Senior Manager, Product Design

Wayfinder.
Change-maker.
Team builder.

With over 15 years of experience, I transform design teams from feeling stuck to reaching their full potential. At companies such as Walmart, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, and DirecTV, I inspire teams to discover new possibilities and chart a course forward, even when the way ahead is uncertain. My mission is to leave a lasting, positive impact everywhere I contribute.

Connect on LinkedIn iamtrestewart@gmail.com →
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Who I am

Design leadership is a people problem wearing a product hat.

◎ FTE Most Innovative Airline Initiative — Smart Ramp, Alaska Airlines, 2025
✦ Webby Award — Best Mobile User Interface — Walmart Website & App, 2022

I'm Tre — a senior design leader with deep experience in consumer identity systems, large-scale operational platforms, and the hardest design challenge of all: building the culture that makes great work possible.

My work sits at the intersection of strategy and craft. I don't just manage teams — I shape the conditions that let designers do the best work of their careers. That means asking "should we?" before "can we," going to the tarmac when the office has the wrong answer, and advocating for a designer with the VP before they've done a single thing to earn it.

When the path isn't clear, I find it. When the team is stuck, I unstick it. When the product needs to earn trust from real people in real, high-stakes moments — I know how to design for that.

◎
Strategic thinker
Connects design decisions to business outcomes before anyone asks.
◈
People-first coach
Invested in every person's growth — not just the output they ship.
⬡
Systems builder
Builds practices and processes that outlast any single project.
◇
Culture shaper
Creates environments where curiosity and accountability coexist.
⊙
Calm in chaos
The person you want in the room when stakes are high and answers aren't clear.

Experience

15+ years across

Alaska Airlines Walmart American Airlines AT&T / DirecTV

Voices

Leadership in practice

The work only matters if people can move with it. A few notes from partners who have seen the method up close.

Sarah Chen

Director of Product, Walmart

Tre has a rare ability to bring clarity to ambiguous problems. He aligns teams quickly, raises the quality bar, and creates momentum where others stall.

Marcus Reed

Senior Engineering Manager, Alaska Airlines

What stood out most was how fast Tre earned trust with frontline teams. He listens deeply, then turns insight into action.

Nina Patel

Principal Designer, American Airlines

Tre leads with calm confidence. He gives teams direction without ego and creates the kind of environment where great work happens.

Work

Three chapters. Each one answers a different question a hiring manager might have about whether I can lead.

Walmart phone verification flow
01 Walmart Consumer Identity
Friction was the right answer
Phone verification cut account creation 40% — and net GMV per account went up 56%. That's not a contradiction. That's the product.

The problem

Walmart's identity platform when I joined as Principal Product Designer: 100M+ active users, verified phones at 11M of a 52M goal, and $180M+ in annual losses from fraud and account abuse. 15% of accounts had non-deliverable email addresses. Bots were hitting account creation to exploit Walmart+ trial memberships. Three separate product organizations were building identity solutions with no shared architecture.

The number that grounded everything: 11M verified phones, 52M needed. That gap was the shape of the problem.

My action

Product said phone verification at account creation would add friction. They were right — it cut account creation 40%. But they were wrong about whether friction was bad.

I designed a controlled test: mandatory OTP phone verification at account creation against a no-verification control, up to 50% of web traffic over eight days, then 100%. The hypothesis: we'd lose volume but gain quality. We tracked both.

The question we couldn't answer without data: were the accounts we were losing actually valuable? If we filtered out 40% of account creation, what was in that 40%?

Impact — verified phones grew from 11M to 52M+

+56%
Net GMV per account
$75 → $117 per year
+136%
Contribution profit per account
$0.58 → $1.37
$8.4M
Annualized contribution
profit increase
−64%
Account takeover
bad-count rate

What I'd do differently

A 40% account creation drop sounds catastrophic in a headline. It took extra stakeholder work — after we'd seen the data — to explain why fewer, better accounts was the right outcome. If I ran it again, I'd align on success metric definition with executive stakeholders before launch, not during the readout. Get explicit buy-in that "fewer, better accounts" is a valid win condition before anyone sees the 40% drop and reacts to the headline number. The data was right. The setup for the data wasn't.

RAMP dashboard — Alaska Airlines cargo operations
02 Alaska Airlines Operational Tools
Deployment isn't adoption
We replaced 18-year-old handheld scanners with a mobile app and rolled out to 17+ stations in one quarter. Then we found out those are two different problems — and built the instrumentation to close the gap.

