a. Stakeholder session
Before anything else, I sat down with the internal team to get a honest picture of where things stood: what they knew, what they assumed, and where the real gaps were. That conversation set the tone for everything that followed.

b. User Research
I then went out and spoke to real people. Not to validate what we already thought, but to genuinely listen. I wanted to understand what drives someone’s travel decisions, where current experiences fall short, and what emotions are really at play when people plan a trip.

c. Insight
What came back from those conversations was something I’ve come to expect in this kind of work, but that never stops being important: travel isn’t a functional decision. It’s a deeply personal one. Different people bring completely different expectations, motivations, and definitions of what a good experience looks like. That nuance mattered enormously for what came next.

d. Value Proposition Design
Using the Value Proposition Design framework, I translated everything we’d learned into something the team could actually work with:

• Customer Profiles to map what people are trying to do, what frustrates them, and what they’re hoping for
• Personas to make those target groups feel real and tangible
• Value Maps to define how each product idea could respond to genuine needs
• The Value Proposition Canvas to keep user needs and product thinking tightly aligned

This is the part of the process I find most satisfying, watching a messy set of insights slowly become a clear, structured direction.

e. Concept Development From there, we shaped multiple new product directions, each one tailored to a specific audience, with a clear reason to exist. Instead of a single offering stretched thin, Company X now had the beginnings of a genuine product portfolio, each piece rooted in something real.

f. Iteration & validation Nothing got signed off in isolation. Throughout the process I kept coming back to stakeholders, pressure-testing ideas, and checking everything against what we’d heard from users. I find that rhythm: research, reflect, refine is what separates concepts that feel good in a meeting from ones that actually hold up in the real world.