Volvo Cars

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Connecting the sales experience

We reimagined a new sales experience for Volvo’s retailers, connecting digital and in-person interactions. I co-led the sales strategy for Connect, Volvo’s retail platform, designed its core sales tools, and brought teams together around shared design patterns.

Year

2023-2024

Role

Lead / Senior Product Designer

Contribution

Strategy

UI / UX

Leadership

The modern car buying process is complex, with customers moving between online research, configuration and visits to retailers. As Volvo moved toward direct sales, these experiences needed to work together and sales agents needed connected tools that reduced admin and helped them serve customers. I helped shape Connect Sales – a new sales system and platform for sales agents. With Product and Engineering, I set the design direction and led end-to-end design across lead-to-order.

Since my work on its early foundations, the wider Connect platform has grown to 30+ applications across 96 markets.

A closer look at Connect, from sales performance to offers and interaction history.

As more teams built Connect applications, designers needed agreement on workflows and interaction patterns. I established an alignment committee and pattern inventory, contributed shared patterns, and drove alignment with the Enterprise Design System.

The offer flow links a website configuration to the lead record, supporting the sales conversation and follow-up.

Alex helped establish a strong foundation, set a clear concept and direction, and partnered effectively with product and engineering to deliver impactful outcomes.

– Emelie, Design manager at Volvo

Shared header guidance defines the relationship between page titles, actions and content, including how the layout handles longer titles.

Results

Volvo’s change in D2C direction closed the Swedish sales pilot, but the work continued in the UK. Customer Management remains in use, and a new ordering flow for the Motability car-leasing scheme reused the Lead flow. The shared design patterns continue across Connect applications.

Motability’s pilot launched at 11 retail sites and processed 300+ orders. It met every pilot success criterion and moved into national rollout.

Thoughts & reflections

We chose Sweden for the pilot, where retailers already had established dealer management systems. We underestimated how embedded those tools were in their daily work. A better interface alone wasn’t enough reason to switch. The main learning was that transformation rarely succeeds as a single big-bang change. Value creation is iterative: introduce improvements gradually, learn from real use and build on the systems and processes people already rely on.