Summery
Organisational Impact
Aligned multiple verticals around one FinTech North Star.
Created a shared language for future customer outcomes.
Connected FinTech strategy directly to the Connected Trip vision.
Gave Product Leadership a tangible reference for three-year planning.
Gave Tech and Data greater clarity for capability assessments.
Created cross-functional ownership instead of a design-only vision.
Standardised a customer-centred approach to strategic vision work.
Made future-state strategy tangible through an end-to-end experience demo.
Role in the work:
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I led the programme from planning through delivery.
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My responsibility wasn't to personally design every screen. It was to create the conditions in which multiple teams could contribute their expertise while still converging on one coherent customer experience.
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Defining the programme structure, scope, milestones and design roadmap.
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Facilitating cross-functional design-thinking and ideation workshops.
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Aligning senior stakeholders across business units and verticals.
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Synthesising research, strategy and customer evidence into opportunity areas.
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Directing the overall UX vision and experience narrative.
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Coordinating designers, researchers and content specialists.
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Delegating exploration while maintaining quality and coherence.
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Leading critiques and design reviews.Connecting individual concepts into one end-to-end experience.
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Producing leadership presentations and securing alignment at key decision points.
Ensuring design decisions could be traced back to evidence rather than opinion.
Product Impact
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Defined the role of FinTech within the Connected Trip.
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Connected Wallet, Travel Card, Checkout and core Payments into one experience direction.
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Established payment parity as a cross-vertical customer problem.
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Moved thinking from single-product checkout toward multi-product journeys.
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Connected pre-book, checkout and post-booking financial experiences.
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Created clearer principles for payment flexibility, timing and messaging.
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Provided a North Star against which future product decisions could be evaluated.
The challenge
One traveller. Multiple products. Fragmented payment experiences.
Booking.com had historically grown through individual travel verticals. Accommodation, Flights, Cars, Attractions and other businesses had developed at different speeds, with different commercial models, technology and customer experiences.
From an organisational perspective, that made sense.
From a traveller's perspective, it didn't. Customers weren't thinking: “I'm using the Flights payment experience and now the Accommodation payment experience.”They were thinking:" I'm booking my trip.”
Yet payment methods, payment timing, checkout behaviour, messaging, rewards and post-booking experiences could differ depending on what customers were buying.The Connected Trip strategy created a bigger ambition: Booking.com needed to increasingly behave like one travel platform rather than a collection of verticals.
Our vision therefore had to answer a fundamental question:
What should payments look like when Booking.com starts designing around the traveller and their entire trip rather than individual products?
The programme specifically needed to address payment parity, multi-product purchasing, flexible payment options, financial management, loyalty and consistent messaging across the customer journey.
Start with the strategy, not the screens
The first thing I wanted to avoid was a vision exercise that produced attractive future concepts disconnected from company strategy. The hierarchy needed to be explicit:
Company Vision
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Connected Trip Product Vision
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FinTech Strategy
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Unified Traveler Experience Vision
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Product roadmaps and capabilities
The original vision framework deliberately positioned Payments as one of the strategic subvisions underneath the Connected Trip Product Vision.
That gave us an important constraint:
Every future experience needed to demonstrate how FinTech made the Connected Trip betternot simply how we could improve payments.This shifted the conversation from individual payment features toward the role money played throughout the traveller's journey.
The Process
With this many teams involved, the process was itself a design problem.
A traditional design process wouldn't work.
If one central team created the vision independently, the result might be coherent but would lack the expertise and ownership needed for adoption. If every team designed its own future independently, we would reproduce the fragmentation we were trying to solve.
So I designed the programme around divergence and convergence.
The documented process moved from common understanding, into defining what customers must be able to do, through design sprints, high-fidelity production and finally a customer-centred vision narrative. Leadership sign-offs were deliberately built into the process rather than left until the end.
Understand → Frame → Diverge → Prioritise → Design → Connect → Tell the story
Phase 1: Define the problem
Before asking teams for solutions, we aligned on what we were solving.
I started by establishing the programme scope, objectives, stakeholders, business questions, research requirements and expected outputs.We deliberately bounded the vision around existing and in-flight customer payment products rather than allowing it to expand into every possible FinTech strategy, such as becoming a PSP.
This was important. A three-year vision needs ambition, but it also needs enough credibility that Product and Technology can use it.We organised the problem around three interconnected areas:
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Wallet + Travel Card: How could rewards, Wallet, Travel Card and Genius become part of a coherent financial relationship with the traveller?
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Multi-product Checkout: How could customers increasingly purchase combinations such as flights, accommodation, rides and insurance through connected journeys?
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Core Payments Journey: How could payment methods, timing, flexible payments, messaging and post-booking experiences become more consistent across verticals?
That became the strategic frame for everything that followed.
