Customer experience as an operating model.
adidas Global Business Services runs the company's core operations across Finance, Procurement, and HR, from hubs in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. As Manager of GBS Customer Experience, I was responsible for how that organization understood, measured, and improved the experience of everyone it served. I established the systems for listening to partners, defined how experience was measured, and operationalized the connection between research, continuous improvement, and product design. The digital products on this page exist because of that operating model, not the other way around.
The GBS teams the work served, across global hubs.
At a glance
Organization
adidas GBS
My role
Manager, GBS CX
Years
2023-2025
Location
Porto, Portugal
Reach
NA · LATAM · EU · APAC
Mandate
CX strategy to delivery
Scope
A mandate, not a product.
The role was Manager of GBS Customer Experience, Product & Service Design: part of a multidisciplinary team responsible for creating and evaluating digital products, services, and processes with a customer-centred approach, across the functions GBS delivers and the global hubs it delivers from.
Functions served
Areas of responsibility
GBS customers are internal: employees, vendors, business partners, and wholesale customers. They can't choose a competitor, but their experience carries real cost in productivity, errors, and trust. The mandate was to make that experience something the organization could see, manage, and improve.
On site at adidas.
The Challenge
Experience existed. A way of managing it didn't.
Thousands of interactions happened between GBS and its partners every week. What was missing was the connective tissue: a way to hear them, measure them, and turn them into improvement, consistently, across functions and continents.
Feedback with nowhere to go
Partners' pain points surfaced in scattered surveys and conversations, but nothing connected that feedback to action, or to the teams who could act on it.
No shared measure of experience
Without a consistent metric, service quality was an opinion. Leadership couldn't see it, compare it across hubs, or manage it.
Global and genuinely diverse
Teams and partners across NA, LATAM, EU, and APAC had different processes and needs. One-size solutions wouldn't land.
Manual, fragmented operations
Daily management and improvement work ran on spreadsheets, so nothing was real-time, comparable, or easy to build on.
The Customer Experience Ecosystem
One connected system, not a collection of tools.
Nothing on this page was an isolated deliverable. Each initiative is a stage in one loop that runs from listening to partners through to leadership decisions, and back. This is the system I was responsible for establishing and operating.
Voice of the Partner
Continuous listening across every partner that interacts with GBS.
Research & Discovery
Interviews, workshops, and journey mapping to understand the why.
Customer Insights
Signals synthesized into insight reports and dashboards.
Prioritization
Insights weighed with operations and process owners.
Continuous Improvement
Improvements captured, governed, and quantified in the CIT.
Operational Products
Platforms like Digital Daily Management put clarity in daily work.
Measurement & KPIs
CSAT and operational metrics track whether experience improved.
Leadership Decisions
Evidence reaches leadership, and the loop starts again.
The GBS Customer Experience ecosystem: one loop from listening to leadership decisions.
A single CX methodology carried every initiative through that loop, from empathizing and discovery to launch and monitoring, with the iteration paths built in to reframe and redesign when the evidence said so. It was operationalized through four repeatable ways of working: co-creative workshops, CX training, user research, and insights and reporting.
“The products were outputs. The operating model was the work.”
Understanding Customer Needs
Listening became a program, not an event.
I established Voice of the Partner as the program that made listening continuous. The CX team acts as the focal point, integrating business needs, pain points, and goals with research, so intelligence flows from every partner that interacts with GBS, on both a transactional and a relational level. What it revealed shaped everything downstream: where partners lost time, where processes contradicted each other across hubs, and which improvements would matter most.
From signal to shared understanding
Research ran as a discipline: stakeholder interviews, one-on-one sessions with the people doing the work, journey mapping with Global Process Owners, and co-creative workshops that put partners and operations at the same table. The output wasn't activity. It was a shared, evidence-based view of where experience broke down, owned jointly by the teams who could fix it.
Workshops
Co-creative sessions to generate ideas and shape solutions together.
Interviews
One-on-one research with partners and team leaders across regions.
Journey mapping
User journeys evaluated and updated with process owners.
Pain points
Needs and friction collected systematically, not anecdotally.
Measuring Experience
Experience became a number leadership could manage.
I defined measurement in three coordinated tiers, because senior stakeholders, functional partners, and end users each need to be heard differently, at different cadences. CSAT became the shared quantitative measure, always paired with open qualitative feedback, so every number came with the why behind it.
Operational · Tier 1
Transactional CSAT after each solved request. Audience: business partners and end users. Feedback on how to improve service delivery.
Tactical · Tier 2/3
Semesterly partner surveys on services, processes, attributes, and touch points. Audience: functional business partners.
Strategic · Tier 4/5
Feedback and results presentations every six months, with deep-dive workshops to co-create solutions. Audience: senior stakeholders.
Measurement that closes the loop
Every cycle ran research, analysis, co-creation, and delivery, then communicated the actions taken back to the partners who gave the feedback. Results and CSAT scores were published into quarterly performance reviews, so measurement fed leadership routines rather than sitting in a dashboard no one opened.
Research
Collect pain points and needs through surveys and interviews.
Analyze
Measure satisfaction and surface the key drivers behind it.
Co-create
Define solutions with operations and update user journeys.
Deliver
Communicate the actions taken back to business partners.
Driving Continuous Improvement
Feedback became governed, quantified action.
Listening and measurement only matter if they change what the organization does. The CIT Portal is where insight became a backlog: improvement ideas from every hub captured in one place, classified by value stream, quantified in estimated annual savings and effort, and moved through a governed workflow with clear ownership, from SPOC and GPO approval to director sign-off and execution.
