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.
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Three engagements that don’t need full case studies but matter to the broader picture of what I worked on at McKinsey. Different sectors, different scales, different roles. Together they show the range of problems design can be useful for inside a strategic consulting context.
International bank, digital transformation
I led the design stream on a digital transformation engagement for a major international bank, with a peak team size of around 15 people. The work spanned the full design toolkit: design workplan, value proposition canvas, service blueprint, customer journey maps, user flows, style guide, and prototypes. I held all on-site design workshops with a broader client team to co-create and iterate, and did hands-on UX and UI design across the mobile app itself. The deliverable was a working app on iOS and Android, but the actual outcome was a client team that came out of the engagement with the capability and confidence to keep iterating without us.
Pure, sustainable travel concept
Pure was an aspirational concept developed for a major travel client around the question: what would a sustainable travel service offering actually look like, and would consumers pay a premium for it? The research said yes, more than 48% expressed willingness to pay for sustainable travel, and the addressable millennial talent pool was 80% larger for climate-oriented companies. I led design on the concept, working closely with another designer to develop the storyline and customer journey. We built out a complete app and brand concept in dark mode (a deliberate energy-conservation gesture), covering trip planning with a carbon wallet, sustainable ancillaries, a Pure Points loyalty programme, and a community of curated guides. The concept was a vehicle for strategic thinking, not a product, but the depth of the visual work was what made the strategic argument land.
Agoro Carbon Alliance, market design for carbon trading
Agoro was the most upstream-strategic of the three. The brief was to help create a leading market for carbon trading to drive a global reduction in emissions while improving farmers’ livelihoods. My role spanned problem statement creation, workshop planning, facilitation of value proposition workshops, low and high-fidelity prototypes, user testing with a live panel, and management of the design team. The deliverable wasn’t a product, it was a viable market design backed by enough evidence that the client could go to investors with confidence. Carbon trading is the kind of problem space where the design work has to hold up against hard scrutiny: regulators, investors, farmers, climate scientists. Doing it well meant designing not just for the user but for the dozens of stakeholders the market itself had to serve.
