by Scaling UX and Proving ROI: Real Shifts from Nestlé, Amadeus, and Paysafe
UX is increasingly being evaluated not as a standalone discipline, but on how it performs within the realities of the organisation — as part of how decisions are made, products are developed, and outcomes are delivered.
For many teams, this shift shows up in day-to-day constraints: competing priorities, compressed timelines, fragmented ownership, and growing expectations to demonstrate measurable impact. In this environment, established practices alone are often insufficient. What matters is how they are adapted — and where they are applied.
The perspectives shared at UX360 EU offered a grounded view into this reality. Contributions from teams at Nestlé, Amadeus, and Paysafe highlighted how UX is being repositioned within large, complex environments — from how it scales across systems, to how it contributes to decision-making, to how it connects to business outcomes.
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This article distils those perspectives into three critical shifts, along with practical frameworks that UX and insights leaders can apply later.
1. Making UX Work Across Functions (Nestlé)
At Nestlé, UX operates in an environment where experience is shaped across multiple functions rather than within a single team. In a global organisation of this scale, employee experience is influenced by HR, IT, data, brand, communications, and regional teams — each contributing to how systems are built, accessed, and used.
This creates a different starting point for UX. The challenge is not ownership of the experience, but establishing a clear role within it. Before any research or design begins, the team needs to understand where UX sits: who already holds relevant insight, which teams influence direction, and how UX is perceived across the organisation.
In this context, effectiveness depends less on depth within a single project and more on how well UX is integrated into existing structures.
“A great design is never a product of a single team.”
— Giulia Angeletti, UX Research Lead, Nestlé
What follows is a shift in how UX engages with the organisation. Collaboration is not treated as a phase, but as a precondition for impact. Different teams become relevant at different points — not by default, but based on what the work requires.
Early in the process, UX aligns with teams that define direction, such as brand and data, to ensure consistency from the outset. During execution, partnerships with HR and development teams make it possible to reach users and deliver workable solutions. After research, communications and learning functions extend the reach of insights beyond the immediate project.
This reshapes the role of UX in practical terms. It is not only responsible for generating insight or designing solutions, but for ensuring that work is connected, understood, and carried through the organisation. In practice, four elements made this sustainable.
- Breaking the IT-first mindset
Expanding conversations beyond feasibility to include experience quality and user impact - Defining shared goals
Aligning UX work with business and functional objectives from the outset - Building shared roadmaps
Making UX visible in planning, dependencies, and delivery timelines - Introducing UX metrics
Adding measures that reflect user experience alongside technical and product KPIs
In this model, UX does not scale by increasing its own capacity. It scales by working through existing structures — connecting teams, aligning priorities, and ensuring that experience is considered across decisions.
But embedding UX across functions is only one part of the equation. As organisations grow, the challenge shifts from collaboration to consistency — ensuring that experience holds together across products, teams, and systems.
Embedded UX = Shared goals + Integrated planning + Measured experience
2. Scaling UX Beyond the Interface (Amadeus)
At Amadeus, that next layer becomes visible. The challenge was not improving individual products, but managing the complexity created by scale. Over time, multiple teams developed separate applications across different functions — each optimised for its own workflows, timelines, and delivery pressures. While these products performed effectively in isolation, they introduced fragmentation at the system level.
Users were required to navigate inconsistent interaction models, repeated logic, and disconnected journeys across what was, in practice, a single operational environment.
This fragmentation was not a failure of design execution, but a structural consequence of growth. UX remained embedded within individual product teams, with limited mechanisms to ensure alignment across them. The result was a growing disconnect between how products were built and how they were experienced.
The shift at Amadeus was to address this directly by reframing UX at the platform level. Instead of optimising individual touchpoints, the focus moved to defining how the system behaves as a whole — across products, teams, and use cases.
“We’ve been asked to design not just product experiences, but moving on from products to ecosystems and platform experiences.”
— Shamindri Perera, Head of UX, Airline Solutions, Amadeus
In this model, value comes less from individual features and more from how products work together. UX is no longer confined to team-level delivery — it becomes responsible for ensuring consistency in behaviour, logic, and flow across the system.
That shifts the role of UX from execution to coordination. Rather than delivering within a defined scope, it establishes the conditions under which multiple teams can build in a consistent way. In practice, three elements enabled this.
- Defining shared UX principles
Establishing a common foundation for decision-making across distributed teams - Building patterns, not just components
Ensuring consistency in behaviour and interaction, not only visual design - Establishing governance at scale
Setting standards so new and existing products strengthen the system
Scaling UX, in this context, is not primarily a design challenge. It is an organisational one — requiring alignment, clarity, and mechanisms that sustain consistency as complexity increases.
Yet even with alignment at system level, a further question remains: where does UX create measurable value? This is where the focus shifts from structure to decision-making.
Platform UX = Shared principles + Scalable patterns + Enforced governance
3. Connecting UX to Business Outcomes (Paysafe)
Even in well-aligned organisations, decisions do not sit in one place. They develop across layers — product, leadership, and operations — each with its own priorities and constraints. At Paysafe, this made the influence of research dependent not on its quality, but on when and where it entered the process.
Research was often introduced after direction had already been set, limiting its role to validation. While this supported delivery, it reduced the opportunity to challenge assumptions or shape decisions before resources were committed.
The issue was not the amount of research being conducted, but its position within the decision flow.
The shift at Paysafe focused on moving research upstream — closer to where priorities are defined and choices remain open.
“It’s change in human behaviour that brings revenue, not features.”
— Lyubomir Todorakov, Director UX Strategy, Paysafe
This reframes research in practical terms. Features do not create value independently — they matter only if they influence behaviour. That places greater emphasis on understanding problems early, before solutions gain momentum.
It also changes how research is applied. The goal is not to explore every question in depth, but to intervene at the point where input can still alter direction. Timing becomes as critical as rigour.
Operating in this way requires selectivity. Research cannot be evenly distributed across all initiatives in large organisations. It needs to be aligned with business priorities and focused where uncertainty carries the greatest risk.
- Focusing research at the point of decision
Engaging before direction is fixed, not after it is validated - Aligning with business priorities
Concentrating effort where investment and impact are highest - Simplifying application
Reducing friction so teams can act without delay or dependency
Over time, this shifts how research is perceived. It moves from a supporting activity to a mechanism for improving decision quality across the organisation.
Impact does not come from doing more research. It comes from placing it where it changes outcomes.
Final Thought
As execution becomes faster and more accessible, the role of UX shifts towards how effectively it is positioned within the organisation — not only in how work is delivered, but in how it is connected, scaled, and ultimately acted upon.
What differentiates leading teams is not the volume of work produced, but how precisely they operate. They are deliberate about where they engage, clear about what they influence, and disciplined in linking their work to outcomes that matter.
This is not an incremental shift. It is a redefinition of where UX creates value — from isolated activity to organisational impact.
Making UX Research Count at the Decision Level
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