Role: Product Lead & UX Designer
Company: Qantas Loyalty
Scope: Qantas Frequent Flyer loyalty ecosystem, discovery to MLP scope
Team: 5, cross-functional discovery team
Timeframe: 7 weeks
Result: Validated value proposition, a 3M-member audience ready to engage beyond flying, and a nine-month launch plan; paused at COVID, foundation primed for relaunch

THE MOMENT
Qantas Frequent Flyer (QFF) is one of Australia's most valuable loyalty ecosystems covering travel, retail, wellness, banking, wine, and more. On paper it has everything. In loyalty members' heads, it's a program they already "know", until they stumble on a benefit they'd been missing all along, and the feeling turns from pride to why didn't anyone tell me?.

That was the problem hiding inside the breadth of the program. It was so large that even savvy members overlooked or forgot what they were entitled to. Complexity read as effort, effort read as disengagement, and a loyalty program that isn't used is a liability with a nice name.

We were brought in for seven weeks to find the lever. In discovery we named it "the Grow lever" and set a single mission: get members to use their points sooner by demystifying the program, helping them discover just one more thing that moved them closer to a reward.

THE BET

The obvious move was integrated into the travel app. We bet against it.

The evidence pointed somewhere quieter. Across data deep-dives and moderated interviews, a few behavioural truths kept surfacing: people want points earning to be effortless; they prefer passive, contextual help over tasks and research; the phone is where they already live more than 3 hours a day; and that's especially true for the roughly 3 million members earning beyond flying , the ones the travel story never really spoke to.

So the bet was a loyalty companion, not a travel app, a daily value driver for the program itself. Something that met members inside the behaviour they already had, rather than asking them to adopt a new one.

The value proposition carried the whole idea in three verbs:

• Get more out of Qantas Frequent Flyer

• Do the things you already do every day

• Go more places, sooner

And we held ourselves to DVF (desirability, viability, feasibility) so the bet had to survive more than a good story.

WHAT WE SHAPED

My QFF: a standalone Qantas mobile experience that shows you where you're missing points, tailors earn-and-redeem opportunities, reveals value in the ecosystem you already use, and connects other Qantas services at the right moment. Not a new place to go, the central entry point to the loyalty ecosystem, with smart linking out to the services that support it.

We got there in five rapid sprints:

1. Immersion, problem framing, and mapping the critical assumptions.

2. Hypotheses and desirability experiments.

3. Concept co-creation and experience frameworks.

4. Working prototypes for earn and redeem : the journeys that won stakeholder buy-in, plus quantitative concept validation against the 3M target segment.

5. Commercial and technical feasibility: an MLP scope and a launch plan.

The signals sharpened as we went. Members wanted balance and status instantly. They responded to contextual offers tied to real behaviour. They expected shopping and deals to surface proactively, not on request. And they valued clarity on travel redemption most when they were closing in on a goal.

Img. AppStore Image used to test Value Proposition in Unmoderated Quant test

THE EVIDENCE

We validated the bet against all three faces of DVF:

• Desirability. 80% of surveyed users said they'd use the loyalty app. Around 2.4M potential users inside the 3M segment.

• Viability. Frameworks and features were weighed against the mission of redeeming sooner. The sharpest question was cannibalisation of the travel app, and we faced it head-on rather than around it.

• Feasibility. We assessed legal, operational, and technical impact before promising anything.

By week seven we had a validated value proposition, a clear 3M-member audience ready to engage beyond flying, a clickable prototype that earned stakeholder buy-in, and a path to launch in nine months rather than twelve, the higher-impact option. And a shift in ambition: from standalone offerings to the foundation for a connected loyalty ecosystem.

Then COVID-19 grounded the airline, and the product was paused. What lasted was the strategic foundation, primed for relaunch, with the hard thinking already done.