Modernizing Hertz's digital rental experience
2019-2021
Client
Hertz
The Challenge
Hertz needed to reinvent its digital customer experience across three distinct brands — Hertz, Dollar, and Thrifty — at a scale and speed its previous technology partner couldn’t sustain. Each brand needed its own visual identity and voice, but the underlying booking, account, and storefront experiences needed to move and evolve together. Without a shared system, every new feature or brand rollout risked becoming a one-off effort: slower to ship, harder to keep consistent, and more expensive to maintain.
The pressure wasn’t just technical — it was competitive. Hertz’s prior vendor had spent a year and a half attempting to deliver native mobile apps and hadn’t gotten there. Hertz needed a partner who could move faster without cutting corners on quality or brand fidelity, across web, mobile web, iOS, and Android simultaneously.
Approach
We ran the engagement using a garage methodology within an Agile framework, working in tight, continuous collaboration with Hertz’s product owners to prioritize features and reimagine the experience brand by brand. Rather than one large undifferentiated team, we organized into squads aligned to major feature sets — Digital Storefront, Reservations, and My Account — which let us build delivery efficiency and deep feature-level expertise in parallel. That structure is what let me grow from delivery lead into a trusted advisor to the Hertz team.
At the center of the engagement was a flexible, multi-brand design system, built from the start with brand and theme switching as a first-class capability rather than an afterthought. We established the system’s MVP against Hertz’s own brand, then used that foundation to spin up Dollar and Thrifty with minimal rework — preserving each brand’s distinct look and feel without rebuilding the underlying UX patterns from scratch.
Once the design system was in place, we extended it beyond desktop web into mobile web, Android, and iOS — using the same shared components and patterns to keep every touchpoint consistent as the platform grew.
Impact
800+ unique page designs delivered across the Hertz, Dollar, and Thrifty brands over the course of the engagement.
The design system’s brand and theme-switching architecture drove a 60% faster rollout of the Dollar and Thrifty web experiences compared to building each brand independently.
Native mobile apps, built on the same design system, shipped in 5 months — work the incumbent vendor had been unable to complete in a year and a half.
That delivery speed became a defining factor in the relationship, helping the team become Hertz’s partner of choice for continued digital work.
