Telefónica, a leading global telecommunications company, engaged us to transform their digital customer experiences (for all their 13 brands) and modernise the efficiency of their back-end technology systems
BORN was engaged to create best-in-class end-to-end (E2E) journeys in the lifecycle of Telefónica products. Even with good intentions and ideas, Telefonica was struggling to move fast due to slow / legacy systems - we worked with them to not only update their customer-facing digital experiences, but also modernised back-end technology systems which powered the new and improved experience strategy.
THE CHALLENGE
Telefónica was losing customers on digital channels at rates significantly higher than in-store — not because of one broken journey, but because of a fundamental lack of consistency across 13 brands, four surfaces, and dozens of markets.
Six technology stacks, 15 separate brand style guides, and customer journeys that existed only on paper — with people being directed to call centres for tasks that should have been self-serve. There was no shared design language, no design ops function, and no way to scale quality across 20+ parallel scrum teams working simultaneously.
They needed a transformation. Not just of the product — of how design worked inside the organisation.
Telefonica Germany brands we worked for
MY ROLE
I led as Transformation Lead for Experience Design — part of a 2,000+ person programme team spanning business owners, analysts, developers, and scrum managers across multiple countries and time zones. I built and directed a team of product designers embedded across multiple squads, set the experience strategy for the full programme, and partnered with Telefónica's senior leadership on the global rollout. I established the design system and design ops, developed the Design Guild — a cross-programme design community — and developed the governance model that made delivery at this scale possible.
The first brands to go live — Aldi Talk, Ortel and Blau — proved the model before we scaled it across the full portfolio.
WHAT WE CHANGED
We built a three-tier design system adopted across all 13 brands: a white-label functional base, channel-specific wireframe journeys, and branded UI outputs automated via design tokens and plugins — so foundation designs could be ported to any brand without manual rework. The governing principle: as standardised as possible, as unique as necessary.
We established design ops infrastructure that standardised how 20+ parallel scrum teams worked, handed off, and maintained quality. We redesigned end-to-end customer journeys — including digitising offline and manual processes that had previously required customers to call in — with a specific focus on conversion and retention.
In December 2022, the WhatsApp SIM product launched on the new platform: 150,000 customers from day one, 80 new every day.
THE IMPACT
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Brand launch time dropped from six months to 8–10 weeks
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Abandoned cart completion increased by 60%
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App store ratings improved from 3.2 to consistently above 4 stars — above industry average — across a migration of 30 million customers to public cloud
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Design team productivity improved by 30–40% after design ops was established — measured by output per sprint across 20+ teams.
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Front-end defects in production dropped to zero.
