Design Leadership · DesignOps · Enterprise Strategy

I help organisations stop treating design as a service and start treating it as a strategy.

International UX & Design leader with 18+ years building design capabilities in enterprise and regulated environments — not just delivering design, but making organisations able to do great design at scale.

18+

years in ux&design

9

markets lead across nn group

30+

designers across the Center of expertise

What I do

Three areas where I create the most value

01Design Governance & DesignOps

Building the infrastructure that makes good design repeatable and scalable — design systems, standards, accessibility frameworks, and cross-market governance models that work without constant central oversight.

02Team & Capability Building

Establishing design functions from 0 to 1: hiring strategy, team structures, department strategy, role definitions, maturity roadmaps, and coaching senior designers into leaders. With hands-on craft available when it matters.

03Design as Business Strategy

Partnering with C-level and board stakeholders to position design as a strategic investment. Translating design value into business language — not just delivering beautiful work, but securing the resources to sustain it.

Case Studies

Work that demonstrates the approach

Scaling UX Governance Across 9 Markets at NN Group

NN GROUP · 2024–PRESENT

Created and now leads the international UX & Design Centre of Expertise for NN Group — covering 34 designers across Greece, Poland, Spain, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Japan, and Belgium. Established shared design standards, accessibility frameworks, and cross-market governance that reduced design-to-development handoff time. Embedded as a strategic stream within the enterprise Future Ready transformation program.

9
COUNTRIES COVERED
30+
DESIGNERS IN COE
Incrase
CONSISTENCY & REUSE

Building Customer Experience in Self-service Platform

NN POLAND · 2020–2024

As UX&UI Lead, I owned the end-to-end experience of My NN — self-service platform for managing insurance and investment products in Poland. I built the information architecture, led user research, and designed customer journeys and UI across multiple touchpoints. I introduced a unified design system adopted across 8 platforms — self-service, call centre, and agent tools — contributing to consistently high NPS scores and a measurable shift of customers toward self-service channels.

1M+
CUSTOMERS
1
DESIGN SYSTEM
Incrase
CUSTOMER NPS

Thinking

On design, business, and the gap between them

All Good
Podcast · Spotify & Apple

A podcast exploring the intersection of UX, design strategy, and business. 20+ episodes on why design needs to be understood in business terms — not just delivered, but defended, measured, and strategically positioned.

— Aga Szóstek — author of Umami Strategy
— Marcin Racino — founder of Webankieta
— Bartek Goldyn —Biznes i Emocje

Listen on Spotify
Publications
medium

AI, UX, and the Chat Illusion — Time to Define AUX
An exploration of how AI is reshaping the discipline of UX design, and why the field urgently needs new frameworks to avoid repeating the mistakes of past platform shifts.

Read on Medium

Also recognised with a Bronze Lion at Cannes and multiple Agency of the Year awards during design leadership at DDB, working with global brands including McDonald's, Unilever, L'Oréal, and Porsche.

Bartosz Sułkowski

International UX & Design Leader

I've spent 18+ years in design — across agency, startup, and enterprise — and what I find most interesting is the organisational challenge: why some companies consistently produce great digital experiences and others don't, despite having talented people.

The answer is almost never about individual designers. It's aboutsystems, governance, and whether design has a seat at the table where product and business decisions are actually made.

That's the work I do. I'm based in Warsaw and currently leading International UX & Design Centre of Expertise at NN Group level — and I'm open to conversations about VP and C-level design leadership roles where this kind of organisational impact is the goal.