Toyota Connected Europe had no digital design capability. Products moved through waterfall cycles with no consistent research, no discovery and no experience ownership. Design was bought in from agencies and treated as a downstream service, called in after the decisions had already been made.

The brief I set myself was to make design something the business could not run without.

I built the function from nothing and ran it for seven years across Europe, Japan and North America, with full P&L accountability. Every designer was paid for by an engagement I had won, and the function reached £10m internal revenue in its peak year.

Design becomes a core competency or it becomes a cost line, and the difference is whether design leadership can talk about margin as fluently as it talks about craft.

Service design did not exist anywhere in Toyota that I could find.

When I arrived, the app belonged to the marketing and growth side of the business, which had handed the whole thing to an agency. No UX research had been done. My team's first job was UI design in support of Connected Technologies, the product division TXD served as an internal client.

Service design came out of that ownership. Once Connected Technologies owned the European companion app, the points either side of it belonged to other divisions and nobody was accountable for the joins. Working with those divisions is what made service design possible to introduce.

A disjointed end-to-end experience is usually a faithful reflection of a disjointed business.

I made the case for service design and hired service designers into a company that had never employed one. They built the blueprints, the reusable service patterns and the playbooks. The bigger change was that business units which had never designed anything together started working on the same journey. They still do. Design leaders in Toyota North America asked how I had got it established and could not repeat it in their own organisation.

I ran the function as an internal consultancy, with a published service catalogue and four engagement models, from long-term embedded partnerships to short innovation sprints. Quality had a written definition and was checked inside client delivery. DesignOps took the operational work off the designers. Service design became an internal service with its own price, so programmes could request it directly. I led European Accessibility Act governance across the whole function and turned compliance into a paid service.

When our largest programme closed overnight, taking its revenue and team structure with it, I ran a retrospective that became the standard method for every client transition after it.

For my first three or four years I ran our largest team myself, as its design manager, while also running the function. As the function grew I could no longer do both. I hired two design managers to run the teams day to day, with design leads inside each product team, and we agreed in writing what each of us owned.

When executives wanted to understand a specific change, I brought the designer who had made it. They knew the detail better than I did, and it gave them time with senior leadership.

Designers were embedded in client teams across three regions, often working alone. Cohesion was the hardest thing to sustain. I ran town halls, a cross-team leads forum, showcases and the annual listening cycle to hold a distributed team together.

We got design into the Connected Technologies strategy team, which owned the first gate of the delivery pipeline. Strategic research and service design became the entry condition for any product or service idea, and roadmaps and investment decisions started from the problem set my team curated.

I built the strategic case for a federated global design system and took it to executive level, one of two design system initiatives across Toyota worldwide.

A principal designer on my team asked whether he should run two days of idea generation for a worldwide Toyota AI initiative that Toyota Connected Europe had decided not to take part in. I told him to go ahead. I knew what he was capable of, that he would bring product and engineering in alongside design, and that the time would be well spent. Three approved proposals came out of it, and around £3.5m of projected investment from Toyota's global AI fund. On the strength of what came back, Toyota Connected Europe entered the initiative it had declined. The wider programme generated 29 ideas, and eight are being pursued by Toyota globally.