Johan Engelbrecht —Brand, product, and generative AI across two decades of consulting and creative work
Selected work
Brand OS
Creative Director, designer, and sole developer on Brand OS, an internal AI tool that turns a written brief into on-brand Strategy assets in seconds. Built as a technical proof of concept to test a question I kept running into as brand custodian: whether the brand system could be encoded tightly enough that anyone in the company could produce work on system, without a designer in the loop.
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Strategy World 2026
Lead designer on Strategy's flagship annual conference for the third consecutive year. Las Vegas 2024, Orlando 2025, and Las Vegas 2026, each iteration improving on attendee feedback. Thousands of print and digital deliverables, two keynote presentations rendered across three-screen arrays, full identity, campaign, and on-site systems.
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Strategy global rebrand
Creative Director and lead Brand Architect on the rebrand that took MicroStrategy to Strategy, launched 5 February 2025, reporting directly to CEO Phong Le and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor. Strategic foundation with Siegel+Gale, final direction set by Michael, brandmark finalised in direct collaboration with him in Figma. I architected the full system, guidelines, and internal brand site, and remain responsible for the brand today.
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Strategy AI Creative Studio
An internal AI creative studio built inside Discord, exposing image, video, audio, 3D, and brand-locked generation to 70+ users at Strategy through a single bot and a tier-based channel architecture.
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Generative production for brand and campaign work
Built the model-led production pipeline behind most of Strategy's image and video output. Custom LoRAs hosted on Strategy's Hugging Face account, multi-model video workflows, and a working method that starts with taste in MidJourney before any training begins.
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Demo Factory
A proof-of-concept tool helping Strategy's sales engineers craft compelling demo narratives. Not the demo itself: the story scaffold around it. A live experiment in how generative tools can shape sales conversations earlier and faster, with a planned v2 to widen the use case.
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INU, a new investment platform
Design lead on an eight-month engagement defining the user experience vision for a new mobile investment platform in the Czech and Slovak market. Led a design stream of up to 25 people across research, vision, prototype, and handover. Delivered the public product at inu.com alongside a complete design system.
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Merchant onboarding transformation
Service design lead on transforming the merchant onboarding journey for a major payments and POS company. Mapped the existing process, built customer archetypes from primary research, defined a service blueprint that untangled an ad-hoc multi-team flow, and prototyped the future state through to user testing.
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Selected McKinsey work
Three further engagements from my time at McKinsey, spanning digital transformation in banking, sustainable travel concepting, and market design for carbon trading. Each one a different shape of design problem, each one a different team, each one a reason I left McKinsey better at the work than I arrived.
View project →Capabilities
Creative direction
Leading multi-discipline design teams. End-to-end brand systems, campaigns, conference design, and product creative at scale.
Brand identity
Naming systems, logotype, visual language, guidelines, and ongoing brand custodianship for a public company.
Product design
UX, UI, and end-to-end product flows. Mobile and web apps designed at scale, including 300+ screen design systems for regulated industries.
Design research
Ethnographic interviews, usability testing, customer panels, value proposition workshops, service blueprints, and journey mapping.
GenAI tooling
Custom LoRAs, internal AI platforms, prompt engineering, and multi-model production pipelines across FLUX, Sora, Kling, FAL, Runway.
Creative technology
Python, JavaScript, Discord bots, browser games, real-time webcam kiosks, and content pipelines.
Strategic consulting
Design thinking, value proposition canvas, service design, and stakeholder facilitation across financial services, public sector, and enterprise software.
Tooling
About
Two decades of design work that proves what's possible rather than describing it.
I'm a Creative Director at Strategy in Warsaw, leading identity, AI, analytics, and Bitcoin creative for the company. My work sits at the intersection of brand, generative AI, and enterprise software.
Before Strategy, I spent three years as an Engagement Manager (Design Expert Path) at McKinsey & Company, embedded in client engagements across financial services, public sector, and industrials. My role evolved across that time to Engagement Manager-level responsibility, leading design streams of up to 25 people, owning workshop facilitation, customer research, service blueprints, and end-to-end product design through to high-fidelity prototypes. The McKinsey years sharpened how I work: comfortable in ambiguity, structured in delivery, and direct with stakeholders.
Earlier, I led design at Avaloq and ERGO Group, and ran my own studio, Designjust.works, taking on brand and product work for clients across Europe and South Africa.
I trained as a designer in Johannesburg and have worked across South Africa, Switzerland, UAE, and Poland over the past two decades. I spend roughly equal time in design tools, code, and prompts. The work I'm proudest of usually started as something nobody asked for.
British Citizen.