MY ROLE
At Expedia I've had the pleasure of working across a few different teams during my tenure. I first joined the multi-brand team, specifically hired for my experience and understanding of the importance of brand and distinct and unique brand experiences with the ask to bring this to the Australian brand Wotif as they had been onboarded to the Expedia platform and lost a lot of their essence and unique style. After multi-brand, I transitioned into leading the activities line-of-business as they went through a migration phase and needing to upgrade their design language and look-and-feel to align with the newly developed design system at Expedia. Once the migration was complete (and delivered two months ahead of schedule) I took on setting the foundations for a new space within the traveler experience called Trips - this is where we wanted to give a better experience and service to our travelers in their planning, pre- and -post trip space. Lastly, I worked within the Loyalty setting, being part of the team that completely changed the game of a travel loyalty program - bringing together the loyalty programs across three of our Expedia brands: Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo.com under one umbrella called One Key.
Apart from leading the team, providing support and feedback on projects and coaching our more senior designers in mentoring others, I also partner with other line-of-businesses and wider teams to pitch ideas, concepts and collaboration opportunities to senior leadership and I keep close collaboration across our other skillsets and teams for a true cross-collaborative work environment.
BUILDING THE TEAM
HIRING AND TEAM MANAGEMENT
In my time with Expedia I’ve managed talent both locally and remotely (Australia, India, Jordan, UK) across both full-time employees and contractors, and I pride myself on being available for my team both ad-hoc and through recurring one-on-ones. In these sessions I provide support, feedback and ideation for ongoing projects as well as career conversations and collaboration on progression plans. In this role I have leveraged my conflict resolution skills across a variety of scenarios and had both onboarding and roll-off conversations. Apart from mentoring my direct reports I also mentored employees outside of the designer space, having similar career and progression conversations as with my direct reports and transparently shared ideas, experiences and challenges I've experienced during my career.
VISUALISING THE WORK
WORKSTREAM ALIGNMENT AND DAY-TO-DAY TRACKING
Coming from consultancy I am used to agile work methods and daily stand-ups, but what I quickly realised was that the deign team lacked an efficient way to accurately and quickly track progress and velocity so that collaboration with stakeholders, strategy, engineering, product and other workstreams could progress smoothly. While working with the Activities line-of-business I took it upon myself to pitch new ways to leverage our tools and also implement a third party software to visualise story points, velocity and burn-downs for a shared understanding and view of progress.
Advocating and implementing a tracking system of story points, velocity and burndown.
I also created an overarching view of all projects and pipeline work across our team, the backoffice team and the third-party integration team so that we easily could spot team efficiencies and bottlenecks, prioritise work and escalate needs and potential issues to leadership for discussion and resolution.
As part of this work, and thanks to our talented team, our modernisation project launched a full two months early and became the second line-of-business to leverage the new Expedia look-and-feel as well as the first one to be on the new technology stack. A big win for the team!
I have pushed for similar processes and tool implementations across my various other teams, as well as pivoted and moved with the business as new systems and third-party software have been implemented.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP AND VISION WORK
PITCHING CONCEPTS AND IDEAS TO SENIOR LEADERSHIP
During my time with Activities, leaning again on my experience from consulting, I identified a few projects and concepts that could really up our game in helping our travellers identify the best destination for their next adventure and get a good idea of things to do there. I pitched these ideas to my boss and then dug through insights and traveller data, reached out to content strategy as well as other teams and created data and insight driven storyboards and concept designs to present to leadership.
Given the confidential nature of this strategic work I can not share these storyboards or any details about the projects.
NURTURING TALENT
WEEKLY ONE-ON-ONES AND CAREER PROGRESSION
Leading talent and seeing them grow and take on new challenges and stretch their skills is something I find really rewarding. Through my different work places, locations and managers, I have found myself often lacking direction and clarity of my own career progression and sometimes felt it's been more based simply on the latest project or the "last shiny thing" we built rather than a driven continuation of learnings and goals. Therefore I've taken pride in being actively available for my direct reports and documenting discussions, challenges and goals. With this we jointly draft a career progression plan that allows my directs to drive their own focus areas and actively reflect on their progress. This is something we use and come back to throughout the year and in our one-on-ones, not only at OKR or end-of-year evaluations.
Career progression plan example.
Left-most area notes are based on one-on-one discussions, middle section shows discussed and agreed upon focus areas and right-most area is for the employee to self-reflect on outcomes and learnings.
360 FEEDBACK & RECOMMENDATIONS
IDENTIFIED STRENGTHS AND EMERGING THEMES
Throughout my time at Expedia, I continuously asked for 360 feedback to improve and keep striving forward, and a few strong themes around my strengths started to emerge from my team, peers and stakeholders. For more details and context to this feedback, please visit my LinkedIn profile. You can find the full feedback in the recommendations section.
