Saudi Telecom Company
From Fragmentation to Foundation
Designing the Operating System for a Telecom Empire
Client: STC Group (Saudi Telecom Company), Saudi Arabia
Agency: Interbrand Madrid
My Role: Experience Design Director
Scope: CX Strategy, UX/UI System Design, Design Ops, Governance
Engagement Type: Agency-led engagement, direct leadership of design system transformation
In Brief
- STC’s growth was fast, but the experience fell apart.
- No shared system meant teams kept building in the dark.
- We turned strategy into components, and components into shared practice.
- The design system became the core engine for scale.
- STC now builds with speed, clarity, and consistency across 100+ platforms.
1. Challenge
STC’s growth was fast, but the experience fell apart.
This wasn’t about aesthetics. It was about fragmentation. STC Group, the Middle East’s largest telecom operator, was expanding fast across fintech, media, and digital services. But every new platform added friction. Journeys were inconsistent. Systems duplicated. Teams couldn’t see or govern the full experience.
I was brought in to fix the delivery side, to unify systems, patterns, and design rules across the group.
2. Insight
No shared system meant teams kept building in the dark.
No design system linked brand, UX, and engineering. No playbook aligned delivery across subsidiaries. No governance to make decisions stick. Teams built in silos. Vendors followed different standards. Strategy was abstract. Execution was scattered.
Without a single model to scale consistency, users hit friction, teams repeated work, and brands drifted apart.
“We had great talent, strong platforms, and a bold brand, but no way to connect them. Every team spoke a different language. We weren’t designing an experience. We were just shipping fragments."
Internal Product Lead,
STC Group
Digital experience audit.
STC, STC Play, STC TV, fragmented landing pages (before).
STC, STC Play, STC TV, consistent landing pages (after).
3. Change
We turned strategy into components, and components into shared practice.
I led design operations and systems delivery as Experience Design Director (via Interbrand). My role was to take a high-level brand strategy and turn it into something the organisation could build with: experience rules, scalable patterns, and governance frameworks that worked across teams.
We started by mapping the full digital ecosystem: every brand, every platform, every overlap. Then we defined a shared experience architecture, built a modular design system, and set up decision-making guidelines so teams could move consistently without bottlenecks or rework.
We translated strategy into components. And we translated components into shared practice..
Component Library spanning 13 brands.
Design Language System 2.0: Core patterns in action.
Live product example: unified experience across STC, STC Play, STC TV
4. Delivery
The design system became the core engine for scale.
We built UI foundations, interaction patterns, and accessibility rules across 13 subsidiaries. But we didn’t stop at files. We delivered a Digital Ecosystem Map to show where experience gaps lived. We facilitated co-creation with internal teams to drive adoption. We wrote a playbook to onboard vendors and teams across STC, STC Play, STC TV, and more.
It wasn’t just a toolkit. It was a new design operating model.
Teams used it to make faster decisions. Leadership used it to see the whole experience. Product, brand, and tech started speaking the same language.
30%
faster onboarding
200+
components delivered
Digital Ecosystem Map
as a daily tool
“This gave us a way to move faster without starting from scratch every time.”
Internal Product Owner,
STC Group
5. Impact
STC now builds with speed, clarity, and consistency across 100+ platforms.
The work unified over 100 platforms and touchpoints across 13 subsidiaries, articulated to serve nuances and different interactions, reduced design time by 40%, and provided STC with a way to scale new products without reinventing the system each time.
More importantly, it gave the organisation clarity. One system. One model. One language for experience.
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