Ben Sheppard

About Ben

Based in London, Ben leads the United Kingdom Product Development and Design Practices. He is passionate about helping clients develop creative products. Before joining McKinsey he designed and built the world’s lowest cost deep-sea camera: allowing pictures of new species to be captured kilometres below the sea surface.

He has a wealth of experience helping clients improve their products and services: both to drive revenue growth and reduce material costs. He has served over thirty of the world’s leading companies on everything from jet engines to sports cars, from asthma inhalers to coffee machines. Ben brings deep expertise in developing global transformation programmes, covering leadership training, project management, and portfolio planning.

Recent experience includes:

• Helped a global pharmaceutical company align on its injection device strategy for the next decade. Resulted in a portfolio of modular devices, proven to meet patient needs, with the added benefit of reducing development costs by over $200 million and dramatically reducing risks of time-to-market.
• Led a three-year transformation at a global industrial equipment manufacturer. The programme reduced material costs by $100 million, reduced inventory by 15% and improved the connection with customers in the product development process.
• Co-leading a profit improvement programme for a luxury automotive company. Embedded a Design-to-Value approach, which achieved 4% cost reduction in its first year despite all the vehicles already being in production.
• Identified a $300 million savings opportunity for defence equipment procurement, using McKinsey’s proprietary Cleansheet Solution.

Ben founded the McKinsey Design-to-Value lab in London. He works closely with LUNAR and Veryday, two of the world’s leading Design Firms that recently joined McKinsey. He gives seminars on innovation and design-to-value at University College London.