Creating a Shared Service Design View Across 14 Applications and Four Product Squads at Delta Air Lines.

 

Challenge  

Delta's digital catering operation had grown into a fragmented web of 14 specialized tools owned by four separate product squads — with no shared view of how they related to each other, which users they served, or where they created friction for people operating across multiple systems.

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Approach

Identified the fragmentation risk independently through cross-squad observation and flagged it proactively before any formal initiative existed. Self-initiated a solo design research effort — organizing stakeholder sessions with Technical Product Engineers across all four squads to gather information unavailable through existing documentation.

Developed a full service design framework covering 14 applications and 12 user personas, including a systems map, dual-lane journey map across Passenger and Employee Experience, and a service blueprint documenting each system's users, inputs, use cases, and outputs.

Created "The Story of the Breakfast Tortilla" — a narrative scenario tracing a single meal through every system from menu planning to passenger delivery — as an accessible communication vehicle for stakeholders who didn't naturally engage with blueprints.

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Outcomes

• Users who crossed system boundaries became visible as continuous personas for the first time, rather than isolated entries in separate product backlogs.

• Cross-system dependencies that had been invisible risk became explicit, shareable design inputs across all four squads.

• A consistent vocabulary was established across teams, reducing coordination friction caused by squads using different terminology for the same systems.

• The narrative scenario format reached stakeholders who could not engage with the blueprint alone, extending the framework's impact beyond the immediate design audience.

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Key Learning

Fragmentation is a design problem before it's an engineering problem. By the time inconsistency is visible in shipped products, the decisions that created it are already months old. The ecosystem view surfaced that risk early enough to address it at the planning level — the only level where it can actually be fixed.

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Growth Opportunity

Embed the ecosystem framework as a living design artifact maintained across squad boundaries — extended to cover emerging systems and used as the foundation for a shared front-end framework and cross-system design standards that prevent fragmentation from recurring.