Kidnap & Ransom

Kidnap-and-ransom protection is one of the hardest things in the world to sell. It’s traditionally brokered, not bought — an opaque insurance product that forces the buyer to picture the worst day of their life before they’ve even seen a price. Global Rescue wanted to offer it differently: as a self-serve upgrade any member could understand, evaluate, and add themselves. That meant designing the entire journey, not just a page.

The work reframes the category before it sells anything. K&R here isn’t a payout — it’s ‘Prevention & Response,’ a service with people behind it. The marketing page leads with expertise (FBI crisis-negotiation experience, a global intelligence network), lays out a clear five-step response model, and draws an explicit contrast with traditional carriers on the things that actually matter under duress: advisory access, privacy, and who’s leading the response.

Across four screens, an intimidating, high-anxiety purchase becomes a calm, self-serve upgrade — without ever pretending the stakes are small.

Designing the flow was the smaller half of the job. Taking a new security service to market meant standing up and running the launch program around it: seventeen workstreams across three phases, spanning member-services training, engineering, web, lifecycle marketing, direct mail, paid media, video, partner enablement, and content. I built and own the road map — scoping each workstream, assigning an accountable owner, estimating effort, sequencing the phases against a fixed launch date, and mapping the dependencies that actually govern it. Pricing gates checkout and the upgrade flow. Engineering capacity gates the training platform. The landing page gates every paid channel pointed at it.

Two decisions from that plan say more about how I lead than the org chart does. The training resource sits on the critical path with an uncertain engineering window, so it ships with a full PDF version as a deliberate backstop — if the interactive build slips, members still get the entire resource on day one and the launch date holds. And while reviewing the tier comparison table, I found its check and cross markers were invisible to screen readers and to search and AI crawlers, meaning assistive technology and AI assistants could misreport what each tier actually includes. On the table that defines what someone is buying, that is not a cosmetic bug. Both are the same instinct: find the thing that quietly breaks later, and fix it while it is still cheap.