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 gave myself was to make design a thing the business could not run without.

I built the function from nothing and ran it for seven years, with full P&L accountability, across Europe, Japan and North America. I was accountable for every hire, and I sold every engagement the team worked on.

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.

I ran the function on a full P&L, at £10m+ of annual internal revenue at peak, and every designer on the team was paid for by an engagement I had won. A published service catalogue and explicit positioning meant partner teams bought the depth they needed.

Our largest programme closed overnight, taking its revenue and team structure with it. I ran a structured retrospective that turned the wind-down into a documented reassignment method, and it became the standard for every client transition that followed.

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.

So I made the case for service design, and hired service designers into a company that had never employed one.

They are still doing it. Colleagues running design in Toyota North America asked how I had got it established, and were unable to replicate it in their own.

The function ran on a written operating system. Continuous discovery replaced the double diamond, alongside a standard validation matrix, three-level journey mapping and content modelling, applied across the whole portfolio.

Four engagement models sat behind it: long-term embedded partnerships, time-boxed studio work, specialist augmentation, and innovation sprints.

Quality had a written definition. A scoring method, design pairing alongside critiques, and UX checkpoints inside client delivery pipelines.

DesignOps was the first dedicated operational support the team had. Tooling, capacity planning, project tracking, quality governance. Designers got their time back.

Service design became requestable as an internal service with a price against it, which is what turned a capability into an offer.

I stepped out of the daily craft early and on purpose. The split is below.

When executives wanted to understand a specific change, I brought the designer who had made it. Their accuracy, their ownership, their exposure to 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. Seeing what someone can do and giving them the room is a large part of the job. 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.

Design displaced the incumbent agencies and became one of three recognised core competencies of the business. The chief executive of Toyota Connected Europe called the team "the hidden jewel of the business". The team, the framework and the service design capability are all still there.