Driving product and team velocity for a legacy travel brand
Refining our approach
As Design Director, I focused on helping the team reduce our time-to-market without losing sight of customer needs. I partnered with product and engineering to cut iteration cycles in half by introducing new rituals and cross-functional squads. To maintain quality, I built in coaching, regular critiques, unmoderated usability testing, and bug bashes. Prototyping became our default way to share ideas and bring strategy to life.
Elevating mobile and wearables
Under my guidance, the team shipped the Neighborhoods feature within our Guides app (Editors’ Choice on the Apple App Store and Google Play), delivering bite-sized city recommendations to empower travelers to explore one neighborhood at a time. Separately, I personally led design of a companion watch app, bringing glanceable value to users’ wrists, including dynamic watch faces in partnership with Samsung’s S3 smartwatch.
Reflections
We grew quickly as a design org and shipped work that changed how millions discover and plan travel. Leading through a product renaissance taught me that real change isn’t just about what you build, but how teams think, collaborate, and adapt. I learned that evolving legacy processes and habits often took more effort—and had more impact—than designing the digital experiences themselves.
