Islands of brilliance are not a strategy.
At a glance
- Challenge
- Digital talent spread across the company in silos, with no single structure, culture or talent engine, while consumers moved to mobile-first, personalised experiences.
- Andrew’s role
- Head of HR for Nike Digital, partnering Adam Sussman, Nike’s first Chief Digital Officer.
- Scale / context
- A fast-growing organisation of more than 2,000 employees and contingent workers across technology, product and design.
- What changed
- One unified digital organisation with its own talent engine. Nike’s digital sales grew 25%, then 35%, then 47% in the three years that followed, taking digital to about 30% of Nike’s revenue by 2020.
In 2016 Nike appointed its first Chief Digital Officer and set out to turn a scattered coalition of digital teams into one organisation. I led the people side of that build.
The technology was never the constraint
By 2016 every consumer company had declared itself a technology company. Nike decided to become one in earnest, and the hard question was not which platforms to build. It was whether the organisation could build them.
Nike had digital talent everywhere: in commerce, in brand, in product, in technology. What it did not have was one organisation. The teams were a coalition, each doing capable work at its own speed, none accountable for the whole, while consumers moved to mobile-first, personalised experiences faster than a coalition could follow.
That year Nike appointed Adam Sussman as its first Chief Digital Officer and set a strategy with a clear centre of gravity: serve every athlete personally, through digital channels the company would now build and run itself. Adam’s summary of the starting point, as I remember it, was that we had islands of brilliance in a sea of inefficiency. I joined him as Head of HR for Nike Digital, with a mandate that was organisational rather than technical. The strategy needed an organisation that could deliver it, and that organisation did not yet exist.
One organisation, not a coalition
The first move was structural. We brought the scattered digital teams into a single organisation with its own leadership team, clear accountability for the consumer experience end to end, and a deliberate blend of Nike veterans and senior digital leaders hired from outside. Getting that team right came first: organisational clarity depends on strategic clarity, and both start at the top.
Structure alone was not the point. The organisation needed a talent architecture that matched digital work rather than the legacy company: a career framework built for product, engineering and design roles, including an expert track so the best engineers could grow in seniority without being forced into management. We mapped the talent we had, assessed leadership potential, and planned succession deep into the organisation rather than only at the top.
A talent engine of its own
A digital organisation competing with Silicon Valley for people, inside a sportswear company in Oregon, cannot rely on the parent company’s habits. We built the engine it needed: an employee value proposition aimed at the talent Nike wanted rather than the talent that happened to apply; always-on external sourcing; and a deliberate shift in the labour mix, converting over 300 contingent workers into employees, which locked in institutional knowledge the company had been renting, and paid for itself in a year.
Capability was built as deliberately as it was bought. DigitalU raised digital fluency across the organisation, Manager90 worked on the craft of managing in a digital organisation, and digital onboarding meant new joiners landed in a culture rather than an org chart. The culture itself was designed rather than left to settle, with engagement and inclusion measured and managed from the start rather than retrofitted.
Bought in
- Senior digital leaders hired from outside
- Always-on external sourcing
300+ contingent workers converted to employees
Renting capability becomes owning it
Built
- DigitalU
- Manager90
- The expert track
- Digital onboarding
- A designed culture
Oil and water
For a while it felt like we were trying to mix oil and water. The digital hires arrived fluent in product, platforms and speed, and some of them did not really understand what Nike was: a company built on sport, on the athlete, on a heritage you cannot manufacture. The Nike side knew all of that in their bones and did not yet see what digital was about to do to their business. Each group could see the other’s blind spot clearly and its own not at all.
That is why the culture was designed rather than left to settle. Blending it was not a values exercise running alongside the real work; it was the real work, because a coalition of two tribes is only a differently shaped coalition.
I have been doing a version of that job ever since. The circles have different labels now, organisational capability and hands-on AI fluency rather than heritage and digital, but it is the same room and the same problem: two groups of capable people who need each other and do not yet speak the same language. Nike is where I learned that the overlap is not a nice-to-have. It is where the value is.
What it delivered
The unified organisation shipped. Nike consolidated its apps, rebuilt its commerce platform, and turned SNKRS and membership into the engine of its direct-to-consumer growth. In the two years that followed, Nike’s digital sales grew 25% and then 35% on a currency-neutral basis, roughly 70% in total, and kept accelerating: 47% the year after that as reported, or 49% currency-neutral, taking digital to about 30% of Nike’s revenue by mid-2020.
The organisation also outlived the people who built it. The structures, the career architecture and the talent engine carried Nike’s digital business through the years that followed, including a pandemic in which digital became most of the story.
What I learned
Guiding principles
Organisational clarity depends on strategic clarity. You cannot design a structure around a strategy that has not been decided.
Blend the cultures, do not replace one with the other. The digital organisation needed Nike’s heritage as much as it needed new ways of working.
Digital fluency is everyone’s job, not a department. DigitalU existed because a digital strategy fails if only the digital function understands it.
Convert the knowledge you already have before buying more. The contingent-to-employee conversions kept years of institutional knowledge that a hiring spree would have walked out of the door.
Build the talent engine for the work, not the legacy chart. Expert tracks, digital-right careers and a distinct value proposition were what made the organisation competitive for people.
Centralise to transform; design the steady state separately. Putting everything under one leader is the fastest way to run a transformation and rarely the right shape to live in afterwards. A federated model can work just as well, but only if the integrated operating model and the governance that runs it are designed rather than assumed. That is the piece we did not settle.
Why it matters now
The same move is happening again. Companies are bolting AI onto old operating models the way they once bolted on digital teams, and the result will be the same: islands of brilliance, and value that never compounds. Nike’s digital transformation worked because the organisation was rebuilt around the new work. That is the argument of this whole practice, and this is where I first proved it at scale. Nike’s later years show the other half of the lesson: an organisation rebuilt for new work still has to keep rebuilding itself, and the ones that stop are the ones that get caught.