DHL Case Study
Building DHL's Global B2B Portal
From Initial Concept to +22,000 Enterprise Customers
0×
Customer Growth
0+
Monthly interactions
€0B+
Digital Quote Revenue
€0M
Cost Savings
€0B+
Yearly Business Volume
0%+
Faster Onboarding & Quote Processing
2018: Entering DHL Through the Digital Speedboat
I joined DHL through Saloodo!, a digital marketplace startup operating inside the DHL Group.
As Lead Experience Designer, I worked with an aggressive data-driven team that treated logistics like a tech product—rapid experimentation, ML-powered recommendations, and ruthless focus on conversion metrics.
We were DHL's "digital speedboat"—small enough to move fast, protected enough to take risks. That positioning became crucial when DHL Global Forwarding needed to reimagine their entire customer experience.
While logistics giants were comfortable, competitors were moving: Flexport raised $1B, Amazon Freight undercut prices by 30%, Uber Freight scaled globally. The $800B logistics market was being digitized—and DHL needed to catch up.
1st scribble of myDHLi from 2019
Architecting myDHLi from Concept to Global Platform
Late 2018
While at Saloodo, I was tapped to create the initial concept for myDHLi—a unified B2B portal to replace DHL Global Forwarding's 1,000+ disconnected applications.
The Vision
One platform for 360° shipment visibility across all transport modes, available 24/7 globally.
The Reality
This wasn't a design problem—it was organizational transformation. Decoupling legacy systems, introducing agile to waterfall teams, and convincing stakeholders to abandon "1,000 apps" for "one customer experience."
1st Axure prototype for customer interviews and stakeholder workshops.
Early flow chart for system discovery, and basis for self-registration.
Early DHL landscape and architecture brainstorming session.
Initial myDHLi kick-off/stakeholder workshops with Saloodo-Team in Bonn
UX-research & analytics training
IT-Workshops in Prague
May 2020: Global Launch During COVID-19
Promoted to Head of Experience Design (April 2020), I led the global rollout across 5 continents during the pandemic. Launched Quote + Book, Follow + Share collaboration, real-time tracking, analytics dashboards with single sign-on.
UX Research and Analytics
When I arrived at DHL, decisions were made in conference rooms based on stakeholder opinions, not user evidence. I built the research and analytics infrastructure from the ground up—integrating UserTesting.com, Hotjar, Google/Adobe Analytics, then building custom KPI dashboards that gave product teams real-time visibility into what was actually working.
Beyond installing tools, I established recurring research rhythms integrated directly into sprint cycles for rapid experimentation. The transformation was profound: design evolved from subjective craft to measurable discipline. Teams could now validate hypotheses, measure feature impact, and make evidence-based decisions with research embedded in our product lifecycle.
User-Centered Design Culture
Building infrastructure was only half the battle. DHL's product culture was fundamentally stakeholder-focused, not customer-focused—teams optimized for internal requests and political dynamics rather than solving real user problems.
I led a cultural transformation by training over 50 team members across product, development, and business units on UX fundamentals through deep workshops on research methods and data interpretation. I embedded designers in cross-functional teams as user advocates, made user testing mandatory before major releases, and created shared repositories of research insights accessible to everyone.
The shift was tangible. Within my teams and the product organization I work with, user-centered thinking became the natural starting point for product decisions, not an afterthought.
DHL Group's
1st Scaled Design System
The Challenge
DHL had fragmented design—old-fashioned guidelines updated sporadically, competing libraries across divisions (myDHLi, dhl.com, legacy portals), no shared technical foundation. Every team reinvented components differently.
5-Year Strategic Journey (2019-2024)
I audited major portals, documenting components and use cases. Rather than replacing everything, I built the foundation—aligning our myDHLi library with existing tech stacks while creating space for harmonisation.
Led cross-division collaboration to merge our library with dhl.com's primary system. Navigated multiple tool transitions (Abstract → Sketch Cloud → Figma) while maintaining consistency. Connected React components to design tokens—making the system living and technically integrated.
Represented multiple business units in DHL Group-wide committee, spreading design culture and defining standards for the future.
The Paradigm Shift
We reversed the model. From static guidelines with inconsistent components, we created the design system that is the guideline—living frontend components with connected Figma libraries became the source of truth.
The Impact
Created DHL Group's first scaled design system, now established across leading business units. Enabled faster development, consistent experiences, and cross-division collaboration. The foundation for all future DHL digital products.
Design Ops
As myDHLi grew to serve 22,000+ customers globally, I built operational infrastructure to scale without sacrificing quality or velocity.
I grew the design organization to over 10 designers distributed across EMEA time zones—but growth was never just about headcount.
I created frameworks for enablement, trust, and coaching that let designers run independently and take ownership. Documentation became our foundation, enabling async-first communication across time zones without constant meetings or approval bottlenecks. I implemented dual-track agile so discovery and delivery could run in parallel, established design system governance for cross-division contributions, and navigated our tool evolution from Abstract through Sketch Cloud to Figma.
That final transition to Figma became transformative—it's now the base for our design system with playgrounds that allow sharing designs across teams. This open architecture welcomes everyone to contribute and share. The design community is now in active exchange, collaborating across divisions in ways that weren't possible before. It's incredibly rewarding to see that cultural shift materialise.
The result: we move at startup speed while maintaining enterprise quality, handling three to five times more projects with roughly the same team size through systematic processes and shared infrastructure.
Case Study
91% faster Customer Onboarding
THE CHALLENGE
One of our biggest challenges was attracting small- and medium-sized businesses. Our operational costs made one-time shipments unprofitable, and the 10-12 day onboarding process was simply too slow and complex for companies with lower shipment volumes. We were losing an entire customer segment before they even got started.
THE PROJECT
I was the lead designer in a cross-functional initiative for the US market. Our goal was to reimagine the online sales experience—remove friction, accelerate onboarding, and make smaller accounts economically viable.
Through detailed process mapping, we discovered that the main bottleneck wasn't compliance itself, but a series of redundant review and approval layers between departments.
That insight changed our approach entirely. I facilitated workshops with operations and sales to redesign the workflow. We consolidated decision-making, removed redundant approval layers, and set up clear data-driven criteria. By empowering teams to make faster decisions and removing redundant approval layers, we reduced onboarding from 10–12 days to just 3–4 days, before we built a single new feature.
These insights enabled us to validate our findings with setting up real prospects and to report on meaningful KPIs, proving the model's effectiveness and building confidence among senior stakeholders.
THE RESULT
After full digital enablement, we achieved setup times of under 24 hours, empowering both operations and sales teams to run with greater autonomy while maintaining manual control where necessary.
More importantly, we architected the foundation for self-registration—where customers will access booking tools instantly with automated account creation and invisible compliance processes running seamlessly in the background.
The project became a global front-runner within the organisation. It convinced senior leadership to adopt the new process as a blueprint for all DHL markets worldwide.
