Adidas

Context:

Adidas is one of the largest sportswear manufacturers in the world. The company needed a B2B solution to manage the end-to-end seasonal product creation process across multiple departments.

Request:

B2B Seasonal Production Platform

Country:

Germany, Indonesia, Hong Kong, USA

My Role:

Product Designer (End-to-End Ownership, Footwear product line) Led the full discovery and design process across global teams (Germany, US, Asia), defining product direction and contributing to the redesign of an existing internal platform.

During the initial workshop, it became clear that stakeholders lacked a shared understanding of their own workflows, responsibilities, and needs.

The initial scope was fragmented, and largely based on assumptions rather than validated insights.

So, we agreed on initial research and I initiated a discovery phase to define the problem space

19 users

40+ hours of interviews

5 departments

3 continents

1 /

user interview

Conducted 19 in-depth interviews across key roles involved in the seasonal process.

Each role included:

recorded interview sessions
transcripts
supporting screenshots and documentation

2 /

synthesis: role-based analysis

All research data was structured into role-based system mappings using Miro.

For each role, I developed:

Personas
User flows
Role-specific artifacts
Pain points and dependencies

3 /

production process mapping

Mapped the full end-to-end seasonal production process across all roles.

This included:

stakeholders and responsibilities
workflows and task flows
communication points
documentation and tools
validation steps
task handovers
edge cases and blockers

This became the first unified view of the system across departments.

4 /

scope definition

Following the discovery phase, we established a clear understanding of:

user roles
needs and expectations
system gaps

This allowed us to define a realistic and structured product scope.

Instead of building a new product from scratch, we reframed the solution: Redesign and adapt the existing B2B platform to better support real user workflows and business needs.

5 /

design approach

Worked within Adidas's established design system, while extending it with new components (validated through Design HQ when required).

Focused on:

end-to-end flows
system consistency
scalability
edge-case handling

6 /

flow design

Designed complete user flows covering:

primary scenarios
alternative paths
edge cases

7 /

visual design

Designed scalable UI patterns and visual solutions to support complex workflows, including forms, data structures, and system interactions.

8 /

usability testing

Conducted regular usability testing sessions after each implementation phase.

This allowed us to:

validate decisions
identify usability issues
continuously improve the product

Timeline:

12 months (Discovery 1+ m)

Team:

2 Product Designers (work in parallel Footwear and Apparel)

Impact:

Brought alignment across 6+ departments and 3 global regions
Created the first unified view of the seasonal production process
Conducted 19 interviews to uncover real workflows and system gaps
Shifted stakeholder mindset from assumption-based to research-driven decisions
Identified key bottlenecks and inefficiencies across the workflow
Reframed product direction from building a new solution to redesigning an existing system
Research artifacts became actively used by internal teams

Adidas taught me that constraint of unclear scope wasn't a problem, it was an opportunity. Walking into a project with no defined requirements and emerging with a system map that the entire organisation wanted to use — that's when I understood what research-led design actually means at enterprise scale.

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