Features

Up, up and away!

British flight search aggregator and travel agency Skyscanner has its eyes set on becoming a globally recognised brand. Its director and global head of brand design ops, Carla Sandhu, sits downs with Transform editor Jack Cousins at Paradigms brand summit in Marrakesh. The pair talk about how to scale up an in-house design team, how creativity can be maximised and what’s on the horizon for Skyscanner’s in-house studio.

How did your experiences of scaling Snook’s design team from 12 to 100 staff inform your leadership and operational approach?

Carla: When I was at Snook, I worked closely with the founder and managing director through a challenging acquisition by a much more traditional and hierarchical tech company that was owned by a Japanese parent organisation. It was a difficult process for everyone involved.

What I took from that experience was the importance of translation and buffering as a leader. Designers and creators don’t necessarily need – or want – to be caught up in corporate complexity. What they care about is having the clarity, space and support to do great work under often tight deadlines. My role was to interpret what was happening at leadership level in a way that was meaningful to them, and at the same time protect them from unnecessary noise so they could focus on delivery.

I also learned that different kinds of designers have different perspectives and needs. For example, brand designers and product designers approach challenges very differently, and part of leading at scale was about flexing my communication and leadership style to resonate with each group.

What were the brand operations like at Skyscanner when you first joined, and how have you sought to evolve them over the past three years?

Carla: The brand operations when I joined were fit for the team that we had at the time and the type of work that was coming in. They had what was called ‘Skills Complete’ teams where people sat in teams that had a producer, a designer, a writer and they mostly were just doing decks for execs – things like that. It was absolutely fit for purpose at the time, but I saw, along with Ross Mawdsley, our global head of visual design, and Andre Le Masurier, our global head of brand and creative, the need to really strip that apart. Instead, we moved to a model where we assign people based on their skill sets, and it's Ross that tells me who should be working on a project, not a producer. It’s because he knows the designers inside out and I think it’s meant we really have the best people on the projects.

Are there particular frameworks or tools you’ve introduced?

Carla: One of the key things we introduced was time tracking. It fills people with dread, but it’s essential for understanding how long work actually takes and ensuring we’re focusing our effort on the most strategic opportunities. We also set up a weekly resourcing meeting, where we allocate work based on people’s skills and capacity – it’s very similar to an agency model.

That said, I’m not overly prescriptive about how producers run their projects. I don’t believe in process for the sake of process. I’ve seen plenty of beautifully designed frameworks that teams spend weeks agreeing on, only for them never to be used. Instead, we deliberately keep our processes to the bare minimum – just enough to give structure – and then trust people to deliver in the way that works best for them within that framework.

What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced at Skyscanner?

Carla: Coming from an agency background, I was a bit naive about how hard cross-department collaboration can be in a large tech organisation. In an agency, no matter how chaotic things get, everyone is ultimately aligned around one goal: getting the client’s work out the door.

At Skyscanner, it was different. Teams had their own roadmaps and priorities, and it’s not that people weren’t unwilling to collaborate – it’s that they’re balancing competing asks from different leaders and stakeholders. My big realisation was that alignment doesn’t come automatically in a scaling tech company; you have to actively invest in building relationships, creating shared context and negotiating priorities. That’s been one of the steepest but most valuable parts of the learning curve for me.

What’s the ultimate aim for Skyscanner’s in-house studio?

Carla: I think, as a business, we want to become the world's number one travel ally. But internally, as a creative team, we want to increase our influence across the business so that we can raise the level of taste and quality of the work that's going out. In the age of AI, it’s very easy for creative quality to become diluted. Our role is to make sure the brand stays distinctive and high quality, while still giving people the freedom to experiment and try new things.

What’s one piece of advice you would give to someone trying to start an in-house design agency, or trying to scale up an existing one?

Carla: Don't be afraid to ask for what you need to do your job well. I think when I started at Snook, we were running things very, very lean. It can be hard in an agency – the margins are not always that high – but I probably sacrificed quality sometimes because I didn't just speak up and say what I needed to do the job well.