Designing a New Airline: From North Star Vision to Launch Readiness

01 · Challenge

Ambitious vision. No shared picture of what to build.

Launching a new airline is extraordinarily complex. The challenge wasn't ambition — there was plenty of that. The challenge was alignment: different teams had different ideas about what the experience should feel like, and no single view of the end-to-end guest journey.

• No unified definition of what a great experience looked like for different guest types
• Teams focused on individual touchpoints and features rather than connected journeys
• New technologies (biometrics, eGates, digital identity) being discussed but not anchored to a coherent experience
• Aircraft delivery timelines shifted — the planned new fleet was replaced by a legacy aircraft for the initial launch, creating real constraints across cabin, systems and digital capabilities
• Leadership needed confidence in what to launch on Day 1 versus what to defer without losing the long-term vision

How do you protect a bold future vision while delivering a credible MVP — without confusing teams or compromising trust?

02 · Approach

Start with ambition. Design backward from there.

Rather than starting with constraints, the work began deliberately with the future. Journeys became the central mechanism — not for documentation, but for decision-making.

• Designed a North Star Day-of-Travel journey — a clear articulation of what an ideal guest experience could look like if constraints were removed
• Stress-tested the vision through scenarios: ideal conditions, service breakdowns, inclusive journeys for guests with accessibility needs
• Created five Guest Experience principles (Digital & Ease, Reliability, Product Mix, Brand Story, Service) as a shared value framework for trade-off decisions
• Developed the Maiden Flight journey as a decision artefact — helping leadership understand what must be true for Day 1, what could be deferred, and where risks were unacceptable
• Pivoted to the Jamila MVP when aircraft timelines shifted — framing the legacy aircraft as a controlled learning environment, not a compromise
• Ran Launch Lab co-creation sessions with teams across digital, operations, guest experience and commercial to agree priorities and build shared ownership

Methods used

03 · Outcome

Journeys as decision tools, not deliverables.

The work produced multiple journey artefacts at different levels of fidelity, each serving a distinct purpose across the organisation.

• North Star journey gave leadership a shared reference point for ambition that survived the aircraft pivot
• Maiden Flight journey surfaced critical gaps across technology, service, product and operations ahead of launch
• Jamila MVP journeys defined scope, workarounds and pilot-ready experiences with clarity
• Mo Journey translated the vision into delivery language for digital and product teams
• Launch Labs built shared ownership of trade-off decisions across functions

04 · Impact

The business learned to design under constraint without losing ambition.

The most significant shift was organisational. Teams that had been thinking in features started thinking in journeys. Leaders who had been debating priorities started making faster, clearer decisions using evidence.

Journey artefacts became trusted decision tools across the organisation — and Jamila MVP became a learning platform, not a compromise.