Digital Product Manager, Design Ops · Southwest Airlines
Vision Decommission
Southwest Airlines has operated through multiple design language generations. Vision — the design language that preceded Heart DS — is in active retirement as teams migrate surfaces to HDS. The Vision Decommission work is the ongoing effort to make that transition systematic rather than leaving it to accumulate indefinitely across the long tail of the site.
The broader problem
Large-scale design language transitions at enterprise organizations almost always stall. The initial push ships the marquee surfaces, but dozens of lower-priority pages tend to linger in the previous generation — each one creating maintenance overhead for design and engineering. The goal here is to make finishing actually achievable, not just planned.
Exploring AI tooling
In late 2025, the team ran a limited experiment using Kiro — an AI-assisted development tool — to explore whether AI could accelerate design migration work. The experiment was scoped intentionally: a small set of surfaces to test the approach before committing to it at scale. The work was team-led, and the insights from the experiment are informing how we think about tooling for the next phase.
Scope and current state
The Vision Decommission effort is ongoing and deliberately scoped to stay manageable. Rather than trying to address everything at once, the approach is to identify and prioritize migrations systematically, work through them in focused cycles, and track the reduction in Vision coverage over time. Progress is incremental but directional.
What finishing looks like
The end goal is retiring Vision's codebase entirely — eliminating the cost of running two design languages in parallel across design, engineering, and QA. One language, one system, one source of truth.