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When the booking site was rebuilt, forums and member connection tools weren’t reintroduced. Members kept asking for them back, wanting ways to connect around shared interests, backgrounds, and on-site experiences. Leadership hesitated: in the past, anonymous posting often rallied members around frustrations, which created difficult conversations for the business. Marketing also resisted member photos, worried about brand polish.
As team lead, I drove strategy, design, and stakeholder alignment for a lean MVP. I delivered the responsive portal, guided mobile concepts for on-site connections, and reused system components to speed dev handoff by ~40%. The beta combines moderated forums, a member directory with suggested connections, and passion-based editorial content.
Members consistently asked for the return of forums — a space to hear candid opinions on properties, restaurants, and travel tips. But the business prioritized brand polish and editorialized content, fearing that poor photography or negative tagging would damage perception of their homes.
Leadership also assumed members would eagerly build out digital profiles, share contact info, and consume long-form editorial content — assumptions that hadn’t been validated. The challenge was clear: meet member demand for authentic connection while protecting the brand and testing whether these aspirational behaviors would actually occur.
I pushed back against the “Taj Mahal” build and reframed the project as a lean MVP to validate core assumptions. Could members share information comfortably? Could forums thrive with clear community guidelines? As team lead, I led the charge in paring down scope, aligning stakeholders across the company, and securing signoff for a beta focused on the essentials.
As sole designer, I delivered the entire responsive experience, coordinating directly with stakeholders from product, marketing, and legal to develop a platform that gave members what they wanted while testing the riskiest business assumptions.
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When the booking site was rebuilt, forums and member connection tools weren’t reintroduced. Members kept asking for them back, wanting ways to connect around shared interests, backgrounds, and on-site experiences. Leadership hesitated: in the past, anonymous posting often rallied members around frustrations, which created difficult conversations for the business. Marketing also resisted member photos, worried about brand polish.
As team lead, I drove strategy, design, and stakeholder alignment for a lean MVP. I delivered the responsive portal, guided mobile concepts for on-site connections, and reused system components to speed dev handoff by ~40%. The beta combines moderated forums, a member directory with suggested connections, and passion-based editorial content.
Members consistently asked for the return of forums — a space to hear candid opinions on properties, restaurants, and travel tips. But the business prioritized brand polish and editorialized content, fearing that poor photography or negative tagging would damage perception of their homes.
Leadership also assumed members would eagerly build out digital profiles, share contact info, and consume long-form editorial content — assumptions that hadn’t been validated. The challenge was clear: meet member demand for authentic connection while protecting the brand and testing whether these aspirational behaviors would actually occur.
I pushed back against the “Taj Mahal” build and reframed the project as a lean MVP to validate core assumptions. Could members share information comfortably? Could forums thrive with clear community guidelines? As team lead, I led the charge in paring down scope, aligning stakeholders across the company, and securing signoff for a beta focused on the essentials.
As sole designer, I delivered the entire responsive experience, coordinating directly with stakeholders from product, marketing, and legal to develop a platform that gave members what they wanted while testing the riskiest business assumptions.