Laila Coulton

I started my career as a Management Consultant and transitioned into large corporates 10 years ago to focus on establishing customer centred capabilities and to drive change. I'm skilled at creating strategies along with clear execution plans and success metrics.

At Xero the initial goal (first 3 months) was to create the Digital Accessibility strategy to embed accessibility into ways of working in Product and Technology. I created the Digital Accessibility 5 year plan and delivered process and cultural change (from accessibility being a 'should' to a 'must'). Our Digital Accessibility customer service practices were externally recognised as best practice.

Following an organisational restructure, I was tasked with creating the 3 year and annual plans for Design and Research Operations. I created a new mission, vision, purpose and strategy within 6 months of inheriting these teams. I built strategies which translated into annual and quarterly roadmaps with clear benefits and outcomes identified. My strategies enabled teams which had been halved during restructure to continue to support Design, Marketing, Product and Engineering without disruption to SLAs. This work also resulted in the consolidation of tools and a substantial reduction (>$200k) in annual tool spend.

At Coles Group I was tasked with building an in-house design capability. Coles' goal was to reduce agency spend and to improve consistency of customer experiences across brands and channels. I iterated and managed the operational systems and processes to support designers, researchers, service designers, accessibility analysts and optimisation analysts. These systems enabled us to operate a design team which could support across all Coles Group brands. In addition to this, my design team built the Coles Group Design System to speed up and deliver consistency in our designs.

At both Xero and Coles Group I led my teams to deliver customer and employee journey maps to aid in customer centricity and prioritisation of work. I'm known for taking a complex system of internal work and customer needs and translating these into a clear and prioritised list of initiatives. My plans create focus for teams and allows the alignment of team strengths to work. When there is a clear view of the most important and impactful work it's much easier to align your resources to ensure they work to their strengths!

I was a strategic management consultant for just shy of 10 years. This experience taught me to learn quickly, be flexible and to be laser focussed on delivering valued outcomes. I worked across energy, utilities, education, tax and retail. My projects included, competitor analysis, category analysis, economic modelling, call centre optimisation, space and range optimisation, organisational redesign, systems integration and implementation, supply chain optimisation and strategic planning.

I'm well suited to an organisation who needs a leader to create a clear strategy or plan. I'm able to create the systems and processes to enable strategies and plans. I have extensive experience in managing and motivating teams. If you need a mess sorted and clear direction set - please reach out.

• Human Centred Design: Convergent and divergent thinking to identify the key problems to be solved and the best ways to solve those problems.
• Journey Mapping: Mapping employee, technology and customer experiences to sharpen strategies and align on priorities
• Strategic Planning: Vision, Mission and purpose exploration, Impact vs Effort mapping and prioritisation to build 5 year plans, annual plans and quarterly roadmaps
• Benefits realisation: Identify hero metrics and establish measurement practices. Create artefacts to share progress up, down and out of the organisation.
• Change management: Build stakeholder maps, change plans and communication plans to ensure messages cut through noise and reach intended audiences