In 2016, LSE wanted a better website.
What existed was fragmented, with no clear route through it for anyone trying to choose a university. Prospective students struggled to find courses. Current students struggled to find support or accommodation. Academics had nowhere obvious to surface their research. One of the world's leading social science institutions was harder to navigate than it should have been for the people who needed it most.
So the first task was the one we were asked to do: reimagine the site around intuitive journeys — finding a course, getting help, finding somewhere to live, discovering research, understanding what LSE actually is.
It went live, and it has changed very little in the eight years since. In digital, that is unusual. It is also the most honest evidence available that it was built on the right foundations.
A website was never going to be the limit of it. The same question kept surfacing: if technology could make finding a course this much easier, what else was it failing to support? How students learn. How they live. How academics research, publish and teach.
The answer wasn't another project. It was capability.
Two things followed that mattered more than anything we delivered ourselves. LSE created a permanent internal digital team. And it stood up a Business Improvement Office with a remit far wider than student-facing technology — the standing to look across the institution and change how it worked.
We helped build both, then worked alongside them rather than in front of them. Every initiative that followed was led by people who stayed.
The strongest evidence that a digital product was built right is that nobody has needed to rebuild it.
What the new teams did next is the actual result.
They built a native student app — schedules, collaboration with lecturers, student-run social and study groups — replacing an expensive off-the-shelf multi-tenant product. Eighty per cent of students adopted it within four weeks, the fastest uptake of any app LSE has released, and online student engagement rose by a third.
They overhauled Salesforce to drive student acquisition and underpin the student record system. They built a new research management system, and a new online course assessment system.
And they took LSE's teaching online. It began cautiously, with CPD microcredentials developed alongside online education specialists GetSmarter. It became more than a hundred masters, open and career accelerator programmes, reaching over ten thousand learners a year in places LSE could never have reached from Houghton Street.
That reach is now a sustained income stream. In the most recent HESA sector figures, LSE's income from continuing education and CPD for individuals stood at £21.2M — the second highest of any UK higher education institution.
In 2026, LSE was named University of the Year for Student Success. A decade of sustained, internally-owned improvement sits behind that. None of it depended on us being in the room.
