Kyndryl: The Workshop as Strategy
A strategic service design engagement across three global clients
Clients · Hamburg Commercial Bank · ContiTech · Kantar
Industry · Financial Services · Industrial Manufacturing · Data & Analytics
My Role · Strategy Design + Service Designer
Methods · Co-creation workshops · Executive alignment · Service roadmapping
Timeline · 7 months
Outcome · Three active client engagements moved from ambiguity to structured delivery
Kyndryl is the world's largest IT infrastructure services provider spun out of IBM in 2021. This role sat inside its growing consulting practice: working across three clients, three industries, and one recurring problem organisations that knew what they wanted but couldn't yet act on it.
A role portrait, not a case study.
The Challenge
Three clients. Three industries. Three versions of the same problem: strategy that existed on paper but hadn't yet become something an organisation could act on. The brief in each case was deceptively simple, align stakeholders, reduce complexity, move forward. The reality was C-suite rooms with competing priorities, inherited assumptions, and very little appetite for another deck.
A glimpse of the process
The work started before the workshop. Interviews with senior leads at HCOB, ContiTech, and Kantar to map where the real fractures were not the stated ones. Then designing sessions that didn't perform alignment but actually created it: structured enough to hold a C-suite, open enough to surface what wasn't being said.
The insight
The blocker was never the strategy. It was the distance between the people who set direction and the people who had to deliver it. In every engagement, the most valuable moment wasn't a framework or a roadmap, it was the first time a room full of senior stakeholders stopped presenting to each other and started thinking together.
The design response
Each engagement produced a service roadmap. But the real work was upstream: designing the workshops that made the roadmap possible, writing the executive narratives that connected insight to decision, and building the artefacts that gave leadership something to act on, not just sign off on.
The impact
Three client engagements advanced from ambiguous briefs to structured delivery roadmaps
Senior stakeholder alignment achieved across financial services, industrial manufacturing, and data analytics sectors
Executive narratives developed that directly strengthened pursuit win themes for ongoing programmes
Co-creation methodology adopted as repeatable approach within the Kyndryl India practice
Key takeaways
The best moments were unscripted, honest conversations, real problem-solving, and a visible sense of relief that things were finally moving. The frameworks developed were well received by customers and gave teams something they could keep using long after the workshops ended. That's what I was designing for.
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A deeper dive into workshop architecture, stakeholder alignment, and service communication design.
