Sony Mobile — Xperia & the Sony Visual Language

Sony has five distinct product verticals: TV, Mobile, PlayStation, Consumer Electronics, and Professional Equipment. Each had its own art director. None of them talked to each other. The result was a fragmented brand experience across dozens of products and platforms. My job was to fix that — without dismantling what each team had built.

I established a horizontal User Experience Language team: one designer from each vertical, all reporting to a shared design language function I managed. The first deliverable was a unified visual language — the foundation for everything that followed.

Getting executive buy-in across five separate divisions was the hardest part. Each vertical had its own leadership structure, its own priorities, and its own design identity. Aligning them required operating at the intersection of competing agendas — something I learned to do well at Sony.

Sony Mobile had UX touchpoints everywhere — camera apps built with the Alpha team, video experiences with Bravia, gaming integrations with PlayStation. Every feature was a cross-vertical negotiation.

That experience shaped how I think about design leadership: the craft matters, but the ability to align people around a shared vision matters more. The Xperia UX was the visible output. The unified design language was the real achievement.