Have you held a leadership role responsible for significantly growing a b2c product (e.g., increasing app downloads/installs, driving daily/weekly/monthly active users, growing subscribers)? Can you briefly describe that role, your responsibilities, and your impact?
I joined Booking.com as one of its first UX Designers in 2013, when the Tech Department was only 300 people. By the time I left we were near 4,000 in Tech globally (Tech/Product were one org). I focused on the B2C side through half of that time, and later on the B2B. As a Designer, my quantitative results were focused on different metrics (conversions, moving down a funnel, etc), where we measured impact through the in-house multivariate A/B testing tool. I was also a Team Lead on the B2C side, but that was people management. on the B2B side we were focused on increasing app downloads through improving the baseline product and accelerating Time to Value (TTV) for product teams to move quicker from idea -> live experimentation -> adding value to customers, with significant improvement.
So, explicitly: no. With the examples given, my responsibilities weren't directly tied to such metrics. However, I am familiar with them and would bring the same rigor of data influenced decision making and collaborative mission to get that done.
Can you give me us a brief example of a long-term strategy or product direction you led that had measurable business impact?
Booking.com was undergoing multiple transformations and pivots over the course of a couple of years (from hotel reservation company -> into non-hotel accommodation bookings -> towards booking full travel experiences). Our product at the time—Pulse, the hotel management app—needed to be redeveloped to handle the change of breadth & depth as it had reached its local maximum, designed exclusively for hotels and not diverse range of accommodations being onboarded. As the B2B accommodations platform product development director, we facilitated that transition across different technologies/times, that contributed to the company's growth, through improvement of self service and alignment of property/management needs.
Tell us about a time you had to get buy-in for a major product decision or strategy that faced pushback. What was your approach?
It's happened quite a few times. One approach was to do it anyway with the investment/resources I already had, under temporary projects (this was for a Copy Experimentation Tool that enabled Copywriters to A/B test words across the 43 languages Booking.com supports). Copy experiments continually showed to have far larger impact than more design- or developer-laborious experiments. We couldn't get investment for a team, so we looked at our organization's priorities as Localization, and put some people on it. In that case, we were able to push the strategy forward despite the lack of decisions to explicitly invest. "Scrappy resource product development" sort of approach.
All decisions we made faced pushback, because these sorts of things shouldn't be made in a silo. I also was executing a major organization change with every person in that organization pushing back. A few months later, I was able to demonstrate the lack of alignment/why the teams were pushing back that led to a departmental reorganization to better align product groups for improved collaboration & focus.