A system teams could believe in.
Delta’s teams were designing customer and employee products separately. A decade of work had produced a shared design sensibility, but much of its reasoning lived with the people who made it. As the organization grew, products started to diverge. I led the work to make that knowledge useful across teams. Winning support meant showing what a shared system could help them deliver together.
Creative Director
Delta · 2023–2026
Team: 8 Design · 2 PM · 1 Product
A reason to act together
My first pitch made the direct case for a design system: what it would give us, what the drift already cost and what would happen if it compounded. I walked away with a polite no.
The opportunity came when Delta collapsed four loyalty measures into a single currency. The change reached delta.com, mobile web, Fly Delta and employee tools. A customer would encounter the new program in one product; a reservation specialist would need to help them with it in another. Teams had a shared problem to solve.
I made the case to product owners, development leadership and senior leaders that a shared approach would help us complete that work together. We built examples ahead of time so they could see it working in their own products.
Different jobs, shared foundations
Sharing components between the mobile website and app didn’t surprise anyone. Showing those same components working on desktop and in employee tools changed the response.
The customer view helped someone explore ways to earn. The reservation specialist’s view brought together the information and actions needed to help them. Both needed to make sense of the same program. Our examples showed how shared components could support those different jobs, giving product owners a concrete reason to invest in reuse.
Once the proposal had support, we spent months in workshops helping teams understand how to use the system and why it worked. Reuse asked something of them too: time to learn, help getting started and less freedom to change things independently. The SkyMiles project was hailed as a success across the organization, giving us the evidence to extend the approach.
The work could travel without us
What began as a proof-of-concept for SkyMiles is now used by twelve teams across more than 100 projects at Delta. Teams that had been building independently pull from the same foundation. Teams we’d never met could still produce design that belonged to the same family.
That reach exposed the next problem. The standards no longer depended on the right people being in the room, but their reasoning still did in places. Teams override components they don’t have context for, even when the system already contains an answer.
If I ran this again, I’d spend more time designing the guidance people use alongside the components.