5 Product lessons from 4 amazing years at Booking.com | Evie Brockwell

I can’t believe I’m finishing a 4 year stint in Product at Booking.com. Time really has flown, but I have learnt more than I ever imagined and for anyone that knows — one of my favourite things to do is to take a step back and reflect on achievements and lessons..

I thought my biggest learnings would be around AB testing and conversion rate optimisation and that has been a huge part of it, but the company and amazing people that I have worked with taught me so much more.

So here’s some top take aways that should be useful to a lot of people in the product world.

1. Product / development teams are at their best when they have collective responsibility

When a lot of people start their product journey, they feel responsible for everything. They need to generate ideas, figure out the roadmap, assess metrics, write tickets, make sure delivery happens on time.

Often you can feel like you need to do all of this to add value, to not block the team. But here’s the truth. Product managers are not super heroes. We just can’t do it all.

In fact, we can offer so much more value when we’re not doing it all.

When we have: the capacity to think longer term and understand the direction of the product, understand our customers and the business strategy, and take a step back to understand the route cause of anything preventing the team from working at their optimum — that’s when we deliver the magic.

So how do you achieve this?

You need to work as a team. Everyone is responsible for doing the above & also very capable of doing an amazing job in all of these areas.

The best ways to start doing this with a team are:

1. Setting expectations for what needs to happen and how everyone can contribute
2. Highlighting the value of working as a collective
3. Making sure that everyone understands and buys into the product direction so they can contribute
4. Run workshops so the whole team can understand data and story writing etc
5. Get the teams input for how they think everyone can best achieve these tasks
6. Start taking a step back from these tasks, allow the team to learn and allow yourself time to free yourself up and focus on some of the other areas

I’m so lucky and grateful to have worked with the most amazing discovery / development teams that can turn their hand to anything & supported me and showed me the value of working in this way.

I truly believe that by working as a collective we make the best decisions, have the best team atmosphere, enjoy sharing our purpose and deliver the best results to the customer.

2. Product led strategy can be so effective

I moved from what was traditionally more of a commercially run business to one that was more product driven. It was eye opening to see the difference that this makes.

Being product led, typically means being customer led.

We start everything with the customer. What are they telling us? What is the data telling us? What is and isn’t working for their experience?

The tactics we use to improve their experience go beyond the website. We focus on supply, product offering, marketing, pricing, information, overall customer experience.

Product managers can be so effective in understanding and quantifying an opportunity and then working with the right teams to generate the best ways to solve this.

When product led strategy is done correctly, it covers all of these areas, gets the right teams brought in & has the ability to execute effectively by iterating and validating that concepts are right along the way.

This means that:

1. Everything is customer focussed to deliver the most value
2. All areas of the experience are covered
3. A great solution is delivered to the customer and proven through data

This leads me to the next topic.

3. Product discovery…

Product discovery has so many different elements & I’ve learnt so much about where you can get value.

The best way to carry out discovery is to start with insights to see where you should focus, then continuously validate your thoughts and ideas.

Insight can be generated from many different areas:

• Conversations with customers
• Data
• Usability testing
• Customer tracking tools
• Surveys
• Internal ideas
• Customer contacts

Anywhere that you observe anything about your website is an insight. Some of these insights are barely validated ie. one comment from one customer and others have so much supporting evidence — you might be seeing the same patterns through loads of these insight points.

The key thing in product discovery is to stay open to what you are seeing — use this to be able to validate or change your direction & continuously be learning. Each time you get a new insight, test something or have a new customer base, you want to be adding this evidence to your insight pool.

Assumptions exist in all of our thinking until we validate them at scale (and even then there are still some assumptions baked in), so try to remove as many as possible.

Discovery is again the most effective when carried out as a team. Everyone on the team can add value and a different lens to thoughts.

It’s also the most effective when you use a range of techniques & speak to real customers that have real intent. This is when you can truly get to the bottom of customers thought patterns and desires and how you can create the best experience for them.

I’ve again been lucky enough to work with some amazingly talented researchers, designers, analysts & development teams that share the same passion for getting to the bottom of what customers really need and assessing the best range of techniques and ways of reaching customers to achieve this. I’ve learnt so much from so many along the way.

4. to be truly successful in your execution, you need To focus on validation During Delivery

When you validate your solution as you build, and are open to the insight you’re seeing, you give yourself the freedom to iterate and ensure you deliver the best end product to your customers.

Some product development teams are still stuck in a tricky place of operating through agile waterfall techniques.

They already know a whole project that they’re going to build and how they’re going to build this & don’t factor in too much time for learning and changing this. Instead, they just slice up the deliverables to deliver incremental value.

One of the key things that I’ve been able to nail time and time again — with thanks to support and help from experts in XP practises and minimising risk in agile projects, is how to break a concept down to its thinnest slice that will help you to validate something.

This could be through:

• User testing
• Intent tests
• A dummy concept
• An ‘MVP’ or thin vertical slice that delivers value to the customer
• AB testing tweaks to a current concept

Whichever techniques you use, make sure these actually serve as a checkpoint to reevaluate your approach.

If you see success, build on it.

If you see failure, you can understand a lot from learning why.

If your results are flat — assess if this hypotheses / opportunity / problem you are solving will really add that much value to your customer.

Agile is the most effective when used to help validate, add value early and know when to stop and change direction.

& finally, I can’t not talk about:

5. CRO (or product optimisation)

CRO is always a hot topic. Driving conversion uplifts can be so powerful and can allow you to reinvest in the business and increase marketing spend.

But.. it’s not all about conversion. Savvy businesses care about the long term value of the customer. We look at several metrics: cancellations, contacts, NPS, overall margin per visit — taking into account the profitability of different channels and upsells / basket value — not just bookings.

By optimising for multiple angles, you can truly serve your customer (and the business in the best way).

This allows a flexible approach based on what is the most important factor to the business and where the most value can be driven. You might be focussed on acquisition and growing traffic, or you might be focussed on retention.

All of these factors can be optimised for & all can be AB tested. I’ve been fortunate enough to work on a wide range of projects and be able to assess the value of different initiatives and prioritise these accordingly.

Once you know your tactics and metrics, there are so many sites that can help with understanding different types of variant testing and how to measure confidence, risk and success. Using these techniques helps you stay true to well formed hypotheses and move your product in the right direction.

There are often common techniques that can help add value to your website and remove blockers from booking / help customers to find the best products for them.

A customer on your website is one that is interested in your product — it’s your job to help them purchase this as easily as possible.

I feel insanely grateful to have worked for a company that is so advanced and could test (and would test) almost everything we put live with a variety of metrics to make sure we’re doing the right things long term for our customers and the business. This means I have learnt so much about the most common patterns that work for e-commerce businesses, and also the ones that you expect to work but often fail.

This is just a tiny insight into all of the things that I learnt and ways in which I developed over the last four years. I’m so glad I had so many positive people that took the time to teach me and great leaders and product thinkers that I can learn from and look to to naturally develop and refine my techniques and bounce my ideas off. It really is a great environment to excel.

If anyone would like to know more — then I am on hand to offer product advice and help companies grow their online sales — drop me a message on LinkedIn.

Originally published at https://eviebrockwell.com on August 12, 2021.