Summary
At Tern Travel, I drove design from product idea into market fit phases for a CRM + trip building Saas, that enables travel advisors to sell bespoke, travel experiences.
Year
Jan 2023 to July 2024
Role
Lead Product Designer
Main Contributions
Customer Research Synthesis, Experience Mapping, Develop end-to-end workflows, Wireframing & Prototyping, HiFi UI Design & Delivery, Implementation Pairing w/ ENG, Brand Design & Collateral
Team
Founders, Product Owner, Engineers, myself
One Dilemma : Opportunity
Problem
Travel Advisors operate in a fragmented environment of tools to perform their client services - sales, planning, and trip management.
Business Goals
Raise Seed Round Funding
Acquire 1,300 Customer in the 1st Year
Build an all-in-one platform for advisors & unseat competitors
From Zero to One: Developing Product Capabilities
Discover & Define
Uncovering Customer Insights
I reviewed sales/outreach calls with advisors, and pulled out key insights around advisors needs and challenges for the JBTD (and more holistically, each product capability project).
identify core JBTD
Creating Bespoke Trip Itineraries
Some of the tagged, supporting quotes/needs from advisors:
“having something that’s always visually nice, clean and easy to go back and look at...”
“Allow it be a real clear outline of options... have to balance [showcasing] a beautiful trip and where they feel really informed and wanna book...”
“having ability to edit branding is important ... and have [itinerary] be very clean and stacked in chronological order..”
“my colleagues use various versions of CRMs and tweaked them or just deal with clunkiness...”
Mapping the Advisor's Journey
I led an experience mapping session with stakeholders to align on the product vision, key outcomes, and user actions for the end-to-end experience, and to refine the project scope for immediate and future phases.
Prototyping the Itinerary Builder
Ideation
Exploring different page layouts & interactions
Concept A
....
Concept B
....
Crafting Easy, Bespoke Itineraries
Advisor UX
Build Itinerary & Send to Client
Drop Trip Activity on board
Drop Trip Activity on board
Add Activity Info
Add Activity Info
Client UX
View Itinerary from advisor
Itinerary Details View
Mobile Views
Rapid Iteration & Continuous Learning
Monitoring & Iterating
Listening and Improving from Requests
Never an idle moment, as we were collecting advisor feedback from mutiple comms channels to help inform new product updates.
Expanding media import
Giving advisors more control in adding beautiful imagery from sources.
More Pricing methods for Activities
Allowing advisors to price out activities by per day/night and per person.
Shortened Itinerary Overview
Advisors want to give clients a quick snapshot of their trip as some have to skim/not read details.
Soaring to New Heights as a Fledgling Product
Results
Advisors Were Overjoyed
During product demos, it would glean customer sentiment around the product experience, and confirmed we built a great UX that meets their needs.
Business Impact
Feb 2023
$3.8M
Seed-Stage Funding
Jan to Mar 2024
$3.79M
Travel Spend
April 2024
1100
Subscriptions
April 2024
$300K+
ARR
Reflections and Takeaways
Some of the challenges/learnings working in a seed-stage startup:
Adapting to Hyper-Paced Startup Environment
Transitioning from structured, enterprise organizations to a fast-paced startup, I enhanced my agility and focused on critical design methods, becoming more scrappy and efficient.
Navigating Constant Changes and Strategy Pivots
I learned to prioritize core functionalities and essential features despite frequent strategy shifts, ensuring we maintained velocity and delivered high-value solutions to customers.
Other Notable Outcomes
Building and Implementing Tern's Design System for Scalibility
Led design and management of a design system, and collaborated with the lead engineer to implement a UI library from the ground up, 21 component categories in 11 months
Led Design for 7 Critical Product Capabilites from 0-1
Design and delivered concepts for :
- Trip Building
- Onboarding + Subscription Sign Up
- Settings / Account Management
- CRM / Contacts tools
- Custom Form Builder
- Task Manager
- Template Abilities
- Automation & Workflows
