The Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines merger came with physical and regulatory deadlines that dictated an inflexible 10-month delivery window for digital and design work. With the timeline tied to real-world change, combined design, product, and engineering teams had to build and ship alongside a transformation that was already in motion.
Chris Strahl talks with Noelle Lansford and Forrest Akemann about what it took to deliver a multi-brand experience under that pressure, while respecting the long histories and cultural significance of two iconic airline brands. From foundational decisions around color, typography, and tokens to close collaboration across teams, this conversation offers a realistic look at how systems work gets done when speed is non-negotiable and the stakes are real.
We'll explore:
- What changes when deadlines are tied to physical and regulatory reality?
- Why is merger-driven multi-brand work harder than planned multi-brand?
- How do shared foundations like color, typography, and tokens enable teams to move faster together?
Guest
Noelle Lansford began her career as an engineer on design system teams before transitioning into design, where she discovered her passion for connecting the technical and human sides of digital product creation. Today, as the founder of Shep, a design systems consultancy that partners with organizations from early-stage startups to Fortune 5 companies, Noelle helps bridge the gap between design, engineering, and business strategy. Her work focuses on creating systems that balance structure with flexibility, prioritize people over process, and deliver lasting business value instead of chasing perfection.
Forrest Akemann is a design systems lead at Hawaiian Airlines, where he has worked since 2019 across product design and design systems. He played a key role in building Hawaiian’s design system and later helped lead the system work through the Alaska–Hawaiian merger, focusing on multi-brand foundations, theming, and system adoption.
Transcript
Robin Cannon [00:00:00]:
This podcast is brought to you by Knapsack, the intelligent product engine helping teams design, build, and deliver digital products at the pace of ideas. Knapsack creates a system of record built for both humans and AI, giving product teams the data structure and alignment they need to deliver with speed, scale, and confidence. Learn more at knapsack.cloud
Chris Strahl [00:00:22]:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Patterns Podcast. Each episode, we sit down with the leaders and builders defining how modern digital products come to life. From systems and tools to culture and decision-making, we dig into what's driving real impact today and shaping the future of how teams build. Hey everybody, welcome to the Patterns Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strahl. Today I'm here with Noel Lansford and Forrest Ackman. They're collectively a part of the Alaska Airlines Hawaiian Airlines design system teams.
Chris Strahl [00:00:54]:
Their relationship to the different airlines and different entities is somewhat complex. I'm going to allow them to talk for a second. And give you a lay of how they connect to this entity. So Noel, why don't you kick us off and say what exactly is your role in this?
Noelle Lansford [00:01:07]:
My role is a lot less these days. Well, I'm the founder and CEO of a design system consultancy called Shep. And for the period of time of Alaska going through the merger with Hawaiian Airlines, I was partnered with the design system team, helping them co-lead and carry out the effort of multi-brand work. So I got to work really close with Forrest. I'd love for Forrest to say how he's involved.
Forrest Akemann [00:01:30]:
Thanks, Noel. My name is Forrest. I've been working with Hawaiian Airlines since 2019. I originally started as a product designer, moved into their design system as well, and got brought over during the merger acquisition. I got brought over as a lead on the design systems team, and that's how I'm involved.
Chris Strahl [00:01:50]:
How'd the two of you work together on this project?
Noelle Lansford [00:01:53]:
So I was brought in first, it was right before Forrest joined the design system team. And so I was brought in kind of as a subject matter expert to start leading the design system towards, hey, how are we going to serve up these two experiences and how are we going to utilize the design system? Partway through that project, Forrest was introduced to me and I knew immediately like, oh my gosh, we got to get this guy in here. Cause he's being very humble about it, but he made the Hawaiian design system. That you saw before the acquisition, if you're a frequent flyer of that. And so the experience you see there is Forrest and his team over there. And so it was just really crucial to have his knowledge of that brand to work together on the new Alaska look and feel with the merger.
Chris Strahl [00:02:34]:
Mean, I it's significant for a whole lot of reasons, right? Like two airlines don't get together quite like this every single day. And I think that it's also airlines that have a lot of history and distinctness. I have the pleasure of having my uncle fly for Hawaiian for over 30 years. And so he actually retired from Hawaiian Airlines about a decade ago. So it's near and dear to my heart and my family's heart as well. And I understand there is a lot of almost familial recognition of Hawaiian Airlines, both throughout the islands themselves as well as the mainland. And there's a lot of love for that brand. Likewise, Alaska coming from, you know, a bunch of bush pilots in Alaska to being the big airline that it is today.
Chris Strahl [00:03:17]:
There's a lot of history and significance to that. And I think that as evidenced by the fact that both brands are still mentioned when we talk about the merger, there's a lot of value to that. And so how do you even begin taking two things that are so iconic and like smushing them together? It's maybe not the right way to say it, but that's what, what came to mind.
