Two engagements, one pattern: the brief asked for a new website, and the real work was the system underneath it.
A redesign brief is usually a symptom, not the problem. A client asks for a new website because the website is the thing they can see and point at. The redesign is real, but the opportunity is the structural problem underneath it, and naming that problem is what turns a project into a mandate.
The industry numbers say the suspicion is warranted. BCG's study of more than 850 companies found that only about 35% of digital transformations meet their value targets, 1 and McKinsey's research keeps returning the same diagnosis: the failures are organizational, not technical. 2 A redesign that ships on top of a fragmented operating model joins that statistic. It just looks better while doing it.
The tell is almost always the same. A portfolio of brands or products has outgrown the system holding it together, managed by different teams and different regions, on a platform that was never built to keep it coherent. A redesign that ignores this ships a prettier version of the same fragmentation. So the first move is to reframe the brief: not "redesign this site," but "build the system and the strategy that let all of this work as one."
Two engagements show the pattern.
SharkNinja. Shark and Ninja had grown into two multi-billion-dollar brands with separate commerce sites, and the ask was to bring them together into one destination and move onto Salesforce Commerce Cloud. I joined as product strategist, working alongside a business strategist. On a replatform, the tooling starts making decisions the moment strategy leaves a vacuum. So the real work was the strategy underneath the redesign: I built a conversion-focused measurement framework (Revenue = Traffic × Conversion × Average Order Value) so decisions had a shared basis, reframed the scope around real user journeys instead of a feature wishlist, and produced an out-of-the-box-versus-custom requirements blueprint that showed where to invest and where to accept the platform's defaults. That kept the experience, not the tooling, in charge of the design. SharkNinja.com launched as a single unified destination for both brands.
Carrier. The ask was to redesign carrier.com. The deeper reality was a portfolio of distinct climate sub-brands that had grown up separately, with no shared system unifying them. A redesign on its own would have locked that fragmentation in. So I reframed the engagement around the real problem: a flexible system that could unify the experience across the brands while protecting each brand's identity, rolled out in phases rather than all at once. The visible result is a coherent, connected web experience across Carrier's brand portfolio rather than a set of disconnected sites. The less visible result is the reason it lasted: the client wasn't left with a new website to maintain, but with a system that could absorb the next brand and the next request without starting over.
Both briefs named an artifact. Both times, the work was a system.
The through-line is the move, not the deliverable. Both briefs named an artifact, and both times the work was a system: a measurement spine and a build blueprint for one, a brand-flexible platform and a phased rollout for the other. The reframe is not a bigger invoice for its own sake. It is the difference between handing a client a new website and handing them the thing that makes the website worth having. Most transformations fail because they treat the visible artifact as the work. The ones that hold are the ones where someone insisted on naming the system underneath it first. That is what turns a project into a mandate, and it is the part of the work I care about most.