Is Your Design Strategy Solving for the Right Problem, or Just Making It Pretty? — Celestine Ngulube, Absa Group

Celestine Ngulube leads a team of around twenty-five designers, researchers, CX professionals and strategists supporting the platforms of a corporate investment bank with an African footprint across twelve countries, alongside a presence in the UK, China, the United States and an emerging interest in the UAE. 

Classically trained through art history, graphic design and photography, Celestine moved into digital in 2013 as a UI designer and quickly became drawn to the deeper questions of what customers were actually trying to achieve. Across two decades in the field, the throughline has been a conviction that craft is only a foundation: the real value sits in orchestrating people, process and technology so that both clients and colleagues experience the bank as a single, consistent whole.

What does your role look like today?

Celestine describes a role defined less by design output than by alignment across a large, siloed organisation.

“My role today is more around looking after a design team. I have got about twenty-five designers who look after our platforms for a corporate investment bank that has an African footprint of around twelve countries. We have also got a presence in the UK, China, America, and we are looking at the UAE as well. The designers are made up of researchers, CX professionals, and some strategy as well.

I spend my day mostly orchestrating between all of this work, the experience work, and senior executives to make sure that anything we have built in a corporate environment is coherent for our clients and our colleagues. So I am mostly in alignment sessions, or design reviews, or talking to our ops teams around how we can optimise our processes in the back end. It depends on the day, but to sum it up, it is mostly spent on orchestration.”

What drew you to CX and product design?

Trained in the visual crafts, Celestine explains the shift from how something looks to how it actually works.

“I did art history, so I was classically trained that way. I also did graphic design and photography, so I used to meticulously draw things and very precisely measure what a logo should be, the colour, all of that. But then I realised there is actually more to it than just how the thing looks. It is how it actually works that makes a difference.

As much as the craft makes the thing beautiful and aesthetically pleasing to interact with, if all the dots are not connecting, if the core of the brand or the product is not coherent, the most beautiful logo will not make a difference. That is when I started to think more deeply about what customers need and the actual problems we were solving. What you see and experience at the surface is just the delight layer. First, it has to be usable, and you have to fully understand what the client needs to do before you make it pretty. That is what drew me to the world I am in now.”

How do you translate branding into an experience?

Celestine argues that consistency across every touch point is what builds trust.

“This is where I say orchestration matters, because the entire journey matters. An example I love to use is how Apple designs their products. If you look at every product Apple delivers, whether it is an iPhone, an iPad or a laptop, and you match all the corners together, they are all the same. These are different silos within Apple, but they understand there is a language that needs to be consistent.

That is the reason people trust Apple. They communicate in the same language across all the channels. When you see an ad, even if they do not say Apple, you know it is Apple. When you orchestrate across all the touch points, the level of coordination and detail required, just getting people to work together, is the thing that keeps us employed. It is like a moving, morphing, growing organism. You can never get it perfect all the time; you always have to tweak something here and there.”

What are the most common challenges you encounter?

For Celestine, nearly every complexity in a large organisation ultimately reduces to people and alignment.

“Inevitably, in a large organisation, you always have to solve for the people. Getting people aligned to the right things is the biggest thing I encounter. The bigger the organisation, the more people to bring together. There is that graphic where two people have one line of communication, three people have three lines, but with sixteen people the number multiplies exponentially. So the challenge is always trying to bring those complexities into a simple layer.

The other part is making sure all of those complex touch points are solving for the right thing. A lot of the time we speak to each other internally and convince ourselves, but when you dig down, are you really solving for the right thing? The way you do it is to think about who you are trying to solve for, who your client base is, and what your mission is. Then you engage your customers and ask why they value you. Without engaging at the right levels with the right customers and aligning to a strategy, you will continuously solve for the wrong things, which is expensive, and you give your customers something they never asked for.”

What is the biggest misconception organisations have about UX and digital transformation?

Celestine separates two common errors: treating UX as decoration, and treating transformation as something you can buy.

