The Reset
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Southwest's first-ever reduction in force, in February 2025, barely touched my own team directly — the real shift happened above me, over the months that followed. A new director arrived to lead Digital Design and Research, a newly formed department built specifically around design, and I made the case to her plainly: our process had become slow and entirely manual, and we'd been forced to scale the system without any real support to document or onboard people efficiently. She listened. A few months later, the Director of Digital Experience I'd spent years building the original design-system case with moved into a new role, and the group got its first-ever VP of Digital.
That's what finally got me room to evaluate real tools instead of patching around the gap.