Contribution

Conducted initial exploration, performed market research, aligned with cross-functional teams and made tradeoffs, scoped the product, wrote business requirement documents, created user stories, led brainstorming sessions, developed user flows, designed and iterated UI, managed design team, reported to management, maintained roadmaps, planed and executed user acceptance testing, conducted user interviews, collected and converted feedback, presented to the company, made go-to-market plan, tracked success metrics after launching.

Confidentiality Notice: If you are interested in this product, please contact me for more details.

Project Overview

Background

Our API product includes FareStructure (FS) and Virtual Interlining (VI) features, which automate split ticketing for flight searches and generate optimal itineraries at lower costs compared to traditional GDS systems. This allows OTAs to achieve their goals more quickly and profitably.

The Admin Panel is the exclusive platform for customers to integrate and utilize our API, and we need to build this product from scratch.

Problem Statement

The previous integration process of our API product, Virtual Interlining and FareStructure API was cumbersome for both customers and engineering team. There are a lot of manual tasksthe engineering team must complete to ensure the customer can fully integrate with our API, such as whitelisting IPs, providing authentication access, and granting technical certification. For this product, we are looking to automate the integration process to reduce engineering overhead, while providing a better integration experience for signed customers.

Goals

• Automate and streamline the integration and certification process

• Enable token authentication to access sandbox and production environments

• Add configuration settings for Virtual Intelining and FareStructure to migrate existing customer to admin panel.

• Improve control by enabling TripNinja personnel to manage user accounts and track integration

• Make this platform scalable for future addtions

Discovery

BRD

As a PM, I drafted and iterated Business Requirement Documents (BRDs) for over 15 major projects, including project overviews, defined business objectives (such as goals and success criteria), user stories, target audiences, stakeholders, involved systems, functional requirements, non-functional requirements, and success metrics.

Here is a sample of my Business Requirements Document work:

Persona

Product Scope

• Automated Integration and Certification:
Incoporate step-by-step guidance and endpoint testing for various API requests, which reduces engineering overhead during the technical certification stage.

• Risk Management:
Empower Virtual Interlining customers to assess and manage risk factors associated with virtual interlined flights

• Revenue Management:Make the flight search more customizable and configurable, generate higher revenue per search for OTAs through different markup models.

• Content Source Management & Verification:Enable customers to set up content sources or providers so that Trip Ninja can verify them, ensuring valid search results and preventing pollution of our VI graph database.

• Analytics Dashboards:Provide customers with access to dashboards, data analysis, and performance tracking after using our API product.

• SuperUser:It is buit for Trip Ninja personnel to create user company accounts, manage permissions, track integrations, and provide assistance as needed.

• Account Hierarchy:

User Journey Map

Here's the user journey map I created for the TripNinja experience. The Admin Panel will serve as the main touchpoint. (zoom in for details)

User Flow

This is a large product, so it includes multiple user flows for each feature. Here is a high-level overview of the general user flow for the initial admin panel.

Development

Architecture Design

Please contact me if you would like more details about the architecture. I'm happy to provide further information.

Design Explorations

I led the design team through brainstorming sessions, prototyping, iterations, design reviews, and more. Here are samples of some of the design work.

Post Launch

Challenges

After launching the first version of our admin panel, we faced a problem: our user base was still growing, and the qualified customers we needed for feedback wouldn’t be available for months. We needed insights quickly. I considered using a paid user testing platform but found it too expensive and uncertain. Instead, I reached out directly to potential users by contacting integration developers on LinkedIn. I offered them travel tech insights and a gift card in exchange for their feedback. This approach worked well. I conducted five valuable interviews, which provided the insights we needed to improve the admin panel for its next version.

User Interview

I conducted interviews with several target users from travel technology companies. During these interviews, I discovered that some steps were not intuitive for first-time users, causing them to spend extra time exploring our platform. I documented all the findings, including questions, answers, observations, takeaways, and their impacts on our product.

This is a part of the findings from the user interview.

Iterations

Based on feedback from interviews and existing customers, we made several key improvements. We redesigned the onboarding page to better suit different user types and enhanced the configuration features, allowing customers to create multiple risk and revenue profiles instead of just one. These updates significantly improved customer satisfaction and retention.

Achievements

As the PM of the Customer Journey Team, which consists of 8 members, we developed and launched the first version of the admin panel from scratch in just 6 months. This web app automated API integration, reducing engineering overhead and cutting integration time by 40% for over 10 companies. It also decreased the time Tripninja engineers spent on customer integration and communication by 70%. Over the past year, we have successfully delivered 7 major projects for the admin panel, including automated API integration and certification, revenue management, AWS QuickSight analytics dashboards, risk profile management, SuperUser functionality, account hierarchy, and external release notes. These improvements expanded our product’s reach to 12 companies, such as Webjet and TripRobotics, resulting in a $300k increase in quarterly revenue.

Next Steps

• Continuously streamline the integration process by enhancing automation and removing roadblocks, such as automating IP whitelisting and billing management, and eliminating unnecessary steps.

• Better support larger clients with subsidiary companies, introduce account hieararchy management feature for more efficient management of subsidiary accounts.

• Increase motivation for integration by offering a new datafeed endpoint before integration that requires no effort—users only need to send raw search data. This endpoint will provide customized analysis reports, encouraging faster adoption and initiation of our API product.