“UX is simply user experience: figuring out exactly what your users need, then making sure the journey is simple enough for them to achieve it as quickly as possible. In banks we get it wrong because we think people want to spend the whole day on our platform. In corporate investment banking, our clients move large amounts of money daily, sometimes many times their annual pay in a single transaction. They do not want to be on that platform for too long. UX makes it possible for them to get in, get out, and trust that the transaction is going to the right recipient.

With digital transformation, the biggest misconception is that it is technical. There is new AI, so let us just throw AI at it. But first, are you solving the right problem, and have you actually done change management? A lot of the problems we face in corporate are not technical problems; they are process problems. AI comes at the end, once you have understood each aspect of the journey. You cannot add a layer of AI to a broken process; you will just have faster broken processes and dodgy outputs. 

People also miss the step of getting colleagues on board for the journey. In corporate banking, a lot of things are paper-based, and a lot of people have been there for years, so their IP is in their heads. You cannot just give them technology; you have to take them on a journey, incrementally, bit by bit.”

How is AI changing your work?

Having taken a data science course, Celestine is clear that AI amplifies rigour rather than replacing it.

“The way it has changed my work is that it is better at the things I already know. That is fundamentally what people should be using AI for. Over twenty years I have seen tools come and go, and every time there is a new tool people freak out. But the principles in my industry have not changed. You still have to solve for the right problems, and there are certain ways of understanding your users that you cannot fast-track with AI.

A former colleague who now teaches ran a challenge for students to interrogate users and build a product. One student came up with an amazing product, but when questioned on the methodology, they fumbled and eventually confessed they had used AI. [They were] sent back to actually speak to users; the project became much better because they took the principles and then applied a layer of AI. 

So you do not ask AI for the answer; that is where people get it wrong. Because I know the context, I will know when AI is lying to me. I can ask it to synthesise three weeks of real user work, and it will infer the right things in record time. Work that used to take weeks now takes days or hours. But tell it your assumptions and ask it to invent the pain points, and it is very good at giving you something that resembles credibility, which then does not work in the market.”

How is AI changing customer expectations in your industry?

Celestine sees a future where the interface recedes, and where being trusted matters more than being visible.

“When a technology becomes this democratised, and customers play with it, they expect instantaneous things. The frontier models remember your preferences and talk to you like a friend, so users now expect instant answers. If I want to pay someone in Japan from Rome, I expect it to happen seamlessly without doing any gymnastics. I read that in the near future you might not need a UI at all, just a chat interface: book a flight, buy a car, pay my top clients, all in one place.

So we now need to think about how we become invisible in the client’s experience, embedded in their day-to-day. But the challenge is trust. Brands create familiarity. There is a difference between talking to you because I can see your face and your mannerisms, and chatting to a system where I cannot tell what it is doing. 

So how do you make it invisible but also personable and trustworthy, so that when a user interacts with that chat interface, they have enough assurance the money is going where it is supposed to go? You cannot compute for all the human contexts out there. On a bell curve, a chatbot can be really good at the common cases, but the edge cases are where the models break, because they have not encountered the entirety of humanity. We are still mammals; there are basic human things that will not change for a while.”

How would you describe your leadership philosophy through uncertainty and change?

Rather than reassurance, Celestine leads by helping teams name and live inside competing tensions.

“Everything around us is changing very quickly. You always have the transactional, your day-to-day, and then the contextual environment: geopolitics, technology, all moving much faster than the systems we have had for decades. There is a tension between the thing you are used to and the thing changing faster and faster. The best way to lead in that is to build more resilient teams and tell them to embrace the change rather than resist it, because otherwise you get left behind and feel that things are happening to you.

When I talk to my teams, I do not tell them it is going to be okay. I tell them what the tensions are and make them aware this is a reality. Early this year, our economy in South Africa looked strong, and then a war changed the outlook, and everything we had planned needed adjusting. The people who were not resilient froze. 

