(Eng) Kingfisher: Research and Service Design across 6 countries - Kate Fanning & Sabrina Wright

Épisode de Head Of Design par Paul MENANT · 2 septembre 2026 · 57 min

1. Episode description (SEO)

❤️ The Head of Design podcast is produced by Design Club and sponsored by Mobbin, the world's largest mobile and web design reference library, used by more than 2,000,000 designers and product teams.

👉 Pre-order the DESIGN CLUB T-Shirt on the Shop: https://shop.designclub.global/

In this episode, I welcome Kate Fanning, Design Research Lead at Kingfisher, and Sabrina Wright, Service Design Manager at Kingfisher.

Kingfisher is the European home improvement group behind Castorama, Brico Dépôt and Screwfix, active across France, the UK, Poland, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. Kate and Sabrina sit at the crossroads of two disciplines that are often confused: UX research and service design.

Kate zooms into specific touchpoints and screens, Sabrina takes the holistic view of the customer journey, front stage to back stage.

And both are pushing their teams through the same shift: moving from reactive research (validating a feature someone already decided to build) to proactively "feeding the funnel" with real opportunities.

What we explored together:

→ The real difference between UX research and service design, and where the two overlap

→ Running research and service design across six countries and multiple retail brands, with a small team and native speakers instead of translators whenever possible

→ Why diary studies are becoming their go-to method for long, low-frequency journeys like kitchen installations

→ Scaling a research and design thinking culture across a large organisation without losing quality control

→ What happened when they let AI generate personas straight from raw interview data

→ "Feeding the funnel": building a proactive research practice instead of waiting to be briefed

Thank you to Kate Fanning and Sabrina Wright for sharing their vision of research and service design at Kingfisher.

Follow me on Design Club: designclub.global LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/paulmenant

Autres épisodes de « Head Of Design »

À propos du podcast

Bonjour, je suis Paul MENANT, co-fondateur de Design Club, un collectif international 100 % Design & Research. Grâce à la force du nombre, on accélère les projets de nos clients et la carrière de nos membres! Avec le podcast "Head Of Design", je vous propose de plonger au cœur de l'univers…

Head Of Design

Épisodes similaires

Tous les épisodes de Head Of Design · Plus de podcasts Culture