From concept to first release — three product surfaces, one platform

The company sells in-flight Wi-Fi connectivity to airlines. But selling connectivity to an airline isn't a simple transaction. Each airline needs to configure the product differently — their own pricing tiers, their own loyalty integrations, their own promotional structures. And the final experience that matters — the one passengers actually see when they open their laptop at 35,000 feet and try to get online — has to reflect the airline's brand, not the platform owner's.

That's three distinct user types, each with a meaningfully different relationship to the same platform: administrators who set up and distribute Wi-Fi products to airline customers, airline operators who configure those products and build the passenger-facing purchasing experience, and the passengers themselves who just want to connect.

The engagement was to design and deliver that platform — all three surfaces — and ship it to first release. What followed was nearly two years of work across four phases, 2,830 hours in total, before that release went live.

I started by running a series of vision-casting workshops with stakeholders to get alignment on what the platform needed to do and what the MVP actually was. Three product surfaces means three sets of requirements, three sets of users, and three different definitions of done — the workshops were about cutting through that complexity and getting everyone pointed at the same target.

From there, I led the design team through the full MVP design across all three surfaces. The admin portal was the back-end foundation: the interface the company's own team used to create Wi-Fi products, configure pricing structures, and distribute them to airline customers.

The airline portal was the most complex surface. Each airline needed to take the underlying product and shape it into something that fit their own brand and business — setting pricing, building in dynamic discounts, configuring loyalty tier benefits, and assembling the passenger experience they wanted to publish. It was a product builder inside a platform, with enough flexibility to serve airlines with very different business models without becoming an unbounded configuration tool.

The passenger experience was the published output of all that configuration: the interface real travelers encountered when purchasing Wi-Fi mid-flight. It had to work across the hardware environments the system is installed on, and it had to be simple enough that someone at altitude, mid-turbulence, on an unfamiliar device could get through it without calling a flight attendant.

Partway through the project, the engagement needed a delivery manager. I took the role and stayed in it through first release.

That meant owning the full delivery function: writing user stories, setting up testing frameworks, building and maintaining the roadmap, coordinating sprint planning across teams, facilitating design and engineering collaboration sessions, reviewing architecture and test cases, and running daily standups. It also meant managing the client relationship under pressure — handling scoping conversations, resolving technical disagreements, and navigating the personality and approach differences that surface when an agency team and a client organization are working in close quarters over a long engagement.

The design work didn't stop when I moved into delivery. Problem identification and resolution is part of delivery management — you don't hand off judgment when you hand off the title.

First release of the in-flight Wi-Fi platform: all three product surfaces — admin, airline, and passenger — delivered and live. 2,830 hours and four phases of work to get there.