The problem

RAMP processes 18M+ baggage scans annually across Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines. The platform replacing it — RSA Mobile, 18-year-old hardware that took weeks or months to update — had no telemetry. No way to know if agents were using a feature, struggling with it, or working around it entirely.

We shipped RAMP Upload and deployed to 17+ stations by November 2025. Then we looked at the data: stations like Anchorage and San Diego had devices deployed, the app installed, and adoption lagging. We were measuring whether we'd shipped. We weren't measuring whether it was working. Those are different questions, and we didn't have the instrumentation to answer the second one.

My action

Two moves in parallel. First, I made adoption instrumentation non-negotiable — not a post-launch add-on, but part of what "shipped" means. Pendo gave us daily active users, station-level usage patterns, and where agents were dropping off. Once we could see the gaps, we used in-app guides to deliver workflow guidance in context at the worst-adoption stations.

Second, I built a split-flag rollout discipline: Boise first, Denver next, then system-wide. The legacy platform required weeks to push a single fix. RAMP Upload gave us same-day hotfix capability. I built the release process to use it responsibly.

Anchorage wasn't failing because agents disliked the app. They weren't getting clear guidance on the new workflow at the moment they needed it. In-app guides fixed that without requiring retraining sessions or manager intervention.

Impact — RSA Mobile is retired. RAMP Upload runs 58 stations.

+131%
Informational scanning
across RAMP system
+400%
Bags scanned
at Anchorage
+75%
Agent adoption at
challenging stations
−28min
Weekly flight delay
minutes (253 → 182)

What I'd do differently

We added adoption instrumentation after the rollout was already in motion. That's the wrong order. Pendo should have been part of the launch definition from day one — what "live at a station" means should have included active user tracking, not as a follow-on. And when Anchorage went from near-zero to 400% improvement, those agents deserved to hear: here's what you did, here's what it changed. We measured the outcome and moved on. That's a missed chance to reinforce the behavior and build trust for the next change we ask them to make.

The solo presentation
03 Alaska Airlines People Leadership
The lid is off
A designer transferred to my team with three flags on his record: not proactive, struggles with ambiguity, risk-averse. Five months later he was presenting solo in the executive suite — and the managing director was asking follow-up questions.

What I inherited

When he transferred to my cargo team in November, the read from his previous manager was clear: not proactive, struggles with ambiguity, risk-averse. His PM said he'd surface an opportunity and he'd sit on it. When requirements weren't defined, he'd freeze.

I listened. I wrote it down. And then I went to see what I actually thought.

What I found was more specific: he'd come from a team dynamic that had gradually worn down his confidence. He had the skills. He was reading the room to decide if using them was worth it. Before I could ask him to take more risk, he needed evidence this environment responded differently.

The sequence that mattered

Six weeks in, before he'd done anything to earn my advocacy, I was in a 1:1 with our VP calling out what product was doing wrong. They'd put him on ULD domain work before he'd been onboarded into the domain and were wondering why he wasn't driving. I raised it directly. He found out about that conversation later.

Before I asked for different behavior, I made a deposit. The coaching doesn't start with the behavior you're trying to change. It starts with the environment.

From there: frequent predictable 1:1s (not check-ins — access). One concrete target at a time. Supervised field visits to SeaTac cargo ops, then independent ones. When he was supposed to own a room, I stopped contributing and sent coaching notes after — because once I take the floor back, there's no clean way to return it in the same meeting.

Where he landed — March 31, executive review

5 mo.
November to
executive presentation
Solo
Presented to MD of
product & design
3
Designers he now
coordinates as IROPS lead

He presented the cargo upload workflow to Alaska's managing director of product and design — field observations, process maps, design decisions, error handling, agent testing feedback, Q2 roadmap. The MD was engaged throughout, asking precise process-level questions, offering refinements. His overall read: "This is great." Six months earlier, this was a designer who was nervous presenting to his own PM. The manager who handed him to me pulled me aside that same week: "They feel coached, supported."

What I'd do differently

The observation period ran two months before I named a concrete goal — and that had a cost. Product was bypassing him, the passivity was calcifying, and I was still reading the situation. Three or four weeks of signal is enough to name a gap and give someone one thing to practice. That timeline cost him. I also didn't pull his PM into the coaching loop early enough. She was seeing the same patterns, and a short conversation in November would have given him consistent signals from two directions at once.

Let's
talk.

If you're building a design team that needs to find its footing — or one that's ready to do the best work of its life — I'd love to be in that conversation.

Connect on LinkedIn iamtrestewart@gmail.com →