Forrest Akemann [00:03:41]:
That is a really good question, and I think One of the things that Noel and I were really, really focused on from the start of this whole project was exactly what you were saying. I live in Hawaii. I have for a while. And it is a really large point of pride for the islands and for local people. As you were saying, there's people who have generations that have worked and have some sort of tie to Hawaiian Airlines. So for us to get that right, was really, really very important.
Chris Strahl [00:04:12]:
So when you think about the representation of that importance, what stands out when you were first embarking on this project? Because I think that there are a lot of, oh, whoa, these big entities are coming together. The world kind of knew about this for a while before those brands actually connected. Presumably you all were in the process of doing that across all this like vast digital ecosystem that also had to somehow be unified. And so when you're taking that on and you're looking at that, like what forms of expression guide your decision-making on this?
Noelle Lansford [00:04:45]:
If you look at Forrest and I's first files, the biggest topic of conversation in our files was just color. And I feel like color was just, we spent so many hours on color and getting that right. And you'd think like, what is there to get right? Because both brands have a very clear. Palette, like when you're looking at the planes, when you're looking at the signage that's there today, but combining those two things and getting them to be complementary and true to the brands and scaling in the same ways digitally that they had before, that was the undertaking. And, you know, our job initially, before we kind of got into the refresh of it all, was can we keep this as similar as it has been in the past? While making these things complementary in the same spaces. Later in the project, it was all about typography. And so I think between color and typography, like, those were our two big focuses. But as far as inspiration, for me personally, and, and I'd love to hear Forrest's take on this, I was really inspired initially by the photography that came out about the merger and seeing the two tails next to each other of the planes.
Noelle Lansford [00:05:52]:
I mean, like, wow, that's where I felt the responsibility and the inspiration come from of just man, these are two really important airlines culturally and how they fit together and how they shouldn't be presented together in ways that would degrade those brands, but like the responsibility to keep the excellence high in the way that both of them have been for such a long time.
Forrest Akemann [00:06:12]:
I would also say that the way in which we approached color was a little bit different for each brand. Alaska Airlines already had color ramps set up for all of their colors. So we had kind of a foundation for the Alaska brand. The Hawaiian brand, we did not have color ramps. We just had primary and secondary brand colors. So that was also a process too of figuring out what color spaces to work in, figuring out how to actually make perceptually equal color ramps, which is, as you know, not always easy. We had to approach it differently for each brand, which was really fun and presented some unique challenges.
Noelle Lansford [00:06:49]:
Yeah.
Chris Strahl [00:06:50]:
And this is all going on also with the backdrop of a very public merger where it's not just about the website or the credit card rebranding, right? There is a ton of stuff going on, tons of things in physical space with physical infrastructure. Tell me about some of those pressures that you all faced on the digital side that maybe ran headlong into a lot of the things that you were facing in terms of what markets and PR and all this other stuff was happening around you?
Noelle Lansford [00:07:20]:
Yeah, I mean, we had 10 months to get it right, you know? That was the big stressor, I think, for everybody, not just the digital teams, but the physical infrastructure. Everybody was under this deadline. Digital was one part of it, but yeah, I remember for me, like, I did an on-site, flew out to Seattle on an Alaska flight in the seat pocket in front of me was the deadline staring at me the whole flight. That was a relaxing ride over, you.
Chris Strahl [00:07:46]:
This.
Noelle Lansford [00:07:46]:
Know?
Chris Strahl [00:07:46]:
Is like, yeah, you know, sometimes I worry on the plane and especially when a magazine talking about the magazine staring at me.
Noelle Lansford [00:07:53]:
I'm gonna need to figure that out.
Chris Strahl [00:07:56]:
Yeah. What about you, Drew Forrest? Like what was that tangible pressure that you felt?
Forrest Akemann [00:08:00]:
Definitely the same as what Noelle was saying. We talked about that a lot because there was a bunch of physical infrastructure changing, billboards, advertising, stickers on the planes. It was a deadline that we had no say in, and we saw what we were doing as a pretty fundamental part to getting where we need to go with a multi-brand initiative.
Noelle Lansford [00:08:22]:
Right. And we didn't find out about the credit card until later too. So like we had 10 months for like the big 2 brands, and then Atmos Rewards is such a cool thing, but that was kind of the big secret because nobody wanted that out there until it was ready to be out there. So even internally, that was held pretty tightly until later.
Chris Strahl [00:08:39]:
Yeah, as a holder of both cards, the experience was actually a pretty interesting rollout. Likewise, having status on both airlines was also a really interesting rollout associated with all of it. And so the way that everything sort of changed around and the timing of it all is a lot. And to make that feel seamless to a consumer is a near impossibility. And I felt like it was done well. And I think that in large part, the digital effort felt like it led the way. And I think that it's interesting when you look at the ecosystem experience, right? Because everybody interacts with airlines on the internet. It's very rare that you like walk to a ticket counter and buy a ticket these days.
