ENTERPRISE PRODUCT STRATEGY | AIRPORT OPERATIONS
How do you change the tools people rely on when the operation can't stop?
Throughout and following the merger of American Airlines and US Airways, airport employees were navigating different legacy systems and processes to support customers when travel didn't go as planned. I led product strategy and implementation for operational tools that helped bring those experiences together across a network of more than 300 airports.
Working across airport operations, customer experience, technology teams, vendors, and frontline leadership, I helped modernize numerous service recovery products spanning baggage tracing, customer notifications, and disrupted-customer support, while navigating the realities of deploying technology into a live, incredibly complex and international operation.
The Service Recovery Challenge
When airline operations break down, the impact spreads quickly. A delayed or canceled flight can create baggage issues, missed connections, overnight accommodations, meal needs, transportation challenges, and thousands of customers looking to employees for answers and help.
Throughout the merger, American was also bringing together two airlines with different technologies, processes, vendors, and ways of working. The service recovery products supporting those moments had to evolve without disrupting the operation employees were already trying to recover.
That meant balancing modernization with operational continuity, coordinating decisions across technology and business teams, and designing for frontline employees who needed tools to work quickly and reliably under pressure.
We weren't implementing technology into a controlled environment. We were changing critical tools while the operation continued around us.
Service recovery looked like a technology problem, but the success of these products depended just as much on understanding the operation and the people doing the work.
These tools were used when employees and customers were already dealing with something going wrong. A product could technically work and still make the experience worse if it slowed employees down, removed functionality they depended on, or failed to account for what was critical in their workflow.
That made prioritization especially important. I needed to understand how employees actually worked, where the greatest pain points existed, and which capabilities were essential versus which could evolve over time. We couldn't always deliver everything at once, but what we released still needed to support the critical work employees had to do and improve on the experience we were asking them to leave behind.
Replacing the old tool wasn't the goal. The new product had to make the work better.
That meant knowing what was critical, prioritizing it, and never treating “partially works” as good enough.
What I Saw
What I Changed
I led these products from strategy through implementation, connecting frontline needs with business priorities, technical realities, vendor capabilities, and the operational requirements of a 300+ airport network. My role was to make sure we weren't simply replacing technology, but improving how employees could support customers when the operation was under pressure.
That required making deliberate tradeoffs about what mattered most, bringing the right people into decisions, and planning releases around an operation that couldn't simply stop while we changed the tools supporting it.
01
Prioritize
Protect the critical workflow first
I worked directly with frontline and operational teams to understand workflows, pain points, and critical capabilities, then used those insights to prioritize what had to be available at launch and what could evolve through later releases.
02
Design with users
Bring operational reality into the product
I incorporated frontline feedback throughout planning and delivery, using employee experience and real operational scenarios to identify gaps, challenge requirements, and ensure new tools improved the work rather than simply recreating existing processes in new technology.
03
Connect the Ecosystem Around the Product
Align more than the product team.
I coordinated across airport operations, customer experience, technology teams, vendors, and frontline leadership to manage dependencies, resolve competing needs, and connect product decisions to the systems and processes surrounding them.
04
Plan for the Moment of Change
Treat implementation as part of the product experience.
I built phased rollout, cutover, contingency, and communication plans around operational constraints, giving teams a path to introduce new technology while protecting employees and customers if something didn't go as planned.
Products Built for Service Recovery at Scale
The work spanned multiple products supporting different moments in the service recovery experience. Each solved a different operational problem, but all shared the same requirement: employees needed reliable tools that helped them act quickly when customers and the operation were already under pressure.
BAGGAGE TRACING
Create one way to manage baggage recovery across the merged airline.
Led the transition to NetTracer, bringing legacy baggage tracing processes together into a unified platform employees could use to locate, track, and recover mishandled baggage across the network.
NOTIFICATIONS
Give customers information before they had to go looking for it.
Helped launch proactive baggage notifications that gave customers greater visibility when bags were delayed, shifting part of the experience from reactive service recovery to proactive communication.
HOTEL, MEAL, & TRANSPORTATION
Help employees recover customers faster during disruptions.
Led implementation of an automated service recovery platform that helped employees arrange hotel accommodations, meals, and ground transportation for customers affected by operational disruptions.
300+
AIRPORTS
Enterprise network deployment
2M+
CUSTOMERS ANNUALLY
Reached through proactive baggage communications
8WEEKS
To convert 300+ airports to the hotel, meal, and transportation recovery platform
What Changed Because of It
The result wasn't simply a new set of systems. These products changed how employees supported customers during some of the most difficult moments in the travel experience, while helping American bring together legacy processes and technology across the merged airline.
Each implementation also created a foundation the organization could continue to build on rather than treating modernization as a one-time replacement effort.
01 | A More Unified Operation
02 | More Proactive Customer Support
Employees could work from more consistent tools and processes.
Bringing legacy service recovery experiences together reduced differences across the merged airline and gave employees a more consistent way to support customers across the network.
Service recovery could begin before a customer asked for help.
Proactive baggage communications gave customers greater visibility into what was happening with their bags, shifting part of the recovery experience from waiting for customers to seek answers to providing information directly.
03 | Faster Support During Disruptions
04 | A Foundation for Continued Improvement
Employees had better tools for moments when speed mattered most.
Automating parts of hotel, meal, and transportation recovery reduced reliance on more manual processes and helped employees move customers toward solutions during operational disruptions.
Launch wasn't the finish line.
By prioritizing critical capabilities first and continuing to learn from frontline use, the products could evolve after implementation rather than requiring every possible need to be solved before employees received a better experience.
What This Taught Me
The best product decisions happen when you understand what the work feels like, not just how it's supposed to work.
Before I led products for airport operations, I was one of the employees relying on those tools to keep the operation moving and help customers when things went wrong. I knew what it felt like when flights canceled, customers needed answers, bags went missing, systems weren't cooperating, and employees were trying to solve several problems at once.
That experience stayed with me when I moved into product leadership. It taught me to look beyond requirements and ask what was truly critical in the workflow, what employees couldn't afford to lose, and what would actually make their jobs easier when the operation was under pressure. It also shaped how I thought about prioritization: delivering incrementally didn't mean asking users to accept a worse experience while we worked toward a better one.
Leading these products reinforced that successful transformation isn't measured by whether the new technology launched. Successful transformation happens when the people using it are better equipped to do the work because it launched.