Growing eCommerce revenue $0 to $200MM at TripAdvisor

It started with a question: The world already knows TripAdvisor as a research site, how might we harness that intent to purchase on our site to complete the transaction?

Back then in 2013, I hadn't yet built a $100+ business or a team from scratch. But, here I was, in the office of the my boss’s boss, the Global Head of Product, and being asked to do just that. The plan was to become a booking engine -  take on the biggest giants in our industry, and  beat them at their own game. It would be the CEO’s top strategic initiative and I had the feeling that if I turned this down, future prospects of career growth at TripAdvisor would be limited. These kinds of opportunities come around once or twice in a career and so without thinking too much about what it would take to truly be successful or what I would need,  I dove right in. What followed was three grueling years of building, launching and optimizing a hotel booking product that reached hundreds of millions of travelers worldwide, changed how hotels distributed their inventory online, and taught me key lessons of product leadership  inside a growing business. Over this next 4 part series, I'll outline 

1. Emulate to accelerate. 
2. Speed Wins. 
3. Accountability is a team sport.
4. Break out of your local maxima.

Lesson 1: Emulate to accelerate out of the gate. 

Building out a new product or key feature from scratch is hard. Strategically, TripAdvisor already had tremendous assets with which to build out from - a content moat, SEO expertise, ownership of top of the funnel, and an established brand that was incredibly trusted by travelers the world over. The part that was most difficult for us was changing the brand perception in the eyes of the traveler about what was possible on the site. It did not necessarily mean we had to reinvent the wheel as it related to the experience of booking a hotel. Those UX patterns were already well established by leaders such as Expedia and Booking.com. The initial hypothesis went something like this - if TripAdvisor’s new booking product experience was just as good as what travelers already expected and were comfortable with, then the sum total of the capabilities - reviews + comprehensive price search + booking would be greater than the sum of the parts. 

This is a common approach - Facebook’s close emulation of Instagrams’ Stories feature into the FB core platform is a perfect example. We found at Tripadvisor that it was a great way to accelerate growth by drafting behind top teams and products that have already put in the effort and expense of building out their own feature sets. Having a deep understanding of the competition is vital to know which version of the feature is best to emulate. Without months or years of product experience in this space to draw upon, we felt as if we didn’t know much. You may feel this way too. We really leaned into that feeling of being a novice and unapologetically copied what was already working. This did require us to get over ourselves - a feeling like we should be breaking new ground and innovating. Along with a few other ingredients, Innovation requires a deep understanding of what’s not working about the status quo, which we realized we did not have yet. In the first few months after initial launch, we tested product designs that closely matched 4 of our top competitors - Booking, Expedia, Kayak, and Hipmunk and rolled out the solution that tested the best. This provided us a platform upon which we could optimize and refine in the future.

Note: This approach is probably not a path to long term success if the sum of the parts does not result in a true differentiation in the marketplace. Look at Juciero as an example, a much hyped Silicon Valley startup that provided healthy juice mixes and a very expensive machine. Once the customers realized the machine simply squeezed the juice out of the packages, Juciero management was left with a “me too” product that was much more expensive than the alternatives.