The Product Lesson Behind a Picture-Worthy Escalator

It’s not often that someone sends you a picture of themselves going up an escalator.

But put a massive, 56-foot-tall kinetic golden sculpture in front of that escalator and suddenly the experience becomes picture worthy.

This sculpture is one of the first things you see as you enter Royal Caribbean's terminal in Miami. When I first saw it in person, it immediately caught my attention. I took a picture, thought for a moment that its placement seemed a little odd, and quickly moved on as I searched for my boarding pass and passport.

A year later, someone sent me almost the exact same picture as they were going through the terminal. This time, I stopped and thought about it.

Why do so many people feel inclined to take a picture at this particular moment?

The obvious answer is that it's a cool picture of something unexpected.

But I think there's something deeper happening.

What originally seemed like an odd place for this massive sculpture now feels like a stroke of creative genius.

To understand why, I started asking myself two questions:

What is this experience communicating to the traveler? And what about it makes the moment feel worthy of capturing?

I came away with a few observations.

1. It immediately validates the customer's decision.

You haven't even stepped onto the cruise ship yet and Royal Caribbean has already taken something as mundane as riding an escalator and made it memorable.

There's a subtle message in that: We care about the experience, even here.

For someone who just spent thousands of dollars on a vacation, that's a pretty good feeling to create before the trip has even started.

2. Gold communicates premium before anyone says the word premium.

Imagine the exact same sculpture in bronze.

It would still be impressive, but it wouldn't feel quite the same.

The gold finish reinforces the idea of luxury and helps reassure the traveler that they chose a more premium experience and are going to get something for the additional money they spent.

3. Its enormous scale previews what you're about to experience.

Royal Caribbean builds enormous ships filled with enormous attractions.

Before you've even seen the ship, you're standing underneath something massive.

The environment is already telling you: this is going to be big.

4. The movement makes the experience feel effortless.

There's also something interesting about experiencing the sculpture while you're moving. You aren't standing in front of it in a museum. An escalator is literally carrying you toward it, past it, and eventually toward the ship. Meanwhile, the sculpture itself is moving smoothly above you. The entire moment feels choreographed. You're no longer checking into a terminal. You're being carried into the beginning of the experience.

And that distinction matters. Try removing the sculpture entirely. Picture the same escalator, the same walls and the same terminal—but nothing hanging above you. The functional experience is identical. Yet emotionally, it is completely different. That's what I find most interesting about this.

Royal Caribbean made a deliberate decision to put something enormous, golden and constantly moving at one of the earliest transition points in the customer journey.

The easiest metric to observe might be that thousands of people take pictures of it.

But “people take pictures here” isn't the insight.

And asking someone, “Why did you take that picture?” might not get you there either. They'll probably tell you, “because it looked cool.”

The deeper product question is:

What characteristics of the experience made it feel worth capturing in the first place?

That's an important distinction for product leaders. Data can tell us what people did. Customers can often tell us what they consciously noticed. But some of the most valuable product insights come from understanding the motivations and emotions underneath those behaviors. When you learn to operate at that level, seemingly ordinary moments—a click, a hesitation, a screenshot, a picture on an escalator—can tell you

much more than what appears on the surface.

And those are often the insights that lead to better product decisions.

Special shoutout to Shreya Doshi, whose product sense course helped teach me how, when and what questions to ask to make this type of thinking a much more repeatable process.