Chris Strahl [00:09:16]:
I mean, you can, but almost never does that happen. And so there's innately a digital part to airlines and then likewise the rewards cards and all the other stuff that is associated with the airline. And so digital having to be like this key cornerstone to it is really interesting. And that's a powerful constraint. Constraint. And then likewise, having a deadline on a merger that is pretty immutable, that is the opposite of a self-imposed deadline to get something done. And it's interesting when you look at a lot of other design systems projects that are out there, oftentimes there are these self-imposed deadlines that are, yes, super important, but they don't quite carry the weight of, oh yeah, we're going to repaint airplanes. And I think that's a little different.
Chris Strahl [00:09:57]:
And I want to make sure that for this discussion, that backdrop remains really present because that is an unbelievable amount of pressure to be able to land the plane, so to speak, at exactly the right time. When you look at this, you also had two systems that I don't think were ever necessarily intended to function together. There was kind of like, hey, we have this system for Hawaiian that's over here. We have this system for Alaska that's over here. Usually when you think about a lot of the value of design systems, is this idea of like, hey, how do I incorporate other brands very easily or very quickly into my componentry? When you have two systems that are very distinct that were built entirely independently, how do you think again about sort of like smushing that together? I'm sure you had different ideas about what different patterns and components were inside of the system. And you even mentioned color and a color ramp. How do you even begin to tease apart that idea of, hey, we have some stuff over here that we want to use and stuff over here where multi-brand is usually something that's easy in this case. The merging of those brands was probably the core challenge.
Forrest Akemann [00:11:00]:
Yeah, I agree. There was often discussions early on about how we would do this. So with Alaska, it's an open source design system. It's the ORO design system. Anybody can use it. And we have a dedicated team of engineers and product managers and people surrounding that endeavor. We didn't have the same at Hawaiian Airlines, so it made sense to use ORO as the building blocks for what we were going to do. And so that's why for us, we needed to figure out color, first and foremost, and then type, because we felt like those were the fundamental cornerstones of each brand.
Chris Strahl [00:11:35]:
Yeah, those like as the foundational building blocks of a brand, I think that represents a wonderful sort of place to build from. How do you do that? I want to hear your take on like, okay, so we talked a little bit about a type ramp, which was kind of a cool little teaser for this, but tell me more. What does that conversation look like? What are you saying to each other? When you're saying, hey, how are we gonna use these foundational building blocks over here in this open source system? But we still have this brand preservation that needs to coexist.
Noelle Lansford [00:12:03]:
So here's the other part of this backdrop, right? So we have this stress of airlines. The other stressor was for me and Forrest personally being co-leads on this, right? We're really the ones trying to figure out on the design side of the house. Of course we have engineering counterparts that we couldn't have done it without as well, but really architecting from a design perspective, what this multi-brand experience was going to be like. Forrest mentioned he's in Hawaii. I'm in Ohio. We have about 3 hours of overlap a day.
Chris Strahl [00:12:28]:
Right. Right.
Noelle Lansford [00:12:29]:
So it was a lot of 3-hour calls.
Forrest Akemann [00:12:32]:
Yeah.
Chris Strahl [00:12:33]:
Everybody in Hawaii wakes up at 6 AM anyway, so they can all go surf by 2.
Noelle Lansford [00:12:36]:
Yeah. Poor Forrest was doing that. And sometimes we get like a nice 5-hour day if Forrest wakes up early and I stay up late. It was a lot of that. But when I look back on all of our conversations, Forrest, it's you and I hopping on a call and asking that exact same question to Big Si, how are we going to do this? And we just get going and we'd have all these big explosive Figma files. We'd get in there and we'd start talking about color and then that would bleed into, well, what about this experience? What about this experience? And so you start with one thing, but it just starts bleeding into all these other things. And so even though the first solve was color, I feel like a lot of that momentum carried into the other categories simultaneously.
Forrest Akemann [00:13:14]:
It carried into the other categories. And then also importantly, one thing that we did at the beginning was we did an audit of as many pages as we could get our hands on. We found as many Alaska pages as we could. We found as many Hawaii pages as we could. We were working in Figma, and so we were able to collaborate and really figure out what each design language is with the knowledge of we are going to have to constrain a little bit. So that we can get on the same level footing as one unified system. So that part was really important as well.
Noelle Lansford [00:13:48]:
Yeah. And when we were going through that, we kept calling them like color use cases or typography use cases. And so we were going through those things, we're like, okay, Alaska uses blue for these kinds of scenarios, Hawaiian uses pink for these kinds of scenarios, trying to line it up. And you know, it's not always blue to pink, apples to oranges, you know, it's like you had to kind of be like, okay, how custom could it be? And it was also at this point where there was a team dedicated to experimenting on making it different. So it was hard to balance those two things of like, okay, here's what we know the use cases are currently. Those use cases might change. And you know, that's hard when you're making an architecture based off of what's live.
Chris Strahl [00:14:26]:
Yeah. So what was the methodology that you all chose for this? Because I can see the natural tension between, hey, we have all this stuff that we have to like effectively migrate or normalize is maybe a better word. And so like, how do we normalize, but then also how do we innovate? And you all sounds like chose to do both because there were people that were experimenting, building new stuff, thinking about new ways of working together while you simultaneously had to consolidate or merge or structure what currently existed.
