Upper Funnel Experience

How do you create an online store window that offers new and returning consumers an effortless shopping experience—one that invites engagement through rich storytelling and reinforces brand equity?

  • The Challenge

    The challenge was to reimagine the adidas.com upper funnel as the digital store window to the brand, providing a reason to engage as well as an effortless shopping experience.

    That meant delivering an experience that could scale globally while feeling personal, intuitive, and inspiring.

    At the same time, we needed to evolve how teams were structured, how strategy was executed, and how decisions were made—ensuring the entire organization was set up to continuously deliver impactful, insight-led improvements.

  • My Role

    As domain leader across both product and design, I was responsible for setting the vision, shaping the strategy, and leading the transformation of adidas.com’s upper funnel experience. I owned the business case, P&L commitments, secured executive sponsorship, and steered the product roadmap & GTM practices.

    My focus was on setting up, operationalizing, and scaling the team during a period of significant disruption—including COVID-19 and a major global restructure.

    The upper funnel is the key shopper journey that drives conversion through clear product presentation, inspirational storytelling and expertise and effortless wayfinding + shopping capabilities. Success required building team resilience, aligning regional and global stakeholders, and embedding a consumer-first mindset into our operations.

  • The Results

    ✅ +UPT, +acquisition rate, -returns rate, and improved AOV through targeted upper funnel enhancements

    ✅ Reduced time-to-market for new experiences and improved collaboration across teams

    ✅ Elevated key category and core experiences (e.g. Football, Running, Originals, New visitor vs returning shopper)

    ✅ Increased team satisfaction through stronger culture, autonomy, and outcome ownership

Vision & Strategy

Working with senior leadership, I helped shape an ambitious 5-year vision to attract, engage, and convert new and existing audiences. I led cross-functional strategy workshops to break this down into focused opportunity areas, ensuring alignment between business ambition and the most pressing consumer problems. This gave the team the clarity and direction to move with purpose

Org Design

I led the creation of fully enabled vertical product teams—each combining product, tech, design, and data—to own outcomes across the full product lifecycle. To tackle larger experience challenges (like Size & Fit, Category Experience, and Premium Guided Selling), we also introduced horizontal squads focused on the end-to-end user journey. The result: faster time-to-market, improved ROI, stronger scalability, and a measurable boost in employee NPS.

Coaching & Mentorship

I worked closely with our product owners & designers during the value-stream transition, coaching them on influence, relationship building, and business case development. One standout example was our Size & Fit squad. By focusing on avoidable returns and deadstock from size-based overordering, the PO shifted the narrative and secured executive sponsorship—turning a difficult pitch into a high-priority investment for the C-suite.

Measurement & Outcomes

I partnered with strategy, CRO, research & analytics leads to define KPI ownership across squads, ensuring every initiative had clear & controlable targets (e.g. +UPT, +conversion, +site to PDP). We implemented quarterly KPI health checks and retros to drive continuous improvement and data-informed iteration.

Innovation

I led the integration of AI into our front-end experience, from automated product copy and transcription to GenAI content creation. This work was scaled through the evergreen initiative, where I introduced workflows and governance to embed AI into our content systems - boosting efficiency while improving consistency and SEO performance.

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Design Operations