Designing Dell’s Future-Ready Content Ecosystem
Evolving vision and strategy to unlock content at scale. Remove the cost of legacy.
I led the UX strategy and design effort for Dell Technologies’ Content domain within a global commerce transformation. The work focused on modernizing content tooling, workflows, and governance across a fragmented enterprise ecosystem – without disrupting day-to-day operations.
This case study is password-protected due to NDA. Access can be provided upon request.
Overview / Challenge
Dell’s content operations had grown into a “Frankenstein” ecosystem over 10-20+ years: overlapping tools, inconsistent access models, manual work, and heavy dependency on ops/IT for routine changes. The result was slow time-to-market, duplicated effort, and inconsistent quality at scale.
Key challenges
- Tool sprawl and overlapping capabilities (one task often required multiple tools)
- Sequential handoffs (teams waiting on each other instead of working in parallel)
- Governance gaps (standards, roles, access, ownership not consistently enforced)
- Limited ability for creators to iterate directly – decision-makers far from the final output
Solution
We defined a clear north-star operating model for how content should be created, governed, and delivered end-to-end and translated it into executable requirements and decision packages.
Key contributions
- Defined north-star principles that prevented further fragmentation (later adopted across other domains)
- Established an access model stance: RBAC/ABAC as a platform capability to support varied team responsibilities without creating new tool debt
- Produced capability specs (~30 capabilities per category) for CMS / DAM / WYSIWYG, aligned to market standards
- Supported executive alignment through an end-to-end narrative showing how internal platform capabilities improve the customer experience
Results
Informed an executive steering committee (SteerCo) direction on platform strategy (build vs. buy)
Enabled a multi-million investment decision direction with an estimated $80-120M business impact range
Drove tool rationalization outcomes (retire/consolidate redundant tools; maintain only time-bounded mid-term bridges)
Created assets used to align multiple domains on capability reuse (deck + short videos, customer view + internal tooling view)
Enter password to view the full narrative, artifacts, and decision details. (NDA-protected)
Industry
Тechnology
Company
Designer
Nikola Velev
Senior UX Designer
Bulgaria (Europe)
Role
Senior UX Designer / Design Lead
Team
Design, End-to-end Leads, Research, Process Engineering, IT, Leadership, Executives
Timeline
2024 Q3 – 2026 Q1
Feedback on this project
Shared by teammates and leaders who collaborated on this project.
“Nik and Sevi became instrumental in redefining Dell’s content foundation and shaping a unified North Star content strategy. Their work helped leadership converge on a future-state approach built for scalability and modernization.”
..
“Their cross-journey visualization helped leadership understand how the journeys integrate to deliver the enterprise vision.”
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“Their WYSIWYG model became a core asset in the CMS RFP and helped drive broad alignment and excitement.”
– Jeanette Castelan, End-to-End Lead (Content)
“Nikola, through a highly collaborative and solidly-researched effort, has been vital in providing insights and understanding throughout the work in Content and Store. His ability to simplify the complex and provide examples of how to communicate effectively and visually has contributed to no end efforts to operationalize how we present strategy and actionable insights to drive and inform visions with his partners.”
– Michael Simborg (Lead Design Strategist)
“Nikola communicates clearly, supports teammates, and keeps collaboration smooth—even in stressful moments. He brings strong problem-solving and UX thinking, and consistently delivers without compromising quality.”
– Sevi Lyutfi, UX/UI Designer, Dell