Forrest Akemann [00:14:55]:
That's correct. I mean, it still all goes back to color, right? Because after we took the assessment of all all of the screens that we had, we were able to then start to propose different structures of color and how that would work. And do we categorize things differently? Because Hawaiian was doing color in one way, Alaska was doing color in one way. And so for us, it was really trying to figure out how does that color sit on top? So we started to talk about, okay, what groupings do we need? So we have our primitive tokens that we've talked about a little bit. Alaska had their color ramps. Hawaiian, we needed to create the color ramps. So that was kind of our first level of color. Our second level that we spent a lot of time on was talking about how that semantic layer is going to work out.
Forrest Akemann [00:15:44]:
So we created some groups, a lot of the basic ones. We have like a text and icon. We have a surface, page backgrounds, some accents, status colors, etc.
Chris Strahl [00:15:53]:
And all those were named the same before you guys started, right?
Noelle Lansford [00:15:56]:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It was all easy. You just kind of put it, drag and drop.
Chris Strahl [00:16:01]:
Yep. Yeah.
Noelle Lansford [00:16:02]:
Yeah, not.
Chris Strahl [00:16:04]:
That's like a really interesting part of this, right? Because you're rattling off all these names of things so casually, but I imagine the amount of effort and time it took to get to a semantic layer that was actually semantic was probably not a trivial amount of work.
Noelle Lansford [00:16:17]:
No.
Forrest Akemann [00:16:19]:
Yeah, it was definitely not a trivial amount of work for anyone involved. We had to create the initial system, but it was also up to all of the designers that we are working with that they needed to implement the system on all of their pages. So there was a really big initiative to retheme everything and get everything up to this new color system that we had created.
Noelle Lansford [00:16:42]:
And to the other point, designers were used to having the liberty of going outside the system if they wanted to, meaning like, okay, if it's just for Alaska Airlines, then we have this blue, we have these, you know, secondary and tertiary colors, and we generally stick to that, but You know, if I'm on a specific part of the product that may be just chips or badges or things like that is a really good example of maybe a designer has a very specific need to go a little bit outside the color palette to mark something as something that stands out from the page. And so when you're going through those things, those colors might be selected to still match the vibe that Alaska gives you. And so, you know, now we're taking those kinds of things into account where it's like, okay, things that are maybe like right outside the brand, but have a UI function. How do we translate that across the brands and what are those use cases? Really trying to keep things able to switch before we had the credit card brand too. It was like, how do we get these two brands to, when we load a theme in the page, users are going to get a reliable experience when we flip it.
Chris Strahl [00:17:46]:
Yeah, with speed is like a very strong constraint to that too. You all leaned very heavily into systems, it sounds like, largely because that was kind of the only way that you could meet the constraints that you had. When I think about that idea of like designers being used to being able to color outside the lines or maybe even make their own drawing, we oftentimes encourage that as a good practice within design systems because you usually have the time to go and review those sort of snowflake-esque bits of work and make an assessment. Does this belong in the system or does it not? How can we better leverage the system here? It doesn't sound like you all really had that luxury. And so like. Forrest, when I think about your comment earlier about how you needed to maintain this distinctness or this separation, but you were still leaning on a design system that originated within Alaska, how did systems help or harm or really empower people to be able to create that initial experience using color, type, whatever, to make it so that when they go to the homepage, you get what you expect?
Forrest Akemann [00:18:46]:
What Iâ I have been trying to communicate to designers and what I think Noel and I were talking about a lot that kind of ties back into your comment about coloring outside of the lines is we didn't really have that luxury too much in this project. More of what we were doing was we were creating a box and designers had to work within that box. Now there's a lot of freedom within that box, but things need to start to go in the box. And so For us, we were constantly communicating with our designers that we're working with, with our team leads, with our managers, with our design director, to make sure that what we're thinking and what we are doing will be appropriate for the needs of what people are creating when they're designing.
Chris Strahl [00:19:33]:
Hey everyone, I'm taking a quick break to tell you about Knapsack's Pattern Summits. If you've never been, these gatherings are for senior product design and engineering leaders navigating the complexity of modern digital production work. We bring folks together for thoughtful, discussion-based sessions where you can share what's top of mind, learn from peers, and leave feeling renewed. Pattern Summits are invitation only and intentionally small so the conversations stay meaningful. If you'd like to join us, visit knapsack.cloud/events to request an invitation. It sounds like there's a lot of empowerment vested in the two of you, and then a lot of trust that you had to build with this team because As you mentioned, Noel, like folks weren't used to working this way. And so if they're not used to working that way, from a human-centric perspective, how did you all pull that off? Because it's two different teams that have never really worked together. They had different sets of constraints, different ideas, different collective ways of working.
