The Peninsula Hotels - Loyalty Program End to End Design

By the end of this case study, you’ll see the capability of leading end-to-end product design development by leading cross-functional teams through complex stakeholder alignment, technical constraints, and user experience design.

You'll witness my capabilities in:

• Strategic Leadership: Aligning stakeholders across business, marketing, technical, and security teams

• Problem-Solving Under Pressure: Navigating WeChat platform limitations while meeting luxury brand standards

• Complex user flow: Documenting detailed complex service blueprints and technical user flows for cross-team collaboration

• Measurable Business Impact: Delivering a solution that directly addressed revenue retention challenges

This case study exemplifies the senior-level design leadership and cross-functional collaboration skills I bring to your team.

Context

The Peninsula Hotels China market presented a $2M+ revenue risk:

• Customer Acquisition Crisis: Insufficient customer data collection compared to other markets

• Loyalty Performance Gap: Chinese guests showed relatively low repeat booking rates

• Communication Breakdown: Traditional marketing channels were failing to reach the target demographic (Digital native Gen Z)

• Competitive Pressure: Luxury hotel competitors were gaining market share rapidly

Although the management jumped into solution and decided to have a mini-program in Wechat. We still want to listen to what customer actually said before kicking off the project.

Challenges & Responses

Stakeholder Alignment Chaos

The Situation: The immediate issue was that stakeholders with conflicting priorities as this was a brand new project and concept in the organization.

• Business Team: "Launch fast, capture market share"

• Technical Team: "This timeline is impossible with security requirements"

• Brand Team: "User experience cannot compromise Peninsula's luxury positioning"

• Regional Management: "We need China-specific features they've never requested"

Workshop-First Stakeholder Alignment

What I Did: Designed and facilitated a 2-day intensive workshop

• Pre-work: Individual stakeholder interviews to understand hidden concerns

• Workshop Design: User story mapping methodology I adapted for hospitality

• Facilitation: Guided 15 stakeholders to consensus on priorities and trade-offs

Results:

• 80% stakeholder buy-in on feature priorities

• Clear definition of MVP vs. future releases

• Shared understanding of technical constraints and creative solutions

Challenges & Responses

Technical Constraints due to high compliance standard

The Situation: How might The peninsula hotels includes WeChat mini-program into their current system and maintaining good UX and brand standard?

• Platform imposed strict interaction constraints

• Security requirements added friction to user flows

• Integration with legacy hotel systems created data consistency issues

Dual-Track User Flow Documentation

The Challenge: Technical team needed detailed specifications while business stakeholders needed high-level clarity

My Solution: Created parallel documentation streams

1. Executive User Flow: Visual storytelling for business stakeholders showing customer journey and business value

2. Technical User Flow: Detailed interaction specifications for development team

Impact: Eliminated miscommunication between business and technical teams, reducing revision cycles.