Phase 2: Create a common understanding
We replaced organisational assumptions with shared customer evidence.
The first collaborative sessions brought senior Product, Design and Research leaders together around FinTech strategy and existing research. Rather than immediately asking:“What should we build?”we first asked:“What do we collectively know?”
Teams brought customer research, existing product knowledge, business priorities and vertical-specific constraints into the same conversation.Together we mapped customer friction, value opportunities and moments where payments could create delight across the journey.
The documented first workshop was specifically designed to create common understanding around FinTech strategy and loyalty research and surface potential value-adds and delighters across verticals.
This created something that hadn't existed before: a shared evidence base.Instead of Accommodation, Flights, Payments or Loyalty bringing their own version of the customer problem, teams could work from the same starting point.
Phase 3: Turn strategy into customer outcomes
“Customers must be able to…”
One of the most important decisions in the programme was to translate strategy into customer language. Rather than defining the vision through features, systems or organisational ownership, we created a set of:Customer Must Be Able To statements These described what needed to become possible for travellers without prematurely prescribing the solution.
For example, the underlying business questions asked how travellers could understand and manage their payment methods, financing, transactions and loyalty credits; see the financial picture of their trip; manage bookings in one place; purchase multiple travel products seamlessly; and understand flexible payment options.This became an important alignment mechanism.
Instead of teams debating:“Should we build feature X?”we could ask:“Does this help customers achieve the outcome we've agreed matters?”
Phase 4: Diverge through Design Sprints
Alignment on the problem didn't mean alignment on the solution.
Once the customer outcomes were clear, we deliberately opened the solution space again.Cross-functional Design Sprints brought Product and UX representatives from relevant areas together to explore competing ways the future experience could work.
The purpose wasn't to polish screens.It was to diverge on prioritised ideas, shape early concepts and determine which directions deserved further investment before committing teams to detailed production.This allowed us to explore questions such as:
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How should customers understand the total financial picture of a trip?
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Where should Wallet, rewards and payment methods live?
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How could multiple travel products be purchased together?
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How should flexible payment options appear?
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How much consistency should exist across verticals?
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What information should customers see before checkout versus during checkout?
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What happens when a booking changes after payment?
The strongest concepts progressed, others were combined, simplified or dropped. That protected the programme from prematurely locking onto the first plausible solution.
Phase 5: Converge through design direction
Hundreds of ideas had to become one experience.
This was where my role shifted heavily toward design direction. Individual designers could explore specific journeys and capabilities, but customers couldn't experience the final vision as a collection of disconnected workstreams.
I worked closely with the design leads and senior designers to establish coherence across the work, reviewing concepts, challenging inconsistencies and connecting individual journeys into a single experience.My earlier documentation describes this responsibility as leading the collection of concepts into one cohesive design, with testing, features and iterations delegated through senior designers and copywriters.
We moved from:
many teams → many ideas → many concepts
to:
one traveller → one journey → one coherent FinTech experience.
Storytelling became a design deliverable
A vision only creates value if people can understand it.
A collection of Figma screens wasn't enough. Executives needed to understand the strategic direction. Product teams needed to understand what it meant for their roadmaps.Engineering and Data needed enough specificity to assess the capabilities required.Designers needed to understand the experience standard they were designing toward.
So the final phase transformed the work into an immersive customer-centred vision narrative.Instead of presenting a catalogue of future features, we showed how a traveller could experience payments across a connected journey.The original process explicitly defined the final output as a customer-centric narrative showcasing the core experiences through a demo.
That made an abstract three-year strategy tangible. People could finally see the future we were asking them to build
From vision to planning
The vision wasn't intended to become a speculative concept sitting separately from delivery.It was designed to influence planning.The programme deliberately sat alongside Business and Technology roadmaps, topic deep-divives and preparation for annual planning, with strategic subvisions providing the experience definition required to inform those conversations.
That created a clearer relationship between:
3-year ambition
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Customer outcomes
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Future experiences
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Required capabilities
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Product and technology planning
Rather than asking individual teams to independently interpret the Connected Trip strategy, we gave them a shared experience-level reference against which they could make roadmap decisions.
What this demonstrates about my leadership
Design leadership at this scale isn't about having all the answers.
The hardest part of this programme wasn't designing a payment screen. It was creating enough structure for people across a complex organisation to contribute without allowing the result to fragment.
I learned to deliberately move between two modes:
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Divergence — create space for teams closest to the problem to explore possibilities.
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Convergence — use customer evidence, strategy and design principles to make decisions and establish direction.
My role was therefore less about owning every artefact and more about owning the quality of the system that produced them.I set the direction, created the process, brought the right people together, challenged decisions, maintained the experience bar and ultimately made sure hundreds of individual ideas became one coherent vision of the future.