As a Principal UX Designer at Sabre, I led the UX initiative of our Sabre Black incubator. I worked with and guided a product owner, a development lead, and a marketing expert to formulate and test new business cases. We went through a 90-day cycle to discover, design, and validate new ideas for our Travel Network business. We presented our validated business cases and recommendations to executive leadership at the end of the first 90 days. If funded, the project builds an MVP product to validate further with customers. We use design strategy and lean startup principles to flesh out the concept and validate it with customers.

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FRAMEWORK

Sabre is a large and established company. It was becoming too difficult to build and launch products quickly to be competitive in a challenging market. Sabre has several innovation labs to help decrease the time to market. The Travel Network business' version of this is Sabre Black. We utilize lean startup and design strategy to iterate and validate ideas quickly to build a business case for new products.

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LEAN STARTUP

The diagram above is a great visual of how we ran our validation process. We were allowed 90 days to validate the concept and form a vision of the product. Once we have our data from user interviews and testing, we put together a business case and present it to our executive leadership. In that presentation, we get a decision to pursue, pivot, persevere, shelve, or abandon. We use the RAPID model to make sure a decision is made before anyone leaves the room. From there if we get a pursue decision, we move forward to create our first MVP and test with real paying customers. Below you can see our stage gates.

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BUILDING THE BUSINESS CASE

As we are collecting data we start to build our business case. I created a standard format for these presentations to create some consistency for our executives. This format has cut down on questions that pop up before we get a chance to present the data. The executives now know where the data they are interested in is covered in the presentation.

I am not permitted to show any of our presentations, but here is an outline of what our business case follows.

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1. Frame the opportunity (Who, What, Wow)
2. Sabre’s differentiators and value proposition
3. AAARRR (Shows the market opportunity)
4. Competitive landscape
5. Who we interviewed and how
6. Customer pain points
7. Designs
8. What customers said and how we listened
9. Business model
10. Development plan
11. Recommendation
    

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All submissions to the Sabre Black program will have the potential to generate NEW revenue or massive savings for the business.

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