2023 - Current
Product Designer
Spotnana.app →
Designing a scalable B2B travel platform that transformed a manual process into a new product line, adopted by over 10 Fortune 500 clients including Amazon, Meta, and Walmart.
From Feature to Platform:
Designing the 'Specialty Desk'
Overview
My Role
Lead Product Designer
Sole end-to-end designer
Led all phases from user research, product strategy, and interaction design to visual UI.
The Challenge
Enterprise clients (like Meta, Amazon) were drowning in manual work for complex, non-standard travel (e.g., interviews, new hires), which our existing 1-to-1 booking tool could not support.
The Outcome (Impact)
Pivoted the product strategy and led the 0-to-1 design of the SPD platform, resulting in:
The Manual Nightmare of Enterprise Travel
The initial request was simple: "We need a way to book travel for group events."
Figure 1: The Old Way. A (blurred/anonymized) screenshot or a recreated diagram showing the painful manual process: chaotic email threads + complex spreadsheets.
Coordinators at clients like Tesla were spending hours in emails and spreadsheets to manually manage bookings for 'Events,' leading to high error rates and no cost control."
Why I Pushed "Pause" on the Simple Feature
My research showed the "Events" feature was just the tip of the iceberg.
Figure 2: The Spectrum of Need.
On the far left, a small dot labeled: "The Ask: Events"
Attributes: Group-based, shared parameters, low frequency.
On the far right, a massive circle labeled: "The Real Problem: Specialty Travel"
Attributes: Individual-based, unique parameters, high frequency (e.g., Candidates, New Hires, Interns, Relocations).
A bold arrow connecting them, labeled: "My Key Insight".
My deep-dive calls with clients like Meta and Amazon revealed their real pain was not 'Events.' It was managing thousands of high-frequency, individual specialty trips." "I realized if we just built the 'Events' feature, we would be solving the wrong problem and building ourselves into a technical dead-end.
From Pilot to Platform
How I advocated for a strategic, phased rollout to de-risk our vision and accelerate development.
Phase 1/ "The Agile Pilot (Events)"
Diagram: A simple flowchart: Initial Need (Tesla) -> Build Core "Events" MVP -> Pilot (Small Co. + Internal)
Annotation: "Instead of a massive, high-risk build, I advocated for building a scoped-down 'Events' feature first. This wasn't the final vision, but a strategic pilot. We launched it to a smaller company and for our own internal offsite in Dubai."
Phase 2/ "The Scalable Platform (SPD)"
Diagram: A flowchart showing the pivot: Pilot Learnings + Enterprise Research (Meta, Amazon) -> Pivot to "SPD" Platform -> Leverage V1 Codebase
Annotation: "The pilot validated our core concept and, critically, provided a foundational codebase. I used the data from this pilot, combined with my enterprise research, to prove to leadership that we must pivot to the scalable 'SPD' platform. We didn't throw V1 away; we used it as a validated stepping stone."
Driving Clarity and Overcoming Constraints
My role extended to unblocking the team and ensuring quality.
Figure 4: My System for Async Collaboration.
Visual: A screenshot from Figma showing your dedicated "Open Questions & Assumptions" page, filled with notes and tags.
Annotation: "With a globally distributed team and incomplete PRDs, I created this 'single source of truth' in Figma—not relying on easily-lost comments. This unblocked our engineering team in India by allowing them to build in parallel based on clear, documented assumptions."
Figure 5: Driving Design System Evolution.
Visual: A "Before/After" comparison.
Before: UI showing the confusing clash between red primary buttons and red "Not Booked" status.
After: The clean, accessible status component you designed.
Annotation: "I recorded user feedback videos showing this confusion. Using this user data (not my preference) in a product meeting, I gained cross-team buy-in to prioritize and fix the DS color palette."
The Solution: The 'Specialty Desk' (SPD) Platform
A flexible, template-driven system for any specialty travel need.
Figure 6: Final UI Gallery. A scrolling carousel showing the key screens:
Template Builder (for 'Candidate', 'New Hire' types)
Coordinator Dashboard (The "control tower")
Traveler Self-Service Flow (Simple and guided)
Title: The Impact: Validated by the Market
(Visual: Make the numbers impossible to miss.)
10+
Fortune 500 Clients (Including Amazon, Meta, and Walmart)
75%
Reduction in Admin Time (From ~2.5 hours of manual work down to <30 minutes)
1
New Enterprise Product Line (Opened a new, high-value revenue stream for Spotnana)
Strategic Reflections
1. Principle: Use MVPs as Strategic Probes, Not Just Products. The 'Events' V1 was never just the end product; it was a strategic probe. My approach was to use it as a low-risk vehicle to gather real-world data, validate our core mechanics, and build the indisputable business case for the larger, more complex (and more valuable) SPD vision.
2. Principle: Leadership is Evidence-Based Influence. My legal background informs my leadership style: influence is built on a logical, evidence-based case, not just opinion. By synthesizing V1 pilot data with V2 enterprise research, I constructed an objective narrative for the pivot. This is how I align product, engineering, and leadership around a complex strategic shift.
3. Principle: Strategic Phasing Creates Velocity and Buy-in. The most impactful strategic decision was phasing the roadmap to leverage (not discard) the V1 codebase. By positioning 'Events' as the foundational layer for 'SPD', we de-risked the technical build, secured engineering partnership by respecting their past work, and shaved months off the final development timeline. This wasn't just a win; it was a deliberate strategy to build momentum and accelerate our path to the right solution.
THE BRIDGE
Uncovering The Next Frontier
THE EVOLUTION
