From commercial strategy to north star vision design

Client: Zalando Lounge, the retail club of Zalando, offering daily limited-time sales on fashion and lifestyle products across Europe.

Project: North Star Vision Design, UX & Strategy Activation, 2020–2021.

My Role: Lead UX Designer & Strategist across 8 product teams and 100+ stakeholders.

Impact

Workshop score 4.8/5 across 8 product teams.
5-7 big bet ideas per product team embedded into the roadmap.
High-fidelity north star prototype delivered — aligning 100+ stakeholders on one shared vision.
Zalando Lounge app reached an all-time high of ~1 million downloads following the launch of the first iteration built on this north star vision.

Context

In 2020, Zalando Lounge launched an ambitious 3-year product strategy. The vision included eight distinct opportunity areas, each entrusted to a dedicated product team.

I was brought in to lead the design strategy and hands-on UX work—structuring the methodology, facilitating customised workshops, designing the north star prototype, and translating commercial strategy into tangible user experience vision.

The Approach

I designed a bespoke ideation methodology to help eight product teams envision the product three years ahead. Each team worked through structured workshop sessions — defining their opportunity area, generating big bet ideas, and aligning on a shared direction across groups of up to 15 people.

In parallel, I worked hands-on as the UX designer on one of the product streams — leading a senior product designer, running user research, and designing and testing interaction concepts. This dual role meant I was both shaping the overall vision and staying close to the real UX challenges teams were navigating day to day.

The outputs from all eight teams fed into a single coherent north star prototype — a high-fidelity, interactive experience vision that brought the 3-year strategy to life as something tangible that product, engineering, and leadership could all rally around.