Setting a vision for Search
Background
The product
Trainline is Europe's leading train ticketing platform, seamlessly connecting millions of travelers to thousands of destinations across the continent. The company operates as a mobility-focused travel tech company, leveraging automation, predictive pricing, and a frictionless UX to optimize rail travel across Europe and beyond.
Trainline website and app
My role
I led Product Design strategy and delivery for Trainline's website and mobile app, driving both strategy and execution across the entire user journey—including the booking, travel, and post-sales experiences.
As the Design Lead for Search, I owned the vision, guidance, and delivery for the core booking flow from discovery to purchasing—the most valuable and high-impact area of our product.
Tasked with creating a vision for this space, I guided multiple teams through a strategic roadmap, designed and launched key features, and delivered measurable revenue growth and user impact all within the span of one year.
Business context
Trainline had historically established its dominance in the UK rail ticket market. With efforts to expand internationally, the company’s new priority was to focus on its key strength as an aggregator, combining journeys across multiple carriers and offering more routes to travelers.
Opportunity
Create a vision for the Search experience aligned to the company strategy of Aggregation that shapes the core product strategy, direction, and roadmap for the next 3 years.
Process
Grounded in insights
I established a solid foundation for the Search vision by analyzing quantitative data to identify the precise market opportunity size and determine our optimal target user segments, and qualitative research to understand the specific needs and challenges faced by users within our target market segment.
Cross-functional alignment
In achieving alignment with every team that touched the booking flow, I led a series of workshops with key stakeholders across all verticals, ensuring the vision was deeply integrated into our fundamental product experience.
Creating the narrative
This vision required lockstep collaboration and communication between Product and Design to ensure a resilient, enduring strategy and a unified narrative that could withstand market challenges for the next three years.
Socializing the vision
As part of the creating and delivering impact, I shared this vision throughout multiple forums, including dedicated sessions with the CEO, CPO, and executive team, focused workshops with the Product & Design organization, and communicated this broadly company-wide at All-Hands meetings.
Sharing with key executive decision makers, including Trainline’s CEO
Sharing widely to the company at the monthly All-Hands
Sharing with the entire Product and Design org
Impact and results
Tangible impact
These shareouts not only directed various teams towards one unified futuristic Search vision, but also had already successfully launched 5 key projects, generating £6.88M in net ticket sales. Certain features launched directly addressed the user needs of easy purchasing and finding the best journey options, such as an updated modern search form to help with speed of input, an entrypoint to edit search more flexibly, and journey feature highlights. This strategic execution transformed the search experience while driving significant revenue growth.
Unified Narrative & Vision
My Search vision unified business aggregation goals with user needs, resulting in a cohesive strategy that produced a shared Hypothesis Tree across multiple teams, resulting in more alignment and collaboration towards a common goal. Furthermore, it inspired the creation of new organizational themes centred around the company’s top priority of Search and Aggregation.
Defined strategy & roadmap
The vision also helped to deliver lasting organizational impact with a tangible 3-year strategy and roadmap. This vision provided a clear North Star that guided individual squad product direction, while positioning me as the owner and leader who effectively directed a team of designers to execute on this strategic vision.
Unified Brand & Product message
The vision also helped align our brand and product messaging both internally and externally, seamlessly translating our offline brand identity into the digital product experience while showcasing our core value proposition of aggregation, range, and scale.
