Communications Manager
Problem Statement
Expedia Group has no single, trusted way to trace, evaluate, or create traveller-facing communications such as emails. Teams rely on fragmented tools and institutional knowledge, which isn't sustainable and increases the risk of duplicate, conflicting, or low-quality messages reaching customers.
Goal
Build an internal website (aka "CommsHub") that serves two purposes:
- Repository: a searchable, easy-to-navigate catalog of every existing traveller communication, with its owner, trigger, audience, and performance metrics.
- Creation tooling: a guided workflow where teams can propose new communications and build them in the tool, with checks that catch overlap and quality issues before anything is sent to customers.
Users
CommsHub serves a range of people who create, maintain, and track traveller communications. Each group needs something different from the tool.
Designers: Find existing messages, templates, and patterns to keep tone and layout consistent and avoid redesigning what already exists.
Developers: Trace technical metadata such as dependencies and ownership, and use tooling to build new communications in a more reusable way instead of one-off sends.
Product Managers: Propose new communications, check for overlap, and track audience, timing, and performance.
Other stakeholders: Get visibility without digging into tooling. Executives get a holistic view of what is sent to customers, legal and compliance verify policy, support looks up what a traveller received, and analysts connect messages to performance.
Process
- Internal research: Interviewed the teams who would use the tool to uncover current pain points and what they need from a single, trusted source.
- Competitive audit: Reviewed successful documentation sites and guided wizard tools to identify patterns that work well for browsing and step-by-step creation.
- Design explorations: Explored a range of design directions and interaction patterns in Figma, then narrowed to the strongest concepts.
- Detailed mockups and critiques: Built detailed mockups in Cursor illustrating key interaction patterns, and shared them in design crits to pressure-test and sharpen the designs.
- Cross-functional alignment and iteration: Presented refined concepts to product and engineering partners for visibility, feasibility input, and buy-in, then kept sharing, testing, and refining as the direction took shape.
Outcome
CommsHub is now in a limited pilot with key teams. We’re continuing to iterate on the design as we gather their feedback and as priorities shift, so the tool keeps evolving to meet real needs. Below are a few generic example screens to give a feel for the experience.