Chris Strahl [00:20:25]:
You probably didn't even use the same tools in all cases. And you had to go take two people that were co-leading this endeavor. And that's great. That's a good place to start. That's like, hey, look, we have a partnership that is going to go forward with this. An immense amount of pressure. Like, we're going to take all of this work and we're going to put it in a pressure cooker. And then we're going to say like, look, there's a mandate, go get it done.
Chris Strahl [00:20:48]:
What does that conversation amongst designers, developers, folks inside the organization, product people look like? I assume that everybody kind of like felt like they were on the same team., but beyond that, how do you engender that trust in those people?
Noelle Lansford [00:21:04]:
Yeah, I have to do it or it doesn't work. fast Right.
Chris Strahl [00:21:08]:
Right. Like no room for individual coffee conversations with a bunch of different stakeholders.
Noelle Lansford [00:21:13]:
Right, right. Yeah. You gotta go fast. Right. And I think, I don't know, Forrest, you tell me what you think about this, but we did designer interviews. That was one of the first things we did while we were auditing pages. We just met with the designers and we're like, show us what you're working on. Tell us how you're using color.
Noelle Lansford [00:21:27]:
Again, color was our first conversation, but we're thinking about everything. And you know, people would generally tell us, and you know, This is all to be explicit, you know, for tokens, right? We're like, okay, multi-brand tokens, we'll build it into the components and then we'll let our consumers use tokens to basically hot swap any other customizations that they've done. And we did a couple test rounds too. V1 of semantic names, we took it on a little roadshow and, you know, had designers pull up working files and we're like, okay, we're going to give you access to this library. Just use it without us telling you anything. Like we'd give them a rundown of like what's in it, the fact that it's supposed to be multi-brand, but other than that, be like, hey, what would you replace on this Page with these names and, you know, we went through several stages of refinement. So I think from a human-centric point of view, relying on other people to give us feedback was huge because if we just plowed through it ourselves, which there were moments where we still had to do that, but our intention was very much if we can gather as much design system consumer data as possible and really serve those people well, then they're gonna be able to make a great experience for the end user and then that's gonna be their goal.
Forrest Akemann [00:22:34]:
100%. When we were doing that and when we were doing all the meetings, I think one thing that was important was we were making ourselves really available to all of our design consumers. We felt like that was really important. We wanted to make something that they would use, that they would like, that was easy for them to use, but that still made sense for the needs of ultimately the business in the multi-brand initiative.
Chris Strahl [00:22:56]:
Were people pretty bought in on the systems concept? Forrest, I'm kind of curious your take on this because like you seem to have sense of, hey, in this transition, this is how people felt or acted or believed that this was either helpful or harmful to their job.
Forrest Akemann [00:23:11]:
So I think people were bought into it. There was probably a little bit of hesitation, trepidation. I'm not sure the correct word because there is a lot of work involved in retheming all of your pages to this new system. It was something that was mandatory. So we tried to make it as painless as possible. And I mean, we helped designers or hopped in files and showed them like how to do things. We did learning sessions. We did a lot of stuff that would enable people to use the system that we created.
Noelle Lansford [00:23:43]:
Yeah, we made an interactive Figma documentation site to show people how the theming worked. And like Forest especially, you know, really did a lot of design files alongside the other designers. I'd hope to be able to say, and I think this is true, hopefully there's not a designer on the team being like, that didn't happen. For me, but the goal was that every single designer that was responsible for the multi-brand effort interfaced with either me or Forrest in their design file for what they needed to turn over for that.
Chris Strahl [00:24:10]:
Neat. Yeah, that's great. So there's a lot of still like hand-in-hand type stuff, right? It wasn't like you all were just building this system in your ivory tower and then visiting the ground floor once in a while. There was a lot of real hand-in-hand work here. How do you balance that necessary hand-in-hand peace with the fact that there was so much time pressure?
Noelle Lansford [00:24:31]:
What you can't see is Forrest and I looking at each other going, how did we manage?
Chris Strahl [00:24:36]:
It's like coffee, lots of coffee.
Noelle Lansford [00:24:38]:
That's exactly what I was going to say. We'd go on a call, be like, did you get your coffee? But really, I think what we wanted to do was like, we'd go into a really high-pressure meeting, and we knew that everybody else that got in a room with us for this hands-on Hey, let's work on multi-brand stuff. They had just gotten out of a really pressured meeting as well. And I think everybody had an awareness of that. Like everybody's under pressure and we all need to lock in as a team together. There was a lot of motivation to do that, especially as designers, I would say, you know, being very open and honest about what our challenges were as design systems and as product. We'd tell them what our problems were and see if they had a way to help us solve and vice versa. You know, they're like, hey, I need this.
Noelle Lansford [00:25:22]:
And if I don't have this, we can't. Do our part of the bargain. So there was a lot of honesty while also respecting that everybody was under pressure.