Mapped to value streams
Every improvement is classified by value stream and process, from Order to Cash to Source to Pay, so patterns and priorities become visible across hubs.
Quantified upfront
Each item carries estimated annual savings and effort, turning a good idea into a business case leadership can weigh and approve.
Owned end to end
A clear chain of ownership means improvements are governed, not just logged, and the organization can see what it decided and why.
Operational Excellence
The operating model, embedded in daily work.
An operating model only becomes real when it shapes the daily routine. Digital Daily Management is where that happened: the platform team leaders across hubs use to run their teams, replacing spreadsheets with real-time visibility over people, performance, and improvement work. I led its design end to end, as the flagship product of the CX practice. Each screen exists to enable a management decision, not to report a metric.
One home for daily management
Every team, tier, and business area enters through the same front door. The consistency is the point: a shared management routine across a global organization, instead of a patchwork of files that only their authors understood.
Leading people, not just numbers
The People area gives leaders a daily view of the team itself: who's available, how everyone is doing, and where capacity actually stands. The decision it enables: distributing the day's work based on people, not on spreadsheet guesses.
Seeing performance in real time
The QDPI index brings quality, delivery, productivity, and inventory into one legible view, with each KPI carrying a clear target and on-track or off-track status. The decision it enables: where a leader's attention needs to go today, not at the end of the month.
Turning insight into follow-through
The Action Tracker turns what the data shows into owned, dated actions, each tied to a KPI and moving from yet-to-start through to completed, with average time to close in view. The decision it enables: whether improvement is actually happening, and where it's stuck.
Foundations
Standards that let the ecosystem scale.
Products across the ecosystem had to feel like one organization built them. I standardized the design foundations: the adidas Yarn design system was the reference, and where the build environment, Microsoft PowerApps, couldn't support it, we adapted and extended it, redesigning components to fit real technical constraints while holding the adidas visual language.
The result was a modular component library, from color tokens and dashboards to data visualisations and action flows, defined once and reused across the internal products, kept feasible through continuous partnership with developers.
Leadership Decisions
The decisions that shaped the operating model.
Organizational complexity isn't resolved through interfaces. It's resolved through decisions about what to build, on what foundations, and in what order.
Decision 01
Make experience measurable before trying to improve it.
Why
Service quality was an opinion, not a number. Without a shared measure, no one could tell whether a change actually helped.
Trade-off
Standing up CSAT and a survey program is slower than shipping fixes, and asks teams to be measured before they see the benefit.
Outcome
A consistent CSAT measure plus qualitative feedback, giving leadership visibility into experience quality alongside operational metrics.
Decision 02
Design a multi-tier listening system, not a single survey.
Why
Senior stakeholders, functional partners, and end users need to be heard differently, at different cadences.
Trade-off
Three coordinated tiers are more to run and align than one blanket survey.
Outcome
Voice of the Partner: transactional CSAT after each request, semesterly tactical surveys, and strategic reviews, all feeding one flow of insight.
Decision 03
Turn insight into governed, quantified improvement.
Why
Feedback only counts if it leads to action that sticks, with ownership and a business case behind it.
Trade-off
A governed workflow, through SPOC, GPO, qualification, and sign-off, adds process that pure speed would skip.
Outcome
The CIT Portal, where every improvement is tracked across value streams and quantified in estimated annual savings and effort.
Decision 04
Embed the operating model in daily routines, not in reports.
Why
Leaders ran performance and improvement work in spreadsheets, so nothing was real-time or comparable across teams, and CX insight never reached the daily routine.
Trade-off
Adapting the adidas Yarn design system to the PowerApps environment cost more than using stock controls.
Outcome
Digital Daily Management: one platform for people, performance, and improvement, on a reusable, on-brand component library.
Working Across the Organization
The job was alignment at organizational scale.
Global Process Owners & Operations
GPOs own the processes and Operations run them. I operationalized the flow of insight between them and the CX team: they evaluated processes, updated user journeys, identified root causes, and made the improvements stick.
Business partners & hub leaders
Across NA, LATAM, EU, and APAC, I facilitated the alignment sessions, pre-launch engagement, and results reviews that turned partner feedback into priorities the hubs agreed on and acted on.
Engineering
The platforms were built in the adidas environment, so I defined the adapted design standards in continuous partnership with developers, keeping them feasible to implement without losing quality.
Senior stakeholders
I presented results and facilitated deep-dive workshops with senior stakeholders every cycle, positioning experience quality as a business metric so CX decisions were made as business decisions.
Business Impact
A capability the organization kept.
An operating model for CX
A defined methodology, listening program, and measurement framework that made Customer Experience something GBS manages, not something it hopes for.
Insight connected to action
Voice of the Partner feeding the CIT backlog meant partner feedback moved through ownership, business cases, and execution instead of dying in a report.
Clarity embedded in operations
Digital Daily Management put real-time visibility into leaders' daily routines across hubs, on standardized, reusable design foundations.
Reflection
Designing the system, not the screens.
What adidas taught me is that the highest-leverage design work in a large organization isn't a product. It's the connective tissue: the way research, measurement, improvement, and operational products link into one loop that keeps running after you leave the room.
It's the same conviction that runs through British Airways, the NHS, and TitanBay, applied at organizational scale: design earns its influence when it changes how an organization decides, not just how its screens look.
Next Case Study