Building a product-led UX organisation across three motorcycle brands

From UX delivery to organisational capability

KTM's digital landscape was much larger than a collection of websites and apps. As UX Chapter Lead, I was responsible for UX across three Large Solution teams, covering everything from dealer platforms and customer-facing digital experiences to connected applications and increasingly motorcycle HMI.

UX designers had largely operated as an on-demand resource pool across this landscape. I identified the lack of persistent ownership as one of the structural reasons why UX struggled to build domain knowledge and influence decisions consistently. As UX Chapter Lead, I helped replace that model with more sustained integration into cross-functional product teams and clearer responsibility across the three Large Solutions.

At the same time, I grew the KTM design team from four to 11 designers while retaining a dedicated UX researcher. The goal was not simply more design capacity. It was to establish UX as an organisational capability with ownership, specialist expertise and a voice in product development.

Moving UX upstream into discovery and prioritisation

The next maturity barrier was timing. UX creates limited leverage when it enters a project after the feature, scope and investment have already been decided. I therefore pushed for a clearer separation between discovery and delivery and initiated Dual Track Agile as an operating model for product development at KTM.

The framework created space to understand problems, investigate user needs and validate assumptions before teams committed to implementation. It was subsequently adopted and communicated to Product Owners as part of the intended way of working.

I also introduced and promoted GIST product planning and ICE prioritisation, based on Itamar Gilad's frameworks, and helped organise cross-functional Big Room meetings in which features, dependencies and priorities could be discussed across Product, UX, Engineering and other stakeholders. The purpose was not methodology for its own sake. It was to improve the quality of the decisions being made before development capacity was committed.

UX increasingly moved from answering "How should we design this?" to contributing to "What should we build - and why?"

Turning research into decision infrastructure

Better prioritisation required better evidence. Research across the wider organisation was fragmented. Activities were conducted ad hoc by different stakeholders or external partners, findings were not consistently accessible, and there was no central governance or repository connecting accumulated insight to future decisions. Important decisions could therefore be based on assumptions that were difficult to validate afterwards.

Within UX, I worked to establish more systematic research practices and strengthen the role of actual users in discovery and product decisions. I then developed the concept further into a strategic proposal for a dedicated Research Unit combining UX Research and Market Research and serving Product Management, R&D, Business Modelling and other functions. The proposed model covered governance, reporting, budget, specialist roles, recruitment, tooling, a shared research repository and a phased path toward an organisation-wide research capability.

This was a deliberate shift in thinking: from research as individual studies to research as organisational infrastructure for better decisions.

Initiating the KTM Design System

A similar maturity problem existed in design and development. Multiple brands and products repeatedly needed to solve similar interaction and implementation problems. Without a shared foundation, teams duplicated work, handovers remained expensive and maintaining consistency became increasingly difficult.

A Design System was not originally part of the roadmap. I developed the case for why KTM needed one, built organisational support for the initiative and secured the required budget. I then hired dedicated specialists who could turn the concept into a sustainable capability.

My role was not to personally build the component library. It was to initiate and enable the system: making the strategic case, securing investment, establishing the team and continuously advocating for the Design System as shared infrastructure across products and brands. The principle behind it was straightforward: standardise what users should not have to relearn; differentiate what actually defines the brand.

Connecting products through the customer journey

The organisational structure created another challenge: many meaningful experiences did not belong to a single Large Solution. A rider could discover a motorcycle on a brand website, configure it, interact with a dealer, create an account, connect an app and eventually interact directly with the motorcycle through its HMI. Internally, those touchpoints belonged to different products, teams and systems. To the customer, they formed one experience.

I developed a strategic Customer Journey initiative to make those relationships visible across brands, channels and both physical and digital touchpoints. The framework deliberately distinguished between the overall customer lifecycle, individual customer and user journeys, and detailed service blueprints rather than treating journey mapping as a single UX artifact. The objective was not simply to create journey maps. It was to provide a shared model for identifying gaps, understanding dependencies and making better decisions across organisational boundaries.

From UX maturity to better product decisions

None of these changes was an isolated UX initiative. Embedding designers created ownership. Dual Track created space for discovery. Research created evidence. GIST and ICE created structure around prioritisation. Big Room meetings brought disciplines and dependencies into the same decision process. The Design System created reusable product infrastructure. Customer Journey thinking connected experiences that the organisation itself had divided across teams and systems.

Together, they represented a broader maturity shift: UX moved from being primarily a downstream delivery resource toward becoming part of the system through which KTM understood problems, prioritised opportunities and made product decisions.

The transformation was still evolving when my time at LX media ended, and not every part of the organisation had reached the same level of maturity. But the direction had fundamentally changed. UX had moved closer to where its leverage was highest: before the expensive decisions were made.