British Airways
Head of Product Design & Research · May 2021 to April 2024
Rebuilding design and research at British Airways, from a 6-person team to a 51-person practice, over three years.
I joined British Airways in May 2021, post-pandemic, as Head of Product Design and Research. The previous design team had lost most of its senior people, and what was left was four designers and two researchers covering every digital surface: BA.com, the mobile app, and the Executive Club. Product and engineering teams were shipping late because design and research were a bottleneck. Three large programmes were converging at the same time: a replatforming of BA.com onto Adobe Experience Manager and AWS, the first cross-product design system, and a CAA-driven accessibility remediation that carried real legal weight. The brief was short: rebuild product design for British Airways from the ground up.
51
Designers & researchers
Grown from a 6-person team over three years
I was hired as Head of Design & Research, in the digital team reporting to the Chief Commercial Officer. Five of the six people I inherited left within my first few months. Over three years I rebuilt the practice to 51 people: 10 researchers, 5 design managers, a research manager, and the rest product designers and contractors. I set the design strategy for BA.com, the mobile app, and the Executive Club across booking, fly, help, and loyalty.
1.3 → 4.0
Design maturity over three years
Measured against the Design Maturity Index
My opening move was a business-wide audit using the Design Maturity Index. I scored BA at 1.3 out of 5 and presented the result in a company-wide town hall to the whole commercial side of the business. The score wasn't a criticism, it was a baseline. Here's where we are, here's the benchmark, here's the gap. That framing turned design quality into a number senior stakeholders could talk about, commit to, and measure, and it became the diagnostic I ran everything against for the next three years.
The first concrete act after that was clearing the research bottleneck. The two researchers I inherited were running project-to-project with no prioritisation and were close to burnout. Before hiring anyone, I built a kanban board of every live research ask, prioritised it, and cut the backlog to something humane. Strategically, I connected the three converging programmes, AEM migration, design system, and accessibility, so they reinforced each other instead of competing for the same resources. The design system became the shared vehicle for both the replatform and accessibility compliance, and I ran it inside BA as 'use the design system and be accessible by default.' That gave teams a concrete reason to adopt the system instead of treating it as overhead.
Underneath that, I built DesignOps from scratch, shared tooling, processes, feedback loops, and contribution models, and set up a Design Guild across the business to create shared standards and a craft community between product design, brand, and marketing teams. A quarterly Design Day, regular design reviews, and career progression frameworks for T-shaped designers who could move between product, research, accessibility, and design system work gave the whole practice a rhythm it hadn't had before. All of this ran alongside the reality that BA is a 24/7 business with millions of active bookings at any moment, and design changes had to be tested and rolled out with a level of rigour smaller organisations don't need.
The products
Redesigning the Executive Club for commercial impact.
BA's Amex partnership is one of its most strategic commercial relationships, but the previous sign-up experience was a single poorly-designed landing page lost among hundreds of thousands of others. Working with the Design Manager and Product Owner, I set the strategy for a modern Club experience: built on the new design system, instrumented for experimentation, and redesigned end-to-end. Amex ancillary sign-ups rose 40% against a 5% target.
See the live Club pages →Making self-service actually work on mobile.
The Help experience was a known source of frustration, especially on mobile where customers often needed answers on the go. We redesigned it end-to-end: information architecture defined by a series of card sorts, a scannable UI, powerful search, and a basic chatbot. The result was a measurable reduction in call-centre demand as people found answers themselves.
See the live Help experience →Shipping trust during a difficult operational period.
During a period when BA's operations faced repeated public disruption due to Covid and Heathrow operational issues, we shipped new 'Delays, cancellations and refunds' and 'Request a refund' self-service flows. Customers who would previously have waited on hold could resolve their issue online. These flows were the single biggest contributor to the 10% reduction in call-centre demand.
Research practice
+560%
More research studies
From 57 to 319 in a year, without proportional headcount growth
I democratised research at BA by structuring the team so designers could run tactical unmoderated studies independently, while researchers focused on strategic work supporting Design Leads and Product Managers. Researchers were distributed across the four product pillars, Booking, Manage My Booking, Fly, and Help, as partners to the design managers, not as a centralised reporting function. The team used the UserTesting platform to run studies against global panels including the US and India, giving the digital department a global customer perspective it hadn't previously had. The bottleneck that had been killing research velocity disappeared. Output went from 57 studies in 2022 to 319 in 2023, a 560% increase without a proportional increase in headcount. The team regularly shared findings with the most senior stakeholders in the business, and research moved from a blocker in the sprint cycle to a driver of product strategy.
Accessibility programme
−20 pts
Barrier reduction over two years
From 60% to 40% across ba.com
The accessibility work started from a CAA regulatory requirement, but I framed it inside BA as a brand obligation and competitive differentiator, not a compliance checkbox. Standards were embedded directly into the design system components, which meant teams adopting the system were shipping accessible work by default. External auditors mapped barriers across the product pillars, ownership for remediation sat with the product teams themselves, and we reported progress monthly to the CAA. We also ran research with participants with different accessibility needs. An improvement to keyboard navigation on the booking flow is one specific example that came out of that work. Over two years we took BA from a 60% barrier score to 40%, brought 55% of ba.com customer journeys to full accessibility from a baseline near zero, and won #1 in the CAA Digital Accessibility ranking across 11 UK airlines.
#1
CAA Digital Accessibility ranking across 11 UK airlines
2023
The story
The hardest moment of the three years was the BA mobile app. We ran a research programme in the UK, US and India, BA's three biggest markets at the time, mapping the current experience and surfacing specific friction points. The team produced exploratory designs for a modernised app, validated them in usability and preference testing, and presented the business case to C-suite. We got the buy-in. The project didn't go forward. The business decided to externalise development instead.
That one still stings, partly because the work was good and partly because the app is still the weakest surface in BA's digital estate years later. But it taught me something specific about large organisations: a strong design case, strong research, and executive buy-in are necessary but not sufficient. Commercial and operational factors you don't always see can override the best-argued design decision, and learning to read those early, not fight them late, is part of the job.
What I learned
I was wrong about my focus for the first six months. I spent too much time with stakeholders and operations, and not enough understanding the products themselves. I corrected it as we scaled the team, but thinking operationally and strategically about the products at the same time, at BA's scale, post-pandemic, was genuinely hard. The lesson I've carried forward is that product fluency isn't something you build after the team is in place. It's the thing you need while you're building the team.
Awards
- 1st place in CAA Digital Accessibility for UK airlines — British Airways, 2023
- Best Accessibility Mission — DX Awards, 2023
- Best Customer Experience — CX Travel Awards, 2023
- Distinguished Luminary Award, Human Insights Summit — British Airways, 2023
Specific product metrics and internal strategy are confidential. Detailed case study material is available on request under NDA.
