Without missing a beat
The brief was a consumer-level experience for Nike's internal agents. That assumption didn't survive the first time I watched them work.
The agents in Iowa were extraordinary.
Not in spite of the tools. Because of what they’d taught themselves to do around them. Twenty-plus pieces of software (inventory systems, order trackers, a standard calculator) running simultaneously, and these agents moved between them without missing a beat. Copying from here, pasting to there, waiting for results, holding the conversational space while they worked. Servicing one customer or five depending on the channel, never losing the thread.
It was a masterclass to watch. The distance between what they were working with and what Nike had asked us to build toward was an ocean.
The brief was a consumer-level experience for internal agents. I walked in thinking the work was about the interface, bringing Nike’s design standard inward, elevating the visual quality of the tools to match the consumer products.
By the end of the first morning, the brief looked wrong.
The mastery was real. The problem it was solving was the wrong one. Their skill was compensating for fragmentation, not reaching the customer. The copy-paste workflow wasn’t a workaround. It was the job.
We needed to build something that gave the mastery somewhere to go.
Before
After
Order history, loyalty, years of relationship — surfaced before the first question.
One channel, one thread, the customer in view.
Agent knowledge surfaced as reusable snippets.
Calculator, inventory, returns — unified into one surface.
Amber marks the auto-surfaced moment.
We unified what they’d been copying and pasting between. The anecdotes agents had accumulated over years (about shoe models, release histories, things no customer would think to ask) we surfaced as snippets, so more customers got the benefit of what the agents already knew. Amplify what made them good rather than replace it.
The real fight was the automation.
A phone number (or an email address in the email channel) could unlock a customer’s entire history. Order records. Brand loyalty. Years of relationship with Nike. We wanted that to surface automatically, before the agent had to ask a single question, so they could arrive in the conversation already knowing who they were talking to. Make customers feel known without crossing into surveillance territory. That line became a design principle, not just a feature decision.
IT hadn’t scoped it. Hadn’t planned for it. So we built the argument and took it to product and leadership — the case that the return accumulated over time rather than landing as a single line item.
We found out afterward how close it came.
Without that argument, the project would have been shelved, millions already invested, organizational will exhausted. The design work didn’t save it. The argument did.
The platform shipped. Standard adoption across every Nike customer service center and warehouse.
I’ve carried that distinction since.