Forrest Akemann [00:25:30]:
Yeah, I think that's a really important point. I mean, at the end of the day, everybody was answering to somebody and we really saw it as our jobs to make that answering a little bit easier for our design consumers. We talked so much about how do we make this the most pleasant experience possible? While maintaining this robust system that we need to create for a multi-brand initiative. That was really top of mind for us.
Noelle Lansford [00:25:58]:
Going back to the box analogy, we talked a lot about, hey, we're introducing a box and we know that the box is gonna be uncomfy. We want to get everybody in this box for the first push. And after that, we really want to hear more. Like we want to hear everything now, but we won't be able to prioritize everything now. So we're going to prioritize as much as we can to launch the first box, and then we're going to let a little bit more come back into the system and get back into that routine that you're talking about, Chris, of like, yeah, we do want to encourage you to explore. We can't do that right now in a 10-month timeframe. But when that box has been delivered, let's start talking about that again. And really pushing for that as a future state, I think was important where it wasn't just like, hey, we're coming with a sledgehammer.
Noelle Lansford [00:26:40]:
This is it. This is how it's going to be. We didn't take that approach at all.
Chris Strahl [00:26:43]:
I think it is interesting because you talked for a second about a mandate also. And so. Mandates and vulnerability don't often go hand in hand. So the ability for you all to foster an environment where people felt like they could speak up and felt like they could voice their concerns or their needs associated with a mandate is genuinely very impressive. It's super challenging when people are faced with a sort of hard wall of this is the way that it's going to be and it's going to be done in this timeframe to then want to actually to speak up around something that may be counter to progress or feel like it's counter to progress. And you all's ability to suss that out from your team, I think it's remarkable.
Noelle Lansford [00:27:25]:
Thank you.
Chris Strahl [00:27:26]:
When you think about what you all learned from this, this is always my favorite part. When you kind of sit and say like, what were the highs? What were the lows? What were the places where we felt friction, good or bad? I'm always curious if you had to take away 3 things from this that felt like concrete axioms for how you're gonna do this work in the future, what would that look like for y'all?
Noelle Lansford [00:27:50]:
I've got one top of mind and I wanna hear Forest's reply to it cause it's very important. The top thing that I learned is that if you spend so many hours on design tokens and you both go on vacation at the same time and you don't talk during that time cause you just over-tokened. And you come back, all roads lead to mullets.
Forrest Akemann [00:28:11]:
Yeah, yes, mullets.
Chris Strahl [00:28:13]:
Not the word I was expecting.
Forrest Akemann [00:28:16]:
To give a little bit of context, as Noel said, we both went on international trips, and the first time that we got back on video camera, I said, wow, that's a great haircut, check out my mullet. And she's like, whoa, check this out, I got one too, right? So we spent a lot of time together.
Chris Strahl [00:28:32]:
Yeah, you guys normalized towards each other, it sounds like, and hairstyles and everything.
Noelle Lansford [00:28:36]:
We said that we Had one brain cell and it was mullets. It was single brain cell. And you'd found that a lot. Like if you'd talk to me about something, Forrest knew exactly what I was gonna say and vice versa. And it's because of this really high concentration of teamwork and then disperse and teamwork and disperse. And so it was really important that we were saying the exact same stuff because there was no room for one of us to have another opinion and spread that around through an organization. You know, it just, we had to be that tight. So yeah, if that happens to anybody else, get mullets.
Noelle Lansford [00:29:05]:
It helps.
Chris Strahl [00:29:06]:
Nice.
Forrest Akemann [00:29:07]:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Chris Strahl [00:29:08]:
Be so in sync there. Your hairstyles match.
Noelle Lansford [00:29:10]:
That is absolutelyâ go on vacation at the same time, which we didn't talk about either. We were just both like, yep, gotta go. Came back.
Forrest Akemann [00:29:16]:
Yep.
Chris Strahl [00:29:17]:
Nice.
Forrest Akemann [00:29:17]:
Nice.
Noelle Lansford [00:29:18]:
That was a highlight for sure. That's just some mad stuff.
Chris Strahl [00:29:21]:
That's a fun way of framing it though, right? Like this idea of being able to finish each other's sentences as a partnership. We talked a lot about the people, right? Which I, I think honestly you're underselling yourselves a little bit. The remarkable stuff is like, yeah, the tech and the work is hard. But like getting a bunch of people to then go use the thing you built is harder. And so seeing that leadership in that partnership is probably what I would imagine would be inspirational to a lot of people that were then consuming the system you all created.
Forrest Akemann [00:29:47]:
We really hope so. For myself, I think the number one takeaway is when you work on an enablement team, you really need to figure out what your designers or what your consumers actually need. And that made our lives a lot better. It made it so that our consumers had buy-in on what we were actually creating. As you said before, we weren't just handing down something from our ivory tower. And so that was really, really important. And just all of the communication that goes into it. I mean, when Noel and I, we worked together so, so much.
Forrest Akemann [00:30:22]:
I mean, it's not a joke that we were finishing each other's sentences. We spent a lot of time together.
