I was personally recruited by SAP Co-Founder and Chairman Hasso Plattner, to solve a problem that most executives would have struggled to name. SAP had grown from a company whose co-founders spent most of their time with customers into a 60,000-person organization where almost nobody did. The distance between the people building SAP's products and the people using them had become the primary constraint on meaningful innovation.
When Plattner encountered Design Thinking and connected with the work David Kelley was doing at Stanford, he went looking for someone who had applied it at scale in industry. That search led to me.
He recruited me personally to establish and lead a new team focused on organizational transformation focused on embedding Design Thinking, not just in the design of SAP’s products but to embed customer-centricity into SAP's development processes, go-to-market strategies, leadership culture, and organizational DNA.
SAP
Navigating Resistance
I established the Design Services Team as a 35-person global organization blending internal SAP talent with external experts, scaling within two years to a network of more than 100 dotted-line contributors across the organization.
Not everyone welcomed the transformation we were leading. SAP's existing UX leadership saw the Design Services Team as a political threat rather than a complementary capability. The tension required direct intervention. I brought the head of UX into a meeting with Plattner, who was unambiguous: the two teams served different functions. The UX organization owned product interfaces. The Design Services Team owned the organizational transformation. If the UX team supported the mission the way engineering, sales, and marketing were doing, they would be better positioned to deliver value within their own domain. The conflict was resolved.
Converting the CEO
Henning Kagermann, SAP’s CEO, was skeptical. While reported to Henning I really worked for Hasso. Henning’s background was technical (Ph.D. in physics) and financial and a methodology presentation was never going to move him. So we showed him instead.
Applying design thinking to the contracting process of one of SAP's divisions, we identified friction points and redundancies the process owners had stopped seeing years ago. The redesigned process saved $6 million in its first year. Kagermann was convinced. From that point the transformation had the active support of both the chairman and the CEO.
The work
With organizational alignment secured the Design Services Team moved across SAP at scale. We led redesigns of core product suites including SAP ByDesign, rebuilt around actual customer workflows, improving customer satisfaction by 17%, and the HCM suite, modernized for distributed workforces, increasing bookings by 4%. We embedded multidisciplinary teams with strategic customers including Siemens, Coca-Cola, and Steelcase, delivering more than 40 co-innovation projects with measurable business impact.
We redesigned SAP's go-to-market approach for SAP A1S, replacing traditional sales enablement with live sandboxes and trial experiences, increasing top-of-funnel growth by 11%. I established SAP's first innovation incubator in Palo Alto, which became the blueprint for the global SAP AppHaus network. And we built a train-the-trainer capability that grew into a global network of more than 3,000 design thinking coaches across sales, support, development, and partner organizations.
The Stanford d.school
The work at SAP was always connected to something larger. As the Design Services Team was building SAP's internal transformation, Plattner and I worked with David Kelley to help shape the The Hasso Plattner Institute for Design, or d.school for short, and later its sister institution, the School of Design Thinking at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam. What SAP was doing internally, the d.school was making available to the world.
What we delivered
Customer satisfaction for SAP ByDesign improved 17%.
HCM suite bookings increased 4%.
The A1S sandbox GTM increased top-of-funnel growth 11%.
The Business Objects contracting redesign saved $7.3 million in year one.
More than 40 co-innovation projects delivered measurable impact for SAP's most strategic accounts. And SAP's market perception shifted from legacy enterprise provider to recognized innovation leader, with coverage in Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and the Financial Times.
The AppHaus network continues to operate globally. The Stanford d.school and the HPI School of Design Thinking continue to shape how the next generation of leaders approaches complex problems.
My role
Plattner recruited me because he needed someone who had done this before: applied design thinking at scale, inside a real organization, against real business problems, with measurable results.
I built the Design Services Team from inception and scaled it to global reach. I directed more than 40 customer-facing projects. I navigated the internal resistance that every transformation of this scale encounters, brought the right conflicts to the right people, and kept the mission intact. I worked with Plattner and Kelley to help found the Stanford d.school and the HPI School of Design Thinking. I laid the foundation for the AppHaus global network. And I left behind an organization with 3,000 internal coaches, a global innovation infrastructure, and a fundamentally different relationship with its customers than the one I had found when I arrived.
That is what organizational design leadership actually looks like.
D E E P D I V E
Torrent: Prototyping Strategy
Most corporate strategy presentations share the same fundamental flaw: they describe a future that nobody in the room can yet see. Slide decks and documents communicate intent, but they cannot make consequences tangible. Leaders leave the room having agreed to a direction without fully understanding what they have committed to — or what they stand to lose if the assumptions behind it are wrong.
The Torrent project started from a different premise.
SAP's CEO Henning Kagermann asked the Design Services Team to collaborate with the Corporate Strategy Group to develop the next generation of SAP's Strategy Enterprise Management System, a highly visible product used by C-level customers that had not been updated in years. The initial research made the problem immediately clear: business practices had evolved well beyond what the existing system could support, and the organizations SAP served had already moved on. They had embraced the principles of Web 2.0 — RSS feeds, wikis, mobile, chat, desktop widgets, collaboration tools — within their own products and services. SAP's SEMS was selling a yesterday's model of how strategy worked to customers who were already living in tomorrow's.
Early in the project the team asked a harder question than "what should the new system do?" They asked what made strategy presentations actually work: what made them stick, what made the consequences legible before commitments were made, and what separated the strategic conversations that changed organizations from the ones that produced polished documents and no meaningful change.
The answer pointed clearly toward making the strategy tangible.
Not describing it.
Demonstrating it.
The team built a working prototype not of a product by the strategy.
The prototype did two things simultaneously. It laid out how SAP could evolve the SEMS solution to meet current customer needs, with a modular architecture that allowed organizations to choose both their approach to defining strategy and their approach to measuring its impact, including embedded performance tracking across Microsoft's product line through SAP's existing partnership. And it went further: using the SEMS project as a lens, the prototype mapped the broader implications of Web 2.0 for SAP's entire business suite, providing a concrete roadmap for how Supply Chain, HCM, CRM, Finance, and the rest of the portfolio could evolve to a modular, Web 2.0 architecture before the point solutions being built by smaller, faster competitors made the question moot.
The board update was scheduled for thirty minutes.
Three hours later the conversation was still going. Board members who had come prepared to receive a product update were instead working through the strategic implications of what the prototype had made visible: the competitive threat, the opportunity, and the consequences of moving or not moving. The session ended with a change in SAP's strategic priorities.
That outcome was not an accident. It was the result of a deliberate methodological choice grounded in research: that the most important decisions benefit from demonstration rather than description, and that design thinking's greatest contribution to organizational strategy is not making the future look good on a slide but making it feel real enough to decide.
The project was later published in the Journal of Business Strategy under the name MorningStorm — renamed for publication since Torrent was in wide use across the company at the time. read the article here