The ones who asked how we innovate around this, who understood the tensions we cannot control versus the things we can, found the opportunities in between. That is how I try to lead. It is not always successful, but my team is probably one of the most resilient in the bank, because they kept it moving and delivered in very complex places. Find the middle ground, keep it moving, and be comfortable living in the tension.”

What skills will matter most for designers and digital leaders in future?

Celestine makes the case for commercial fluency, adaptability, and a scarcer resource: critical thinking.

“Your craft can only take you so far. If you cannot convert those things into commercial value, you will be disintermediated by the tools, some of which are very good in beta form now. You need to understand what you are solving for your customers, which never changes. You need to be resilient, and you need to be ambidextrous: there is not one attribute that gets you future-ready. You augment your craft with the emerging skills available now, but at the end of the day you translate it into commercial value, because corporate is transactional and you still need to make money.

The other thing, especially in the world of AI, is critical thinking. That is going to become rarer because of the instantaneous nature of how AI gives you answers. You can get stuck in a loop, convinced this is the right thing, but if you do not fully immerse yourself in the problem, you will not be solving for the right thing. It has never been this easy to become exceptional, because you just have to do the boring work. 

It is not fast or glamorous, but fewer people are actually putting in the work, so if you put in a little extra, your ideas are grounded in reality. In about ten years, when everyone is convinced AI will solve everything, the people who step back and still understand basic human needs will get to the top. Basics are the things that do not change.”

What one question should senior leaders keep asking themselves?

Celestine closes on the discipline of the five whys, and a single question he returns to again and again.

“What are we optimising for? As simple as that, and I will ask it again and again. In design, we have a framework called the five whys. Why are you doing this? Why? Why? At the core of it, if someone can explain what they are optimising for and why, is it really worth doing? A lot of people stop at the second why. But if you go deeper, the first layer is superficial, the second gets them thinking, the third almost breaks them, and by the fourth and fifth you understand whether they have fully broken down what they are optimising for.

It is a completely transferable framework that applies everywhere. This is why I love design: fundamentally it is about solving for humanity and integrating that with technology, but you actually have to love and care for your users’ humanity. You almost have to be an anthropologist as a designer, because you are not solving for some alien over there. You are solving for an actual breathing, feeling, emotional human being who never quite knows what they want.”

Join the Conversation: The Ortus Club’s Executive Network

As Celestine Ngulube makes clear, the hardest problems in design and digital transformation are rarely technical, and they are rarely solved alone. They sit at the intersection of people, process and strategy, where leaders must orchestrate competing priorities and keep asking what they are truly optimising for. That kind of clarity is sharpened through dialogue with peers facing the same tensions.

At The Ortus Club, we host curated executive roundtables that bring together senior leaders across design, technology and operations. Step beyond the hype of digital transformation and join the kind of grounded, high-value conversations that separate what looks good on a slide deck from what actually works in market.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does orchestration mean in a corporate bank?

A: It is the work of removing internal complexity so that multiple siloed departments, each with its own speciality, present themselves to the client as one coherent entity, with a consistent experience across every touch point for both customers and colleagues.

Q: Why is usability more important than aesthetics in product design?

A: The visual layer is what Celestine calls the delight layer, an added quality that makes a product pleasant to use. But if the underlying journey is not coherent, even the most beautiful interface fails. You must understand what a client needs to do before you make it pretty.

Q: Why do organisations get digital transformation wrong?

A: Many run to the technology before understanding the landscape, treating transformation as a technical fix rather than a process and change-management challenge. Adding AI to a broken process only produces faster broken processes and unreliable outputs.

Q: How should leaders use AI without undermining rigour?

A: AI amplifies work that is already grounded in real user engagement, commercials and data, synthesising in hours what once took weeks. Used as a shortcut to skip the meticulous work, it produces output that resembles credibility but fails when taken to real clients.

Q: What is the five whys framework?

A: It is a design technique for reaching the root of a decision by repeatedly asking why. The first answers are superficial; by the fourth or fifth why, you can tell whether someone truly understands what they are optimising for. Celestine considers it transferable well beyond design.