Robert Fransgaard - Your Design Success Partner

How can I help you?

It is rarely the design work that holds you back. It is everything around it: structure, ownership and direction. Most teams know what good looks like. They just struggle to make it land.

I am Robert Fransgaard. I help leaders set design teams up for success and lead complex design-led initiatives, turning ambition into work that actually delivers.

Designing product and experiences people love

Shape a strong digital experience vision, clear strategy and practical way forward.
Lead the creation of new digital product experiences.
Review and improve an existing product experience.

Improving design teams and design maturity

Modernise your existing design team and make it a destination for talent.
Establish a new and effective design team and provide interim design leadership.
Optimise innovation- and delivery processes enabling design to create greater business impact.

Ensure continuity and continous learning

Provide stability and cover while your design leader is on extended leave.
Accelerate your design leader's continous growth with design-focused leadership coaching.
Improve your product leaders' practical knowledge of design.

How can I help? Let's start the conversation.

How I've helped

LEGO

Ensured continuity as Interim Head of UX

Ensured continuity for design managers and 20+ designers during the Head of UX’s planned absence.
Provided 1:1 coaching and sparring for the entire group.
Secured budget and support for contractors.
Conducted a Design Maturity accessment with proposed actions, some of which have already been actioned.

WAIR

Shaping great, AI-driven stock replenishment products.

Concept design and user testing of new product proposition and UX.
Review and optimisation of existing core flow based on user research.

"We need more people in the world like you Robert !"
—Mitch van Deursen, Owner, WAIR.

PLEO

Maturing design, research and brand teams at unicorn fintech scale-up.

Maturing design team from loose start-up formation to structured scale-up organisation.
Embedded Design System and Research teams in the right processes, targets and strategic conversations.
Modernised product delivery by introducing product-engineering-design leadership trios and peer-design format.

H&M

Redesign of hm.com.

Initiated redesign of www.hm.com for better user experience, to align with overall brand and to introduce product from external brands.
Established team in Berlin of product manager, brand- and product designers and frontend devs co-led by the H&M Creative Director and myself.
Established a strategic design team to map out the current- and future state customer journeys.
Contributed to the surprise increase of 17% in H&M stock in 2023.

H&M Group

Built a cross-brand digital product design organisation.

Scaled local product design team to a 130+ strong global organisation with offices in Stockholm, Berlin, Beijing and Bangalore.
Ensured design support for all the Group’s brands as well as internal products for departments like Supply Chain, Fashion Design and Assortment Planning.
Built Design System- and DesignOps Teams. Embedded a Design Leadership layer on par with the Product and Engineering leadership.

COS

Documenting the multi-channel customer experience.

Facilitated LEGO® Serious Play® workshops to capture and document how COS customers navigate across channels.
Identified key moments crucial to a good omni-channel customer experience.

SAGE

From on-prem business management products to SaaS experience.

Led the mid-market and enterprise design teams through transition from on-prem to SaaS software.
Formalised a Core experience team to own Design System and cross-product flows such as Single Sign-On (SSO).
Formalised career frameworks for designers, content writers, solution designers and design leaders.

Salesforce

Introducing Salesforce Experience Design to EMEA market.

Built design org across London, Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam and integrated designers from acquisitions.
Transformed Salesforce’s design thinking offering "Envision" from a process to a fixed packaged product with set resources and outcomes.
Introduced design targets to the sales organisation.
Maintained a 9.7 / 10 customer satisfaction, no unwanted attrition and no unplanned benchtime.

ING

Concept and product type design for SMB customers.

Progressed a conceptual idea to a fully functioning prototype ready for customer testing.
The success of the end-result became key note presentation at Cloud Force Amsterdam.

Unilever

Design org advisory and improving UX across portfolio of business apps.

Advisory and support for Unilever to establish their own internal design department successfully.
Facilitated the first Salesforce “Envision” workshop in Europe with Unilever exploring how to bring all relevant HR data together in a single experience.
Conceptual design of intelligence gathering-, data democratisation- and innovation solutions.

Burberry

A digital collaboration platform for everybody with a business relationship with the company.

Created the concept of a “Facebook for Burberry” style internal collaboration system.
Designed the prototype design to benchmark competing technology vendors.
Led a team of designers and frontend developers to create to blueprint and wireframes for the solution.

How I work

I take on the work that feels too big or too complex to get started. The kind of initiatives that stall across teams, priorities and ownership. I focus on moving them forward by creating clarity, setting direction and breaking them down into something that can actually land.

I set a clear vision for where we are going and how we will know when we are getting there. Because progress depends on making decisions. Standing still is usually the only real mistake.

I build design teams that people want to work for and that the rest of the organisation wants to work with. Not just strong designers, but teams that are trusted, understood and able to collaborate and contribute beyond their craft.

The focus is always the same: move the work forward, create clarity and make sure it delivers real impact.