From bricks to clicks, via empowerment and trust. 💡 Meet Jørn Erik.
Before digital transformation became part of everyday language here, Jørn Erik was already solving problems behind the scenes. He joined the LEGO Group in 1987 as a young engineer, supporting internal systems across our factories and supply chain.
“Even then, I realise now, I was drawn to what I call ‘good problems’. The kind that requires you to find the real cause instead of just fixing what you can see. That mindset has stayed with me throughout my career.”
Thirteen years later, that mindset was about to be pushed to its limits. Twenty-five years ago, in a makeshift office hidden inside a Broadway toy-fair showroom, four engineers gathered around a table and decided to build something that had never been attempted at the LEGO Group before.
The launch of the first global lego.com shop would become a milestone moment, not only for the business but for millions of fans around the world, including Jørn Erik.
We arrived in the U.S. in 2000 expecting to work with an external company that had already been developing lego.com for a year. Two weeks later, the business cancelled that collaboration but kept the deadline. So we started again from scratch. I still remember the urgency, the uncertainty, and the spark of possibility that shaped everything that followed.”
The target was ambitious: relaunch the website, build the first LEGO® Account system, and create a fully functioning e-commerce shop in 13 countries and three languages. And they had just four months.
“We were four internal engineers, and we referred to ourselves as the Four Musketeers. We were not hindered by processes. We were empowered to take decisions and whenever we had troubles, we sat around a round table. Nobody left before we had a solution and a plan.”
That sense of trust defined the whole experience.
“There were no managers standing over us questioning whether we had made the right call. They trusted us. And that trust gave us enormous energy.”
The conditions were far from conventional. With no permanent office, the team worked from a toy-fair showroom filled with animated models, music and no windows.
"We turned one room into a meeting room and the other into a small data centre. It was before AWS and cloud computing. Everything was physical hardware. For the first two months we did not even have a proper network connection between New York and our Enfield site, so we were literally moving hard drives and even transporting servers in the boot of a car to integrate development from both locations.”
But empowerment to act fast carried them through mind-bending technical challenges.
“Around September, we went to a Microsoft E-lab for performance testing and discovered the site could not go live. We had not slept for 40 hours. We got on the plane heading to the data centre we had prepared for go live and told our manager, ‘We cannot go live. But we have a plan. We will rewrite the whole thing in three weeks with a focused team of engineers.’ And he did not question it. He just said, ‘Okay’. That is empowerment.”
Three weeks later, the site went live and stayed running for about ten years. The moment the first order flowed through the system is etched in Jørn Erik’s memory.
“We were sitting in the data centre in Alpharetta outside Atlanta, watching all the monitors. When we saw the first traffic hit LEGO.com, I placed an order myself for the Silver Champion racing car. I paid with my own credit card and shipped it to Billund. When I got home, it was waiting for me.”
What he learned during that year has influenced every chapter of his career.
"Everything from that time influenced what came after. I spent years on 24/7 operational support which taught me the importance of finding the real root cause of problems rather than treating symptoms. Later, working on continuous delivery, our engineering organisation was doing 185 live deployments a week. Engineers could decide when to release without manager sign-off. To me, that is trust in action.”
But the deeper lesson has always been about people: how they work, what motivates them, and what they can achieve when they feel ownership.
“I’ve programmed in eight languages, but what drives me now is creating the right environment for others to succeed. I am always trying to recreate what worked so well in 2000: the empowerment, the clarity, the shared responsibility. It is more challenging in a bigger organisation, but it is what I believe in.”
Today, Jørn Erik is a Competency Lead in Digital Technology, supporting People Technology systems used by colleagues worldwide.
"My focus is still on finding better problems to solve and helping others develop the same mindset that defined my journey.”
His message to early-career colleagues is simple:
“Trust is something you earn, but empowerment is something you take. You must balance it with responsibility, and you can lose it the second you act recklessly. But if you take it seriously, you can create powerful solutions.”
As the LEGO Group marks 25 years of LEGO.com, Jørn Erik still sees the Silver Champion on his shelf at home. It is a reminder of the moment when four engineers were trusted to build the future.
Just imagine your LEGO® career.