Multi-Million Dollar Platform Launch
The biggest project I’ve run to date. I owned design, managed a team of designers, and launched the best version of our travel platform to date.
2024
Staff Experience Designer
Rocket Travel by Agoda
Challenge
Design and launch a complex, evolving travel platform for a major new partner.
Solution
Facilitate scoping discussions, collaborate with partner and internal teams to refine requirements, delegate design tasks effectively, and ensure platform consistency through rigorous reviews.
Summary
I led the design efforts for the launch of a new travel platform for a major partner. This was a high-stakes project, as it was the first partner to be launched on an evolving platform with significant technical and UI updates planned.
I was promoted from Senior Experience Designer to Staff Experience Designer 🎉
My role spanned initial scoping, feature design, partner collaboration, team delegation, and quality assurance. It all culminated in a successful launch that exceeded partner expectations and set the foundation for a new and improved platform.
Complicating factors
Though we had an existing travel platform, the vision for the evolution into the next phase of the platform hinged on large technical updates, adding new back end systems, and improving user experience. Because we were venturing into new territory, I navigated:
Ambiguity in initial requirements.
Tight timelines to prepare for partner-facing presentations.
Coordinating multiple internal and external stakeholders to align on priorities.
Initial Approach
Facilitating scope discussions
To kickstart the process, I created representative designs of the platform. They were based on existing features with some minor modifications based on known partner needs, but were simply happy-paths of primary flows. These served as a tool for scoping and feature refinement discussions and a visual aid for identifying gaps in requirements.
Partner Collaboration
I was flown out to meet the partner team, where I spent two days walking them through our existing platform’s feature sets using representative designs. These sessions helped the product team gather and refine requirements and informed priorities to phase the development approach.
Showing designs to the partner early helped uncover requirements (like their preference for showing everything in points first) and allowed technical teams to get ahead of constraints (like only having dollar amounts in the map).
Planning & Delegation
With initial requirements agreed upon, I outlined the design work needed for the project. At this point in the project, I was promoted to Platform Manager, which shifted my focus from hands-on design to delegating work and focusing on platform consistency.
I was supported by five designers, each with expertise in specific areas of the end-to-end funnel. I facilitated bi-weekly reviews to ensure alignment and support their work. I also encouraged open forums for sharing designs and gathering feedback. Using the reviews and tight feedback loops, I oversaw all feature request work to ensure adherence to platform consistency, design standards, and appropriate design system usage.
Usability Testing & Refinement
The partner requested usability testing to validate early designs of their new platform, so I shaped the designs and test plan using my platform knowledge to target potential pain points or customized features. With the help of designers on my team, we constructed a prototype to test the scenarios the partner was most concerned about.
Key Findings
Credit Card Form
The prior iteration of checkout included a credit card form as a fraud prevention method. As we expected, users who were using only points in their transaction expressed distaste for the need to provide credit card information when they weren’t using one to pay. This user data was the push Product needed to prioritize the removal of the field for points only transactions.
The partners had specific concerns about users missing the checkboxes in the cart. However, as we'd seen on other partner sites, users often added more to their cart than they planned to purchase and understood the checkbox interaction as the way to select the item or items they actually wished to purchase.
Cart Checkbox
Despite partner concerns about the need to select which items in the cart the user wished to purchase, we validated its efficacy, noting that in testing and on other partner sites the cart functioned more as a wishlist than a traditional shopping cart.
The ability for a user to bypass the credit card entry when paying with points was an optimization that required both technical reconstruction and also an update to how we presented the payment options to the user. This particular change was one that I and the other designers felt clarified the interaction and saved the user time and confusion.
Quality Assurance & Launch
As development teams released changes into the QA environment, I served as the primary design reviewer, supporting individual designers and conducting weekly end-to-end checks. It was challenging, but I managed rapid changes across multiple teams to maintain design integrity.
On a new platform of this scale, with so many teams working on different parts, we were bound to encounter inconsistencies. I reviewed every page and documented findings for scrum teams. This particular set of findings were all based around color usage and brand consistency.
Results & Reflections
The platform’s launch was a milestone as the first partner implementation on its latest version. Key outcomes included:
A satisfied partner team.
A scalable framework for future partner launches.
A deeper understanding of process, collaboration, and the balance between design advocacy and compromise.
This project showcased my ability to manage complex projects, collaborate effectively with internal and partner teams, delegate work efficiently, and oversee design consistency. I’m super grateful for the opportunity to lead this work and proud of this milestone in my career as a design leader.