SAP Design Services Team
Overview:
Hired by Hasso Plattner, Co-founder and Chairman of SAP, as a VP in the Office of the CEO, to lead a global organizational transformation to embed Design Thinking into the company’s DNA from performance metrics through development processes.
I worked directly with Hasso and Henning Kagermann, CEO of SAP to drive an organizational transformation program embedding design thinking throughout all aspects of SAP’s 60,000-person development, sales and consulting services. This work led to the establishment of the global SAP AppHaus program.
Working directly with the Executive Board I redesigned the development organization, development processes, performance-based metrics, and the physical work environments.
Leveraging my previous time at Stanford, I work with Hasso and the University to establish of the Stanford d.school, from initial funding to formalization, as well as its sister program, and then later we established the School of Design Thinking at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam Germany.
Responsibilities:
Build out a multi-disciplinary team to collaborate with key stakeholder groups
Develop transformation plan that included projects (internal & external), training programs, processes and performance metrics
Work with Executive Leadership to integrate Design Thinking within their staff and orgs.
Deliverables:
40+ successful projects delivered
Drove the reorganization of three core BU’s
Created three net-new products
Defined one of the first Design Thinking + Agile process integrations
Established global DT training program
Impact:
What began as a design initiative transformed into a multi-billion‑dollar strategic lever. By repurposing design principles toward business goals—scalable workshops, executive-aligned prototypes, and embedded performance metrics—SAP shifted from a software vendor to an innovation leader. Design Thinking became not just a mindset, but a hard driver of growth, efficiency, and market relevance.
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.
The original five step Design Thinking model IDEO developed, and later adopted by Stanford’s d.school, was created to share the basic principles of user-centered design, empathy and rapid prototyping. At SAP we evolved and expanded that model to include the additional steps necessary to ensure both the 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.
