CLIENT
Delta Air Lines
SERVICES
Design Strategy & Service Design
Context
Delta needed a unified strategy to address rapidly growing lobby congestion across major airports. The organization had operational insights but no shared long-term vision for how customer behavior, digital tools, and space constraints should work together in the land side of the airport.
My objective was to lead the definition of Delta’s Landside Vision and create the framework that would guide multi-year transformation of the airport lobby experience.
Challenge
The congestion problem wasn’t caused by lines alone.
It stemmed from:
Fragmented ownership across Digital, Ops, and Design
No shared view of the landside system
Inconsistent customer preparedness patterns
Physical space limitations misaligned with customer volume
Lack of a strategy for how future customer behaviors would evolve
The real work was aligning the enterprise around what needed to be true in the future and why.
Outcomes
Even without sharing confidential numbers, the outcomes were significant:
Enterprise-wide Landside Vision, now used to guide transformation work
A shared language adopted by Digital, Ops, and Design
A roadmap influencing over a dozen downstream initiatives and active pilots
Greater clarity on how customer behavior impacts throughput, staffing, and space design
Executive alignment around a long-term strategy instead of short-term fixes
Most importantly, the organization shifted from reacting to congestion toward strategically designing the future airport experience.
Approach
Combined internal data, global research, and airport observations to reveal root causes of congestion
Synthesized insights into digestible themes that created alignment among executive stakeholders
Facilitated cross-functional sessions to define the strategic direction for the future lobby experience
Developed a visual framework and roadmap linking customer needs, operational realities, and digital opportunities
Key Strategic Levers
Strategic Bets: Six shared hypotheses guiding long-term Landside decisions
Behavioral Archetypes: Four customer profiles grounded in preparedness and service need
Vision Framework: Connected enterprise CX goals to spatial, digital, and behavioral drivers
Experience Roadmap: Sequenced near-term and long-term work across teams
Cross-Functional Alignment Tools: Workshops, decision maps, and communication artifacts that unified leaders
These levers created the clarity and momentum needed to activate a cohesive Landside transformation.