Anne Gruengreiff

Over 20 years in digital product development have taught me one thing above all: great UX doesn't happen by accident. It takes the right structure, the right people, and the right culture.

I partner with companies to build and scale UX capabilities from the ground up. That means hiring and developing high-performance teams across UX Design, UX Research, Content Design, and DesignOps, establishing processes that actually stick, and connecting user needs to business outcomes in a way that leadership understands and acts on. I've led teams ranging from small, focused design squads to UX departments of 40 people.

My approach to raising UX maturity in an organisation centres on one principle: visibility. UX work needs to be seen, understood, and valued across the business, not just within the team. At idealo, I moved UX from a reactive service function to a structural part of how product decisions were made. That required changing not just processes, but mental models, how leadership thought about users, how product teams prioritised, and how quality was defined and measured. That kind of change is organisational transformation. It just starts with design.

AI is reshaping how products are built, how organisations make decisions, and what users expect. I've introduced AI-supported workflows in research and discovery, and when existing solutions don't fit the problem, I build my own. AccessAI, an AI-powered accessibility tool I developed, came out of exactly that gap: teams needed a faster way to catch accessibility issues early, and nothing on the market matched how design and engineering actually work together. What I've learned from building it, and from AI work more broadly, is that AI amplifies good thinking and exposes weak foundations. Organisations that lack clarity about their users, their decisions, and their quality standards don't get better with AI. They get faster at the wrong things. That's where experience in UX leadership becomes directly relevant to AI strategy and digital transformation: not because UX has all the answers, but because it keeps the human at the centre of the question.

Accessibility is not a checkbox for me. It's a design principle I've embedded into every team I've led and every product I've shaped, and it's the reason AccessAI exists. In a world where AI increasingly mediates digital experiences, that conviction matters more, not less.