Digital Product Manager, Design Ops · Southwest Airlines
IFE Starlink Portal
Known internally as Project Firework, the Southwest inflight Wi-Fi portal is the experience customers encounter when they connect to the T-Mobile-powered Starlink network on their own phones, tablets, and laptops during a Southwest flight. This isn't a seatback entertainment system — it's a lightweight, device-agnostic portal designed to work on whatever the passenger brought onboard.
Context
Inflight Wi-Fi portals occupy a specific and often underserved design space. They run in a constrained environment — browser-based, on hardware the team doesn't control, in a connectivity context that ranges from smooth to unreliable. Customers arrive at the portal with a simple goal: get online. The design job is to get out of their way.
The Design Ops lens
This project was a Design Ops effort, not a solo one. The team brought Heart DS components and patterns to bear on a product context that had its own constraints: varied device sizes, limited session context, and the need to work in both light and dark conditions depending on cabin lighting. My role was to guide the design direction, manage the team's work, and ensure the approach held together across those variables.
Heart DS in a new environment
Bringing HDS to the portal was an opportunity to validate the system in yet another product context beyond the core southwest.com surfaces. It confirmed that the token architecture and component library could flex to a stripped-down, portal-style experience without losing coherence — useful signal for future products that live at the edges of the Southwest digital ecosystem.
Outcome
The Starlink portal launched in Q4 2025 as part of Southwest's T-Mobile inflight connectivity rollout. It gave passengers a cleaner, more intentional first touchpoint when connecting inflight, and gave the design system team another real-world proof point for HDS beyond the web.