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Case Study

Enabling a team to design a country. From playbook to practice.

Solutions
Capability & Enablement
Service Design & Operations
ClientSaudi Tourism Authority (STA)
IndustryGovernment, Travel & Tourism
Year2021-2022

Introduction

Saudi Tourism Authority's Visitor Experience team designs the Kingdom's tourism products - the itineraries, site experiences and visitor propositions Vision 2030 is built on. STA had brought firms in before us. Frameworks, recommendations, decks, exits. All abandoned.

This wasn't a playbook problem.
It was an operating model problem.

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The problem
A design practice in name only. No shared process. No line between STA and vendor. No definition of 'done'. Every project a bespoke negotiation.

Demand outran design, every month.

 

The mission
Design the engine, not the slides. An operating model sized to the team they had. Built for the team they were hiring.

Instructions, not recommendations.

 

The approach.

Learn the constraints. Design inside them. Hand over something that holds. A blueprint, not a presentation.

Start with what can't move
Team size. Hiring runway. Approval chains. Tooling. Political reality. We mapped what could move and what couldn't - before drawing a single process.
Play back the present
From screens to places
STA governs, vendors execute
Co-sign everything

The handover.

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End-to-end process. A template library for every step - brief, research, site visit, persona, journey, blueprint, product deck. Role definitions for the team and every vendor they work with. Governance that scales with headcount.

Co-authored. Co-signed. In use the week we left.

Impact.

Adoption

Still the team's default operating reference.

4 years

Velocity

Time from product brief to designed expeirence.

6 weeks

Onboarding

Reduced new team members on-boarding time to first shipped contribution.

75% faster

Governance

Vendor deliverables passing first-time review.

80%