Noelle Lansford [00:30:27]:
Yeah, no, you know, like you'd be on a several-hour call, both looking at a Figma board, hadn't said anything for hours at the same time. What do you think of this? You know, like really freaky. But yeah, it's crazy. But the other thing is just back to the people, right? The other half of the house that we haven't even talked about yet is the engineering team and how tight Forrest and I had to be with our engineering team and other people's engineering teams. And then by proxy, of course, your product leaders. And so that's where everybody was feeling pressures in different directions. And, you know, everybody's divvied up into these different categories. And really by the end of it, I don't feel like there were categories.
Noelle Lansford [00:31:05]:
There wasn't like, oh, well, the engineers think this and the designers think that. I think I remember like a pretty critical point where all of us just said, hey, we're not going to be able to just do the schedule we've always done. We're all going to be in a big, giant, ongoing call together and people are going to be leaving it and entering it and leaving it. And it's like one big all conversation day. And for our engineers, I know they stayed up late working on building a lot of it. And so that call would go into the night and people would just pick back up. And so it was really a temporary blurring of all that. And I remember everybody saying like, man, the pressures are a lot.
Noelle Lansford [00:31:40]:
The amount of time we're spending on this is a lot, but if we could just operate this way as a team after all this, that's the dream.
Chris Strahl [00:31:48]:
That's awesome. It's funny because so many communications styles associated with things like communities where, you know, you drop in, drop out, or people that are like much more ad hoc or informal about what's happening, you end up with a lot of inconclusive things. And I think that you all were in a position where you had to have clear priorities and you had all these really clear constraints. How did you balance that idea of we're all going to shift everything about how we work? We're all going to end up in these ways of working that we've never done before. That generally don't lead to like highly conclusive results and yet still operate within those constraints. I'm mystified by this. It's amazing. I love it.
Chris Strahl [00:32:30]:
And I'm just really curious, like, what was the unlock for you that made it so that everybody was able to still get stuff done despite the major upheaval of everything around them?
Noelle Lansford [00:32:39]:
Yeah, Forrest, do you kind of wanna talk about the breaking point? 'Cause you and I were both part of this and it was around typography and we learned a lot about typography stuff, but there was a critical point and, and it was happening with color. And so typography was really the round 2 of what we had learned with color. And it was just like handoffs weren't going to cut it. And that sounds obvious in a way, but it's like, no, we just need to be on a call with our engineers to get this done. Not out of micromanaging, but just to communicate properly.
Forrest Akemann [00:33:05]:
Yeah, that's right. And even sometimes when we were on a call with our engineers, communication failed, right? So I think it was top of mind that we were all trying to achieve this one goal. Engineers and designers, they were like, we will put in the work. We are willing to stay up late. We are willing to work longer than we need to or than we should to make this happen. Typography was a really good example of something that didn't go as planned. Color, relatively, we had good adoption. It was very well received.
Forrest Akemann [00:33:33]:
And typography was not. We were augmenting two typography systems. We had a Hawaiian Airlines system that had a little bit moreâ I don't want to say more expressive because that's not the appropriate term, but there was some larger sizing. There was some things that that we really didn't have on the Alaska side. And so for us, we had to augment those systems. And on top of that, we wanted to implement a fluid typography system that in our Figma, in what we were referencing in Figma, was there. And we got pretty far into this process and then realized this had actually never been implemented in code. So this is going to be a completely net new thing.
Forrest Akemann [00:34:11]:
We had to go through multiple iterations of how to actually create a really solid typography system that was fluid based on viewport size and that was responsive to the brand. And we ended up being able to accomplish it, but it took a lot of work from a lot of people to make that happen. And communication throughout the whole thing was absolutely key to making it happen.
Noelle Lansford [00:34:32]:
Especially on the product side too. It was one thing to get it right on the design system, but what really threw us for a loop was our engineers were going similar to what Forrest and I were doing, sitting in with designers on design files and working through how to get all this stuff on the newest stuff from the design system. The engineers were doing that too. Forrest and I started hopping in those calls too, where it was like engineer mid-implementation, like one of our design system engineers going into a product space and being like, man, I don't see how this is going to work either. And all of us going, man, this isn't going to work, we need to fix this. I don't know, that was kind of the beauty of it is we all got to see that firsthand. I think it really built a trust between the design system teams and the product teams because consumers of like, no, our team is here for us and we're going to have to fix this because we're all here trying to do this one thing. Yeah.
Chris Strahl [00:35:20]:
Well, I mean, it sounds like you cared, right? I think that that's one of the things that's always funny, right? Is me coming from the engineering side, there was always this inevitable, well, just because it works in Photoshop or Figma, it doesn't necessarily mean it works on the internet. And then likewise, hey, you know, that thing you made is ugly. And so, you know, you get kind of like either side of that coin. And it was very easy as an engineer to be like, eh, not my job to make it pretty. Or from a designer to be like, well, not my job to make it work on the internet. Being able to say like you blended those things where it didn't really matter exactly what your skillset was. You were all trying to be on that same team.
