Fortune 500 Financial Services: Mobile Travel Platform Strategy

The Strategic Inflection Point

The challenge: A Fortune 500 financial services company with a $1+ billion travel and lifestyle business needed a strategic partner to lead the design for their first native mobile travel experience. The business reality: The established 13yrs long relationship was transactional ("just make it look good"), requiring a cultural transformation while delivering the complex mobile experience spanning pre-trip planning, booking flows, and post-trip engagement.

The Embedded Partnership Approach

I joined with the explicit goal of reframing the working relationship from vendor to strategic partner, coinciding with the client's hiring of a new mobile director who needed my strategic support. The timing was perfect in establishing our partnership while also implementing systematic product discovery and delivery processes.

Strategic Leadership Delivered:

  • Transformed vendor relationship into strategic partnership

  • Established embedded partnership, becoming primary strategic support

  • Implemented dual-track discovery and delivery framework for complex mobile platform development

  • Led strategic brand evolution, extending 100+ year brand identity for travel experience differentiation

  • Coordinated strategic development across disparate internal teams and third-party engineering partners

Business Impact

Strategic Partnership Transformation:

  • Grew client’s annual design budget from $400K to $3.4M through strategic value demonstration

  • Scaled team from 5 to 20 people with expanded strategic responsibilities

  • Within 4 months, mobile director officially introduced me to entire stakeholder ecosystem as his "strategy design partner"

  • Elevated agency relationship to highest executive levels in 13-year client history

  • Successfully presented strategic brand evolution to company President

Customer Experience Excellence:

  • Delivered comprehensive mobile booking flows (car, hotel, flight) validated through systematic user testing every single sprint

  • Created exceptional customer experience spanning pre-trip planning, booking, and post-trip engagement

  • Evolved client brand tone of voice specifically for travel customers, improving communication clarity and satisfaction

  • Established strategic near-term and long-term roadmaps for comprehensive customer journey optimization across all trip phases

Design Delivery Confidence:

  • Maintained consistent sprint delivery without story delays through systematic design processes

  • Led usability studies every sprint with incredible customer insights that validated design decisions

  • Created scalable design system extending 100+ year brand identity while serving modern customer expectations

  • Built strategic framework connecting immediate customer needs with long-term product vision

Why This Matters

When your organization needs to transform vendor relationships into strategic partnerships while delivering complex product experiences, you need more than project management. You need strategic leadership that can simultaneously build trust, deliver results, and establish sustainable frameworks for on-going collaboration.

This engagement demonstrates how strategic partnership development creates measurable business value while transforming organizational relationships and establishing sustainable strategic capabilities.