Johan Engelbrecht
Creative Director at Strategy. Previously an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company. Two decades across brand, product design, generative AI, and strategic consulting in financial services, public sector, and enterprise software.
Selected work
2026 Strategy World 2026 Lead designer on Strategy's flagship annual conference for the third consecutive year. Las Vegas 2024, Orlando 2025, and Las Vegas 2026, each iteration improving on attendee feedback. Thousands of print and digital deliverables, two keynote presentations rendered across three-screen arrays, full identity, campaign, and on-site systems. Event design → 2025 Strategy global rebrand Lead in-house designer on the rebrand that took MicroStrategy to Strategy, launched 5 February 2025. Strategic foundation with Siegel+Gale, final direction set by Michael Saylor, brandmark finalised in direct collaboration with Michael in Figma. I built the full system, guidelines, and internal brand site, and remain responsible for the brand today. Brand identity → 2025 Strategy AI Creative Studio An internal AI creative studio built inside Discord, exposing image, video, audio, 3D, and brand-locked generation to 70+ users at Strategy through a single bot and a tier-based channel architecture. AI tooling → 2025 Generative production for brand and campaign work Built the model-led production pipeline behind most of Strategy's image and video output. Custom LoRAs hosted on Strategy's Hugging Face account, multi-model video workflows, and a working method that starts with taste in MidJourney before any training begins. GenAI → 2025 Demo Factory A proof-of-concept tool helping Strategy's sales engineers craft compelling demo narratives. Not the demo itself: the story scaffold around it. A live experiment in how generative tools can shape sales conversations earlier and faster, with a planned v2 to widen the use case. Product → 2025 Conference creative technology Two interactive builds for Strategy World, a venue map kiosk and a brand-mascot browser game, that turned conference touchpoints into things people actually wanted to use. Creative tech → 2023 INU, a new investment platform Design lead on an eight-month engagement defining the user experience vision for a new mobile investment platform in the Czech and Slovak market. Led a design stream of up to 25 people across research, vision, prototype, and handover. Delivered the public product at inu.com alongside a complete design system. Product design → 2022 Merchant onboarding transformation Service design lead on transforming the merchant onboarding journey for a major payments and POS company. Mapped the existing process, built customer archetypes from primary research, defined a service blueprint that untangled an ad-hoc multi-team flow, and prototyped the future state through to user testing. Service design → 2022 Selected McKinsey work Three further engagements from my time at McKinsey, spanning digital transformation in banking, sustainable travel concepting, and market design for carbon trading. Each one a different shape of design problem, each one a different team, each one a reason I left McKinsey better at the work than I arrived. Strategic design →Capabilities
Tooling
Working setup, day to day.
Figma 
Adobe Creative Suite 
macOS 
Cursor 
GitHub 
Claude 
OpenAI 
Grok 
Google 
Perplexity 
Hugging Face 
FAL.ai 
Midjourney Currently exploring local model workflows: running open-weight LLMs and image models offline through LM Studio, Ollama, and Draw Things. Curious about what changes when generation moves off the cloud entirely.
About
I'm a Creative Director at Strategy in Warsaw, leading identity, AI, analytics, and Bitcoin creative for the company. My work sits at the intersection of brand, generative AI, and enterprise software, building things that prove what's possible rather than describing it.
Before Strategy, I spent three years as an Engagement Manager (Design Expert Path) at McKinsey & Company, embedded in client engagements across financial services, public sector, and industrials. My role evolved across that time to Engagement Manager-level responsibility, leading design streams of up to 25 people, owning workshop facilitation, customer research, service blueprints, and end-to-end product design through to high-fidelity prototypes. The McKinsey years sharpened how I work: comfortable in ambiguity, structured in delivery, and direct with stakeholders.
Earlier, I led design at Avaloq and ERGO Group, and ran my own studio, Designjust.works, taking on brand and product work for clients across Europe and South Africa.
I trained as a designer in Johannesburg and have worked across South Africa, Switzerland, UAE, and Poland over the past two decades. I spend roughly equal time in design tools, code, and prompts. The work I'm proudest of usually started as something nobody asked for.
British Citizen.