Expedia executives share thoughts on guiding principles to a dynamic lifestyle.
We believe great products are built by great teams. Establishing a great team can be challenging, especially when your team includes thousands of people and spans across three functional areas, four brands and five continents.
We are often asked: “What’s your vision?” You might be surprised to learn that at Expedia, we don’t have one vision. Consumers are too unpredictable, the industry is changing too fast and investing in one vision is too restrictive. We’re acutely aware of new trends and always testing new concepts, but we can’t predict the future.
However, it’s important to provide direction so your team can act as one cohesive group and simultaneously feel challenged to continuously improve. For us, it’s all about APPROACH, which can be described using four basic but powerful principles:
Principle 1: Be scientific.
Get close to a problem, make observations, build and test a hypothesis, and follow the data. Then do it all again. This removes unintentional bias towards a solution and instead prioritizes data. Utilizing the scientific method has expedited our testing capabilities and changed our approach across the company. From branding to SEO to mobile product to our cloud solution teams, each group is implementing tests of varying sizes to understand what resonates with travelers and why.
Principle 2: Make it easy.
Life is complex. Complexity can make travelers afraid. Travelers frequently visit new places and are uncertain about what they will experience throughout the trip. To be successful, planning, booking, and traveling must be as easy as possible.
Planning should be inspiring, not stressful. Booking should be straightforward and instill a traveler with a sense of confidence that they found the best trip at the best price available. Enjoying a trip should be as simple as arriving and having clear guidance for what’s next – whether it’s lounging by a poolside bar or exploring the local history.
Principle 3: Don’t be boring.
The world is distracted. We are competing for time among consumers. The internet used to be about relevancy, but now in order to succeed, you must be interesting.
We’ve entered an era where teens will have spent more time playing online games than in a classroom. There’s even a trend evolving where teens are delaying getting their license – in favor of texting. Teenagers now in a car are all on their phones connecting with others, whereas the driver is offline. This emphasis on content means companies are competing for attention. In that world, the most interesting information wins.
Principle 4: Be better every day.
Make incremental changes. It’s hard to remember how you did something last year, but easy to remember how you did something yesterday. Improve upon it. Learning is your friend but so is failing – both teach you things. You can do really big things with small changes that create a significant impact over time.
At Expedia we echo these mantras in team meetings, in product review cycles, and with our partners. We’ve found they lead to better products, efficiency, job satisfaction, and a better life.
–Aman Bhutani, Chief Technology Officer & John Kim, Chief Product Officer