my recent experience in Product design
Rocket Travel
Leading Design at Rocket Travel
Rocket Travel is essentially the white-label division of Booking Holdings, the travel conglomerate that includes Booking.com, Priceline, KAYAK and others. Various companies and well-known brands that are interested in starting an OTA (online travel agency) work with Rocket Travel to customize their very own travel platform.
I joined Rocket as a Product Design Manager and later became the Director of Product Design. When I joined, the company was in growth stage, so a notable amount of SOPs and processes still needed to be solidified across the org (including on the design team), while continuing to serve our partners. And, this was exciting work for me because I knew I could really make an impact.
One of the initiatives I led from conception->strategy-> implementation in order to help propel Rocket's growth was accessibility practices. As Rocket acquired new, larger partners in highly-regulated industries, such as finance, those partners introduced accessibility (a11y) requirements the org had not encountered.
Challenge
-No formal a11y program or practices existed within the company or on Product teams to promote designing and building accessible products.
-Audits conducted by our third party accessibility compliance group reported hundreds to thousands of moderate to critical a11y issues.
-Critical and high a11y issues can be an entry barrier for users of assistive technologies and other users with disabilities, and could leave Rocket and our partners exposed to legal battles.
Goals
Develop a strategy and long-term vision for what accessibility looks like at Rocket and create an implementation plan. I assembled a small working group of Engineers, Product Owners, and Designers who volunteered to help. We defined our strategy and high-level goals and agreed on a phased approach to roll out an accessibility program.
Strategy
Shift and improve Rocket's culture around and understanding of what it means to design and build accessibly. Have a culture of exceeding WCAG guidelines and embracing universal design by 2026.
Plan
In order to shift the company culture, we needed to focus on hearts and minds—so educating ourselves and the org was the first phase of our work, along with low hanging fruit like encouraging teams to run automated a11y tests with each new release. The second phase would focus on working with teams to improve their practical skills, and the final phase would role out a program with a11y ingrained into the product development lifecycle for teams to reference and follow. And, after all phases were complete, I'd continue to monitor the program.
Process
To meet our goals, I worked with the team to outline the steps for a each phase, and we were able to accomplish:
-Hiring on a contract Accessibility consultant to help guide our efforts
-Improve our own accessibility knowledge base, as the working group
-Engage the whole org in a11y workshops to improve knowledge across the org and start to shift the culture
-Roll out accessibility training with modules catered to Engineers, Product Owners, Designers and other departments
-Create a resource guide in Notion for all things accessibility
-Develop and launch a program/framework for incorporating accessibility practices, checks and balances throughout the product development lifecycle
Outcome
At the end of phase 3, the launching of the accessibility program with three product teams, our next audit showed an approximate 24% reduction in critical and high accessibility issues. Feedback from across the org of people who attended the workshops was positive and Engineers, Product Owners and Designers shared their appreciation of our work.
Although the working group disbanded after launching the program, I continued monitoring by gathering feedback, working with our third-party accessibility auditor on future audits and utilizing W3C's maturity framework to document the teams' growth and progress.
Leading with empathy and making an impact
As a design leader at Rocket, I was also able to set strategy for large design, process and structure overhauls—streamlining workflows and aligning the product with user needs and business/partner needs.
Leading the restructure of the Design org to better meet Product strategy and foster more user research/data led roadmapping, was a key accomplishment during my role with Rocket. The restructure paved the way for some of the impactful work I fostered below— through mentorship of my team, whole-human focused 1:1s, being open to feedback, breaking strategy down into clear actionable plans, design guidance, quality definition, constructive feedback, clear role definition and rolling up my sleeves when needed.
I enjoyed my time at Rocket. I had the great opportunity to work with some extremely smart and talented people who are as passionate about travel as I am. In my next adventure, I'm seeking a team just as passionate and dedicated (or more!) to designing and building great products and team culture.