Noelle Lansford [00:35:57]:
Yeah. And the thing with the Figma typography too, that was so weird is it was a classic case of tooling problems, right? And I'm sure people have had this exact same scenario where Forrest and I were both kind of new to the team and the people that set up the Figma had a really good reason for setting it up the way they did, it's super smart, it's super easy to use for designers. And we went into it with the incorrect assumption that it was set up that way in code. We thought we were all on the same page, you know, our engineering teams had seen it and all this, but somehow we all still missed each other on engineers being like, well, you know, it looks right. I think that's right. And then, you know, us being like, okay, we're going to do it this way then. And then once you get into the product code, you're like, wait, this isn't it.
Chris Strahl [00:36:40]:
That's not it.
Noelle Lansford [00:36:41]:
This isn't it at all. Yeah.
Chris Strahl [00:36:42]:
So maybe that's our third axiom. Is like try to test those assumptions.
Noelle Lansford [00:36:46]:
Yeah, totally. And really pressure test those assumptions because, you know, I think we were all in the vein of moving fast. It's easy to not pressure test those things, but from our experience, you know, the worst time to pressure test it is in the live product. And you still get it done, but man, it's hard to do it that way.
Chris Strahl [00:37:06]:
The great part about this conversation is you two are obviously friends, largely as a result of the work that you've done together on this, you really know each other and you really know each other deeply in a way that I can tell just by listening to you all talk. When you think about getting there and that moment where you felt that sense of success, that glide where you were like, hey, we're gonna do this, we're gonna make it. What are the things that immediately came to mind for both of you? And then what did you think of next? And the reason why I ask it in this particular way is I wanna understand what that moment of success really felt like for you. And then what did you immediately say, like, this is the next thing to do?
Forrest Akemann [00:37:43]:
For me, I think that moment of success was when we started to see actual web pages and we started to see them first in Figma and then starting to see them live on the site. For me, that was awesome because this is this thing that we had been working on for a long time, a short amount of time, but a long time to us.
Noelle Lansford [00:38:04]:
A lifetime in 10 months.
Forrest Akemann [00:38:05]:
Yeah. Yeah. So for me, it was really that. Actually seeing things, you know, when I was traveling, seeing advertisements, that was really cool. I mean, I didn't have a part in designing those ads or anything like that, but that was great. And then what's next is just because we have hit this milestone doesn't mean that we're done. We still need to continue to iterate, to optimize. New things will come up.
Forrest Akemann [00:38:29]:
So for me, it was really trying to create the best experience for our design consumers. It's an evolving process. It doesn't stop.
Noelle Lansford [00:38:38]:
Yeah, I think it's similar. There was a specific time the whole team flew out to Seattle. There was a couple times we flew it to Seattle. The first time, like I mentioned, we're all just staring at the deadline. The advertisements were the deadline and we're all like, okay, we're gonna have to do this. And then several on-sites in, you see the Atmos Rewards billboard and you're like, we did it. That's it. You see the airport gates, you see the kiosks, you're in the experience., and you're navigating with the app, you're buying tickets to get out there on the site that you helped do, and you're like, this is it, this is what it's about, this is the celebration.
Noelle Lansford [00:39:13]:
And I think that was a really cool thing. Being users of the thing that you're working on is just, uh, absolute pleasure. The thing that Forrest and I talked a lot about was like, man, we did a lot of this by hand. That's the other part, right? We did so much of this by hand and by talking to people and all of these things, and I don't think you can really replace that. But there was a lot of opportunities to kind of up the tooling, right? Like I know the big conversation on that onsite when we had done everything with our engineering team was like, what's next? Like, how do we automate this? How do we make this thing a machine that becomes more mature? Because what was most important was getting things out to the users and making it a good experience for our design system consumers. A lot at the expense for things being very, very manual for the design system team. And that was kind of the next thing on the mind is just like, Hey, we've got this experience. How do we make our lives easier on the design system team while still supporting that innovation for the customer? Forest is already leading the charge on a lot of that work at Alaska Hawaiian right now.
Noelle Lansford [00:40:15]:
And it's super cool to hear the team actually doing that vision that we had right there at the end of the project.
Chris Strahl [00:40:21]:
Well, I just want to say remarkable job to both of you. It's an incredible endeavor and an amazing journey that you've both been on. It's awesome to see such a great outcome. So it's a, just an incredible story.
Noelle Lansford [00:40:33]:
Thanks. Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Chris.
Forrest Akemann [00:40:35]:
Thanks, Chris.
Chris Strahl [00:40:36]:
Awesome. Well, hey, this has been The Patterns Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strahl. It's been great to chat with you all. Have a good day, everybody. Hey everyone, thanks for listening to The Patterns Podcast. You can reach us on LinkedIn using the link in the show notes. The Patterns Podcast is brought to you by Knapsack, the intelligent product engine helping teams design, build, and deliver digital products at the pace of ideas.
Chris Strahl [00:40:56]:
Learn more at knapsack.cloud.
