Case Study

Generating Results for the Energy Industry

Directing a team of ten to deliver a web enablement platform that reduced the time and cost to launch new sites by 66%

Role: Lead Strategist & Experience Director
Client: ExxonMobil
Industry: Energy (B2B & B2C)
Duration: 2 years
Team: 10 (UX, design, strategy, front-end development)

The Problem

ExxonMobil’s internal teams called their website publishing system “a burning platform” — and they weren’t being dramatic. The technology had hit end-of-life. It couldn’t produce decent analytics, couldn’t create landing pages, and couldn’t support any tools to help customers navigate a catalog of hundreds of unique products. The product catalog wasn’t even online.

But the technology was the easy part of the problem. The hard part was organizational.

Seven separate Business Units needed to agree on a single platform, and they couldn’t. Each BU had different go-to-market strategies, different business models, different customers, different levels of digital marketing maturity, and operated in different countries with their own regulations. On top of that, an uneven web of vendors was doing seemingly different work for different sites across the globe. Nobody had a unified picture of what they actually needed, because nobody was operating under the same assumptions.

The strategic question wasn’t “what should the platform do.” It was: how do you architect a single platform that supports seven fundamentally different ways of doing business?

My Approach

I started with the organizational complexity, not the technology. Before touching wireframes, I needed to understand seven different business contexts well enough to find the structural patterns that could unify them.

I ran 35+ workshops and stakeholder interviews across the Business Units to surface requirements, constraints, and the political realities of who needed what. Then I led user interviews, task analysis, and customer journey mapping to understand how each BU’s customers actually behaved, not just what internal stakeholders assumed they wanted.

The key strategic insight was that while the seven BUs marketed differently, their customers’ underlying jobs-to-be-done overlapped significantly. That meant I could architect a flexible platform with shared infrastructure and a component library that supported divergent marketing strategies without building seven separate systems.

I directed the team through personas (built around jobs-to-be-done, not demographics), touchpoint flows, annotated wireframes, visual mockups, and clickable prototypes, running concept testing and usability testing at each stage. Usability testing was conducted globally, in English, Spanish, and Russian, because this platform had to work across markets, not just in Houston.

Key Decisions

Flexible platform architecture over unified templates. The instinct on a multi-BU project is to standardize everything. I pushed against that. Instead, I architected the platform so shared components could be assembled into fundamentally different site structures and marketing strategies. The same component library powered B2B industrial lubricant sites and B2C fuel retail sites because the components were designed around user tasks, not brand guidelines. This is what made 66% cost reduction possible: new sites could be assembled, not built from scratch.

Job-to-be-done-driven personas as alignment tools. The personas weren’t just research deliverables. They were the mechanism that got seven BUs to stop arguing about features and start agreeing on customer needs. By framing everything around what customers were trying to accomplish rather than what each BU wanted to promote, I shifted the conversation from territorial to collaborative. The personas and task analysis became the shared language across all stakeholder groups.

Object-oriented task flows. I structured user task flows around content objects rather than page sequences. This meant the information architecture could flex as BUs added products, entered new markets, or evolved their digital strategies without requiring a redesign. It was the architectural decision that made the platform a long-term asset rather than a project deliverable with a shelf life.

Keystone deliverables that drove alignment, not just design. Every major deliverable — detailed sitemaps, annotated wireframes, training documentation — was designed to serve double duty: guiding the design team’s execution and giving stakeholders a concrete artifact to align around. On a project with this many decision-makers, ambiguity is the enemy. I eliminated it by making every decision visible and reviewable.

Outcomes

The platform was so successful it became ExxonMobil’s standard web platform for all downstream businesses, generating an additional $12M in follow-on sales.

• 66% reduction in time and cost to launch new sites

• 20+ sites launched on time and on budget, globally, in multiple languages

• +4,847 B2C pages newly indexed by search engines

• +510 B2C pages achieving top 3 search positions

• 40% increase in B2B monthly visits

• 25% increase in B2B contact inquiries

• 25,000+ B2B success story views from a baseline of zero

• 1,400+ B2B content shares from zero

• 1,100+ B2B content downloads from zero

• 116 B2B distributor conversions from zero

• Sitecore Experience Award for Best Data-Driven Website

Reflection

This project taught me that platform strategy is organizational design in disguise. The seven BUs didn’t need seven solutions. They needed one architecture flexible enough to let them each operate independently while sharing infrastructure. My primary contribution was reframing the problem from “build a website” to “build a system that lets seven different businesses build their own websites.” That reframe is what unlocked the 66% cost reduction and is why the platform scaled beyond the original scope into a $12M follow-on engagement.