Johnnie Walker

How I led the transformation of the digital team from an activation & service team to a key growth-driver for the brand

SKILLS User Journey Mapping | Workshop facilitation | Vision & Strategy | Data-led decision making | Prototyping | Product leadership

  • The Challenge

    I joined the Jonnie Walker team as they prepared for their new financial year. After decades of brand & commercial growth, the business was facing declining sales & poor profitibility.

    My challenge was to re-focus the team on strategic growth drivers, right-size the digital-org and foster a system-led approach to product & design.

  • My Role

    As the head of Product & Consumer data I was accountable for the end-to-end digital consumer journey, leading a x-functional team of freelancers & agencies to design, develop & operationalise the digital experience, campaigns & content engines. I acted as both Head of Product and hands-on UX lead, defining strategy while directly shaping design and research work with the team.

    Building the strategy - Understanding the biggest consumer & business opportunities and how we can realise them.

    Securing stakeholder buy-in - Partnering with brand & market stakeholders to prioritise & fund key initiatives.

    Optimising the org - organising the team in to key value-streams and embedding an adoption-first focus with Diageo digital capabilities.

    Continuous delivery & optimisation - balancing quick-wins with longer-term transformational programs, ensuring progress & credibility with leadership.

  • The Results

    ✅ -30% reduction in agency spend


    ✅ +15% NS increase vs last year through market rollout


    ✅ +20% market adoption due to improved stakeholder engagement

User Journey Mapping

I needed to build a clear PoV on digital opportunities in the first 30 days, to make sure I could secure stakeholder & leadership buy-in before the new financial year. By mapping out the current consumer journey I was able to identify:

Highlights

+Brand Storytelling & evergreen content

+Paid social & wholesale presence

+Product presentation

Frustrations

-Hard to find & compare products

-Disconnected journey from social to onsite experience

-One-size fits all approach to product presentation (€40 vs €20,000)!

Insights & Learnings

Now that I had a good understanding of the current consumer journey, I worked with analytics, research and business stakeholders to understand key challenges and impact, using the following methods:

Generative research - research interviews to probe opportunity spaces and understand key frustrations.

Analytics reporting - working with analytics to build-out funnel reports so that we could understand consumer behaviours, identify breaks in the experience and understand commercial impact.

Competitor analysis - Comparing competitor websites and identifying new industry trends to understand easy-wins & upcoming opportunities.

Market learnings - Working with CRO & markets to understand business opportunities and existing learnings through previous a/b tests and commercial reports.

Synthesis workshop - Leading a x-functional workshop to agree on our ambition and opportunity spaces.

Set a clear vision & strategy

With a clear understanding of our biggest opportunities and strategic priorities I led a x-functional workshop to set a long-term vision and worked with the team to build out a strategy that brakes down complex challenges in to focused & achievable outcomes.

My goal was to give the team the clarity on what success looks like without micro-managing tasks. Based on this I chose to use an opportunity solution-tree framework which:

  • Focuses on outcomes over output

  • Gives a clear definition of what success looks like

  • Sets controlable KPIs with ambitious targets

  • Balances quick-wins with longer term outcomes

from wireframe to hi-fidelity prototype

Show & tell

In order to build confidence in our vision we we quickly went in to prototyping in order to:

Build credibility & excitement with internal stakeholders

Validate concepts with real consumers

X-functional alignment ensuring solutions are feasible from a tech & operations perspective

Build > launch > learn > iterate

Throughout the product design process, I foster a culture of collaboration & understanding between product x design x tech. With a shared ambition and a clear view of what success looks like I encourage the team to take calculated risks and focus on opportunities that deliver the biggest impact.

My main aim is to build, validate & iterate new capabilities with our consumers. I would rather fail-fast & improve rather than aim for perfection and never progress!

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Design Operations