Building a Creative
Operating System
at Lindt & Sprüngli
How a transactional design function became a strategic growth engine — from the brief to the shelf.
This is a story about infrastructure — and what becomes possible when you build the right kind. Not a rebrand. Not a campaign. A creative operating system, built from scratch, that changed how a global premium brand thinks, talks about, and produces design.
Design as a production service
When I joined Lindt, my first instinct wasn't to redesign anything. It was to listen. I started where I always start: with the team.
My onboarding process is built around interviews — first the core creative team, then a deliberate branch outward to cross-functional partners in brand, marketing, legal, and production. I'm not collecting opinions. I'm mapping the system: what's working, what's breaking, where the real friction lives versus where people just think it does.
From those conversations I identified the pain points, separated the low-hanging fruit from the structural issues, and built myself a roadmap — designed to show the team small wins were possible before we went after the big ones.
What I found was a creative function operating entirely as production support. Projects arrived without a defined problem to solve. There was no formal briefing process, no concept development stage, no shared standard for what "good" looked like. The workflow moved directly from request to execution — skipping the thinking entirely.
I understood the shape of the problem. Then I saw it in action.
A meeting that changed everything
A few weeks in, I sat in on the bi-weekly creative review. The format: the creative team printed their work and tacked it to the wall. Finished product only — no process visible, no context set. Then the room reacted. Brand managers, associate brand managers, senior leadership — everyone together, everyone with an opinion.
A designer presented their work. And an ABM looked at the wall and said, plainly: "This looks like something made by an elementary school kid."
My jaw dropped. And then I recovered the meeting.
I stepped in and redirected: I'd observed a few things, I said, that would help both the designer and the brand develop stronger work — starting with how we brief and how we give feedback. After the meeting, I pulled the ABM aside. I didn't lecture. I encouraged — specifically, how to give feedback that supports creative development rather than dismantling the person doing the work.
That conversation mattered. But it was a band-aid. The real problem wasn't one person's words. It was the absence of a system that made better feedback possible in the first place — a business that had skipped the entire front end of the creative process, with no structure, no anchor, no accountability.
That meeting was my starting point.
A creative operating system, from the ground up
The intervention had to happen at every layer — process, culture, and tools simultaneously. You can't fix feedback without fixing the brief. You can't fix the brief without building a concept stage. And you can't build a concept stage without first defining what success looks like.
Progress, not perfection.
Infrastructure that learned.
This wasn't a transformation that flipped overnight. It's the kind of change that compounds — better infrastructure creates the conditions for better work, and better work builds the trust that makes the next round of work even stronger.
"The system didn't just improve the work. It changed how the business understood design."
Creative excellence doesn't come from more talent alone — it comes from clear systems that give great thinking room to scale. The brief is not an administrative task. It's the first act of design.
When an organization learns to treat it that way, everything downstream improves: the work, the conversations, the culture, and ultimately the results on shelf.
