Sam Ross
Sam RossSenior Product Designer, Strategist & Builder
Intro

I'm a multi-disciplinary designer with over 8 years experience delivering end-to-end UX across complex environments - from upstream service design and strategic visioning through to hands-on product delivery. I am contextually aware of the commercial and technology realities when building and designing product and how to make sure that human needs are put at the forefront at the right time.

Experienced working embedded within client organisations and across global cross-functional teams, partnering with senior stakeholders to shape strategy and win business.
Practitioner of AI-augmented design and research workflows that accelerate insight quality and delivery pace.

Selected works
Next Generation Travel App
Lead UX Designer
Product design UI design Design systems Stakeholder engagement

An airline needed to retire a twenty-year-old app codebase while overhauling years of accumulated UX debt - in six months. I co-led design across a team of three to four, developing a two-track parallel delivery model to stay ahead of a large engineering team. The result was a fully reimagined app experience that lifted the App Store rating from 3.8 to 4.5.

Next generation travel app screens
UI design & digital brand
Wireframes
Concepting & feature development
User testing at airport
Customer testing

Asset Management Platform
Lead UX Designer
Product design Research UI delivery AI workflows

Customers running freight forwarding and logistics businesses had no integrated way to manage assets across containers, vehicles, and equipment. I owned the end-to-end experience - from mapping workflows and benchmarking competitors through to UI delivery in close collaboration with engineers. Introduced AI-integrated design workflows to accelerate delivery and set a new standard beyond what competitors offer.

Asset management UI
Product design
Asset research artefacts
AI-integrated workflows
Asset research
Customer research

Future Cabin Experience
Experience designer
Service design Experience vision Research

I was involved in a multi-year programme of work to design the future cabin experience for incoming Boeing 787 aircraft. While the airline industry is heavily regulated and often waterfall in nature, this team sought to be design-led wherever possible, involving customers at every step.

Cabin experience testing
Seat familiarisation
Cabin UI design
Cabin simulator prototyping
Cabin screen UI
In-flight experience design

Real Estate Client
Lead UX Designer
CX/EX strategy Service design Journey mapping Prototyping

A major UAE-based real estate client needed to transform both their customer and employee experience as part of a significant regional expansion. I led UX through a compressed proof-of-concept phase - mapping current and future state journeys, building prototypes, and presenting the CX vision directly to client leadership in Dubai. Design played a unifying role across Salesforce, technical, BA, and commercial workstreams.

Real estate app UI
Customer & employee prototypes
Real estate user flows
Rapid concepting phase
Real estate service blueprint
Executive presentation

Employee Experience Transformation
Lead UX Designer
Research Experience vision Personas Business case

A multinational electronics manufacturer needed to transform their employee experience through a new digital platform - moving from current state to a funded executive vision in eight weeks. I led the experience strategy across the full discovery-to-vision arc: employee interviews, journey mapping, personas, and prioritisation frameworks, synthesising input from global locations into a business case that secured executive approval.

Employee journey map
Employee research
Experience vision board
Experience vision
Business case
Business case

Digital Loyalty Transformation
Lead Experience Designer
Research Experience visions Roadmaps Businesss casing

A well-loved loyalty programme was leaving growth on the table due to a legacy platform that couldn't keep pace. I led a product squad of three designers through a three-month discovery and envisioning project, running research, building experience visions, and creating a suite of reusable artefacts - journey maps, blueprints, personas, and roadmap variations - that helped secure a $30 million dollar executive-approved programme.

Value based roadmap
Stakeholder engagement
Personas and journey maps
Experience visions
Future of loyalty room
Roadmap facilitation

Air New Zealand Airpoints Store
Co-lead UX Designer
Ecommerce UX Research Prototyping Journey mapping

The legacy Airpoints Store was outdated, off-brand, and underperforming. I led UX from scoping through to delivery - conducting customer research, mapping end-to-end journeys, and building and testing prototypes against leading ecommerce benchmarks. A dual-currency payment model added significant UX complexity; successfully advocating to simplify the business rules turned it into one of the store's strongest features.

Airpoints Store UI
Multi-channel UX
Customer journey map
Feature blueprinting
Airpoints packaging
Premium brand end-to-end

Airport Mobility Transformation
Co-lead Experience Designer
Research Facilitation Business case Strategy

Ground staff at the airport had no mobile tools or real-time information to help them serve customers more effectively. I led a two-phase research and design programme - running bespoke day-in-the-life workshops with different staff groups, then combining research with technical constraints to define a prioritised feature set and build a business case that secured executive approval.

Airport mobility workshop
Experience design artefacts
Day in the life task journey
Staff design workshops
Future mobility experience
Proof of concept prototyping

Unit Brand Design
Lead Designer
Brand identity Visual design Design systems

Unit is an insur-tech start-up focused on delivering a simplified insurance product for body corporates and tenants of medium to high density developments. The team had a goal of being a differentiator in the market, with an easy to understand product and modern and welcoming brand. I helped them set their brand vision, develop a digital first brand identity and prototype their initial product flows.

Unit brand research
Product design
Unit brand identity
Brand design
Unit website design
Digital & physical

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