The Experience Edge: How H&M aligns 79 markets around one customer journey

Anne-Kathrine Nissen, user experience leader and Head of Product Design at H&M, joins Jochem van der Veer to share what it really takes to lead customer-centric transformation across 79 markets, 140,000 employees, and a brand in the middle of a major strategic shift. With experience at Airbus and Electrolux before H&M, Anne-Kathrine brings a deeply cross-functional perspective on how to make journey thinking stick in organizations where silos exist for a reason — and changing them requires years of trust-building, not a single workshop.

Here's why you don't want to miss this episode

There is no such thing as a simple customer journey

At H&M's scale, the customer journey is not a single artifact — it's hundreds, if not thousands of journeys, depending on who defines them and how. Anne-Kathrine explains how a global framework sets the story and principles, while local variation is baked in by design. The real challenge isn't creating the map. It's the 99% perspiration: entering conversations across cultures, functions, and geographies to align teams that all have different definitions of success.

Speak their language, or become noise

To drive cross-functional alignment, Anne-Kathrine learned to stop speaking "CX" and start speaking sales, tech, and business. She draws on Daniel Kahneman's concept of loss aversion to explain her approach: help stakeholders vividly imagine what they stand to gain, rather than what they might have to give up. One concrete example — convincing previously autonomous teams to adopt global website templates — shows how reframing a constraint as a benefit can shift the entire conversation.

The customer journey as organizational glue

The journey framework isn't primarily a research artifact at H&M — it's a shared vocabulary that enables cross-functional alignment. Anne-Kathrine describes her role as equal parts researcher, designer, and evangelist: constantly connecting dots between teams, spotting where one team's work affects another, and keeping the bigger picture in view. Like a dance floor where everyone needs to feel the same music, the journey gives teams a reason to move together.

When H&M stopped being a marketplace

One of the most revealing parts of the conversation is Anne-Kathrine's account of H&M's brand transformation — from a multi-brand marketplace back to its roots as a singular fashion brand. This shift invalidated much of their existing customer insight. Metrics that once made sense no longer applied. Loyal customers were potentially at risk. New customer segments needed to be defined and tracked. For Anne-Kathrine, this meant rebuilding the insight foundation — new metrics, new research, new conversations — while simultaneously managing a company-wide change process that touched every team.

Insights don't die — they fade away

Anne-Kathrine is candid about the growing challenge of a "sea of data" that spans reviews, behavioral analytics, user interviews, regional testing, iOS and Android variations, and more. Making sense of it all — and making it usable for teams that don't have the context to interpret it — is one of the hardest unsolved problems in her work. Her experience at Electrolux offers a model: spreading user test footage across the organization, setting up monitors in office kitchens, running internal user panels, and sending newsletters. Keeping insight alive means meeting people where they are, again and again.

The shift from pushing insights to fielding questions

A subtle but important shift is underway in how teams relate to customer insights. Where once the experience team pushed out reports and evangelized findings, Anne-Kathrine now sees colleagues actively seeking out designers and researchers — asking what's happening, wanting answers on demand. This pull dynamic is a sign of maturity, but it also raises the stakes. Insight quality depends on the question behind it. And that means the experience function increasingly needs to act as an interpretation layer — not just a data source.

From complexity to coherence

This episode is a masterclass in operating at the intersection of scale, culture, and organizational change. Anne-Kathrine's approach — thinking like a researcher, selling like a partner, and building trust like a colleague — offers a practical model for anyone trying to make journey management real in a complex global organization.

Want to hear the entire conversation? Watch or listen to the podcast with Suchi and Jochem on The Experience Edge:

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