market Motions – Designed a sandbox-driven GTM for SAP A1S that increased top-of-funnel growth by 11%.
Infrastructure for Innovation – Founded SAP’s first incubator in Palo Alto, which evolved into the global SAP AppHaus network.
Capability Building – Established a global train-the-trainer program, creating a network of over 3,000 Design Thinking coaches across sales, support, development, and partners.
Academic Partnerships – Worked with Hasso Plattner and David Kelley to establish the Stanford d.school and later the School of Design Thinking at HPI in Potsdam, shaping the future of design-led enterprise education.
Cultural Transformation – Embedded design thinking into SAP’s development processes, KPIs, hiring practices, performance assessments, and workplace design.
Market Perception – Shifted SAP’s brand from “legacy enterprise provider” to innovation leader, with recognition in Fast Company, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and the Financial Times.
Innovation Infrastructure – Built the blueprint for SAP’s AppHaus innovation hubs worldwide.
Education & Influence – Helped found global institutions (Stanford d.school, HPI School of Design Thinking) that continue to influence enterprise innovation practices.
My Role
As Global Head of Design Services:
Defined and drove SAP’s customer-centric transformation strategy.
Built and scaled the DST team from inception to global reach.
Directed 40+ customer-facing projects with measurable impact.
Redesigned SAP’s development processes and success metrics around customer value.
Spearheaded SAP’s adoption of an incubator model, and laid the foundation for the AppHaus global network.
I worked with Hasso Plattner and David Kelley to help establish the Stanford d.school and later the HPI School of Design Thinking in Potsdam, creating academic anchors that reinforced SAP’s design-led transformation with global credibility and thought leadership.
Rewriting the company DNA
It all began with an magazine article, a keynote, a phone call…
Hasso Plattner, Chairman and Co-Founder of SAP, and David Kelley, IDEO’s Chairman and Founder, were connected following Hasso’s 2004 SAPPHIRE keynote, where he referenced a Business Week cover story on the power of design featuring IDEO. Hasso had long wanted SAP to reconnect directly with their end users, the employees, analysts and consultants who were in the software day-to-day. After meeting with David and the team at IDEO, Hasso requested that SAP create their own in-house IDEO. In 2004 I was recruited by the Office of CEO to establish the Design Services Team. In the first year I grew the team from 3 people to 40 designers, business analysts, engineers, psychologists.
Our goal was simple: instill in the SAP culture two basic principles: empathy, to allow everyone to understand the real people using SAP’s solutions, their emotions, goals, and needs that must addressed; and rapid prototyping to develop quick and cheap solutions that could be updated quickly, at limited costs, in response to users’ feedback and suggestions.
Over a four year period I worked directly with Hasso and Henning Kagermann, CEO of SAP, driving an organizational transformation to embed Design Thinking throughout all aspects of SAP’s development, sales and consulting services. I worked with the Executive Board to redesign the development organization, SAP’s development processes, their performance metrics, and even their physical work environments. Over time my role expanded and I gained 120 dotted line reports across the company to assist in my team’s mission.
To accomplish this transformation we defined a multi-pronged approach to demonstrate, teach, and scale design across the organization.
We delivered over 40 projects to demonstrate the impact of Design Thinking and role that empathy and rapid prototyping play in delivering increased value while decreasing time to market.
We established a global training program, leveraging similar Design Thinking efforts at P&G, Kaiser Permanente, Nestle, Kraft, Steelcase and others. Over four years we trained thousands of SAP team members and established a global network of certified facilitators and coaches with the capacity to run over 250 workshops per year.
Through this work we embedded Design Thinking into the day-to-day practices for the development teams, their development planning and delivery processes, performance metrics and acceptance criteria. And we engaged with number of SAP’s top customers to develop solutions for their businesses, train their leadership on Design Thinking, and lead consulting engagements on behalf of SAP’s professional services group.
Today SAP continues to be a leader in the practice of Design Thinking, with their AppHaus network, DT certification programs, and design-led development frameworks.
At SAP we evolved and expanded the original five step Design Thinking model IDEO developed, and later adopted by Stanford’s d.school.
This model was created to share the basic principles of user-centered design, empathy and rapid prototyping along with the realities of product development.
The resulting model includes the additional steps necessary to ensure both the long-term business success of the solutions, as well as the realities of software development.
Torrent
SAP’s CEO Henning Kagermann asked my team to collaborate with the Corporate Strategy Group to develop the next generation Strategy Enterprise Management System for the SAP Business Suite. This solution, while a highly visible touchpoint for SAP c-level customers, had not been updates for several years.
During the initial research with customers and industry leaders, it was clear that business practices had evolved beyond the capabilities of the SAP’s SEMS. We also observed that many of these organizations had embraced the principles of Web 2.0 (RSS, wiki’s, mobile, chat, desktop widget, collaboration tools, etc.) within their own products and services.
We developed a modular suite that allowed organizations to choose both their approach for defining their strategy, as well as for measuring its impact. This included leveraging our partnership with Microsoft to embed and track performance metrics across their product line. Additionally, looking at the broader implications for Web 2.0 and the ERP Suite, we used this project to create a tangible strategy for why and how SAP should evolve its entire business suite to follow a similar modular, Web 2.0 architecture. Our prototype not only laid out how we could evolve the SEMS solution, it also provided a roadmap for the evolution of the entire SAP Suite from Supply Chain, through HCM, CRM, and Finance, etc. The update to the Executive Board was slated for 30 mins, however as members of the board started to dig into the larger picture, their discussion ran over three hours and changed the strategic priorities for the company.
Delivering the product strategy in the form a prototype allowed the Torrent team to align the organization universally around the concepts of Web 2.0 and the disruption it would have on SAP’s ability to remain competitive against point solutions being sold by smaller companies. In 2009, the Journal of Business Strategy published an article about this project (Since Torrent was in wide us within the company, for the publication we renamed project MorningStorm).
Gateway
Following the Torrent presentation, Executive Board Member and Global Head of HR, Claus Heinrich, asked my team to showcase the Web 2.0 principles to overhaul SAP’s Performance and Compensation solutions. This was cosponsored by Shai Agassi, EBM and Global Head of Development given SAP’s HCM suite was facing serious competition from emerging players (ie. PeopleSoft, Workday, etc.) his goal was to create a more competitive solution for the market.
Working with our Human Resources Department, and with a cross section of customers, industry thought leaders and consultants, we kicked off the project. At the same time we also tapped SAP’s HR Leadership to identify bureaucratic bottlenecks, corporate objectives and regulatory issues in the EU, Asian and North America.
We developed a wiki like solution allowing employees to draft and share their performance objectives with managers and colleagues, the system also integrated data from the ERP suite (ie. bug tracking, CRM stats, Supply Chain analytics, even the Strategy Enterprise Management System (ie. Torrent), etc.) to allow employees to leverage both qualitative and quantitative data to show their contribution as well as its impact. With the wiki backbone in place employee and their manager could edit, update and comment on the plan over time—with all the edits time stamped and tracked. Likewise portions of their plan could be shared with colleagues for feedback, rating input, and dependency tracking. Integrations with Microsoft allowed for direct input from Outlook, Project, OneDrive, etc.
Analytic dashboards and notifications enabled employees to track their performance and any changes that could impact their meeting objectives. The dashboard also gave managers and executives a clear overview of the full organization’s progress.