Case studies in design leadership and content operations, with thought leadership on AI, DesignOps, and design systems through the Design Systems Collective, Medium, and podcast features
I am an experienced design leader with over 20 years working across customer experience design, product strategy, front-end development, and design systems at scale. I specialise in aligning user needs, business strategy, and technology to deliver measurable outcomes. My work focuses on governance, experimentation, and data-driven frameworks which improve efficiency and help organisations meet their OKRs.
At VML, I served as Global Platform Design Lead for The Coca-Cola Company, where I led experience design for 1XP, a unified consumer platform which supports a large multi-brand portfolio. I proposed and led the Future Journey Labs programme, bringing in CX, Service Design, and UX Research specialists to explore new opportunities for growth and engagement. These Labs generated reusable insights and artefacts which informed roadmap priorities and OKRs. Concepts ranged from improved onboarding flows through to immersive watch parties, highlight reels, digital scrapbooks, interactive challenges, sports predictions, and loyalty initiatives such as Golden Pass and personalised brand creators.
I also oversaw the development of the TCCC Global Design System in Figma which used tokenisation to balance brand expression with consistency. The platform was built on Adobe Experience Manager as a cloud stack, requiring close collaboration with engineering to ensure parity between design tokens and front-end implementation. Accessibility, performance, and data frameworks were embedded from the outset to enable measurement, iteration, and scalability.
Beyond Coca-Cola, I have contributed to global digital programmes and UX advisory work for EY, Canon, Specsavers, M&G, and The Telegraph as well as a veritable multitude of other clients. These engagements have included design governance, AEM component architecture, metadata frameworks, and content modelling for enterprise-scale CMS environments.
Beyond client delivery, I contribute to industry dialogue on DesignOps, AI, information architecture, analytics, and content operations. I have published articles on Medium, spoken on the Marketing in the Madness podcast, and shared insights through the Design Systems Collective community. These contributions explore how design systems, metadata, and analytics frameworks can be combined to make experiences more scalable, measurable, and accountable to OKRs. My focus is on practical approaches which integrate design governance, content modelling, and experimentation into product strategy.
Simon-Ward-CX-Strategy-Design-Systems-and-Digital-Governance.pdf
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