Virgin Media’s digital platforms were evolving fast, but the delivery model behind them needed a rethink. I joined the Challenger team — a dedicated innovation group within Virgin — to help shape how new digital capabilities could be designed and delivered more efficiently. The goal was to bring agility, collaboration, and customer focus to a business long known for its scale and complexity.
Virgin Media operates with a distinctive dual structure — Champion and Challenger.
● Champion represents the established digital ecosystem: the long-standing infrastructure, systems, and delivery processes that have powered Virgin’s online presence for years.
● Challenger acts as the injection of innovation — a forward-thinking, start-up-style environment designed to test, learn, and build new digital capabilities.
While working at Virgin Media, I was part of the Challenger team, responsible for driving transformation across the company’s digital landscape.
Why Change Was Needed
Virgin’s existing systems were showing strain. Complexity had crept in through outdated processes and siloed data structures, resulting in long delivery cycles and difficulty scaling innovation.
The Champion–Challenger model was introduced to solve exactly that. It aimed to establish a continuous flow of new capabilities — combining the reliability of Champion’s infrastructure with the agility and experimentation of Challenger’s working model.
Challenger’s mission was clear:
“Create fast, step-change digital delivery using the latest technology, agile processes, and data-driven experiences.”
Challenger’s Approach to Innovation
To bring that mission to life, the Challenger program adopted a modern, start-up mindset:
● Ring-fenced agile teams operating in a start-up-like environment for fast, iterative delivery.
● Test-and-learn culture that embraced experimentation and managed risk.
● Lightweight, modular journeys that could evolve quickly.
● Flattened hierarchy blending internal and external expertise, focused on delivery.
● Strong leadership and external digital specialists brought in to accelerate innovation.
● DevOps and testing factories introduced as part of an agile, non-project-led model.
● Structured handover processes to ensure momentum and maturity after release.
● Industry-leading SaaS architecture as the backbone for future scalability.
This model allowed Virgin to deliver continuously rather than in “mega-project” bursts — evolving its digital ecosystem piece by piece while maintaining operational stability.
Program setup
Challenger followed a Spotify-inspired squad model, shifting the organisation towards autonomous, contribution-focused teams.
Squads — Multifunctional teams owning a single product or feature, with clear OKRs and rapid release cycles.
● Tribes — Collections of squads working in related domains (e.g., Sales, Care, Experience). Tribe Leads ensured alignment and removed friction.
● Chapters — Specialists embedded across squads, sharing best practices and expertise (e.g., UX, development, data).
● Guilds — Informal, cross-tribe groups (e.g., Design Guild) keeping teams aligned and avoiding siloed working.
● Alliance — The overall Challenger ecosystem, uniting all tribes and squads under one shared mission.
This structure encouraged autonomy with accountability, collaboration across disciplines, and faster, more meaningful innovation.
My Role & Undertaking
As a User Experience Consultant, I contributed to and led multiple initiatives within the Challenger program. My responsibilities included:
● User research and stakeholder interviews
● Initial sketches and concepting
● Rapid prototyping for early validation
● Information architecture and content mapping
● Wireframing and user flows
● User interface design and documentation
● Daily collaboration with developers and business owners
Operating within such a complex transformation required balancing speed with consistency — ensuring new features were innovative, usable, and scalable.
Approach to Design
My approach — and that of the broader UX team — was to challenge the status quo at every level. Virgin’s transformation was massive, so each project became an opportunity to question existing assumptions and design for what customers needed next, not just now.
Building Empathy
Understanding Virgin’s diverse customer base was fundamental. UX starts with empathy, and while I had recently joined Virgin as a broadband customer myself, I knew my experience represented just a fraction of the audience.
Through research, I worked to understand the needs of the wider 48 million customers served across Virgin’s ecosystem. This involved mapping behaviours across multiple personas and identifying the frictions that shaped their digital experiences.
Designing for the Future
Virgin defined five Digital Tribes to represent how different types of users exist in the digital landscape. These archetypes leaned toward the cutting edge of digital behaviour — helping the team design not just for today’s needs, but for the experiences of tomorrow.
By aligning design thinking with these tribes, we ensured new journeys were intuitive, data-informed, and adaptable as user expectations evolved.
An example of a persona that was used that was referred to when designing journeys
Outcome
The Challenger program became a catalyst for Virgin Media’s digital transformation — modernising workflows, accelerating delivery, and embedding a test-and-learn culture across teams.
From new customer journeys to modernised infrastructure, the Challenger approach proved that large organisations can innovate like start-ups without sacrificing scale or reliability.
Projects worked on
