Insight

Platform Product Development and the Uncertain Travel Future

As we have learned, product and platform development are nuanced concepts. Platforms are typically more complex and require more alignment. Platform product teams need to consider value generation for both producers and consumers, inherently increasing the number of stakeholders. This means clarity of business vision across products, an understanding of how those products reinforce one another and often times weighing the need to make trade-offs when prioritizing platform enhancements. 

Many platform behemoths started as platforms or made the transition long ago. Shifting to a platform model is exponentially more complex for large, established enterprises because they have so many existing stakeholders and product capabilities across their value chain. Understanding and being empathetic to all of your product teams and their revenue streams is a balancing act. It’s difficult to align all teams on necessary tradeoffs – as is shifting focus to support third-party value generation. 

The process is usually burdened by entangled legacy technologies or business concepts sandwiched between organization structure and politics. Culturally, organizations should invest in collaborative, creative, long-term, holistic thinking. Teams need to be mutually incentivized around a clear vision. They should be rewarded for short-term sacrifice in exchange for long-term value generation for the wider ecosystem, and ultimately customer value.  

There are many ways for leaders of established companies to drive behavioral change.  For example, Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart eCommerce and formerly Jet.com, leveraged quantitative and qualitative performance measurements (objectives and key results) that aligned with the customer experience. These incentives improved collaboration (often between IT and business, as the customer experience OKRs needed both) and holistic thinking spawned across the organization. They experienced breakneck rates of growth.

In platform product development, we like to take macro concepts and apply them as filters to test our design.  What tricks could travel and hospitality providers learn from the increasingly commodified convenience of the on-demand economy? We might ask the team, “what if we were asked to build the Uber pool functionality for hotels?” Before we get into the details of how it might impact the business, we ask ourselves, “Would it offer significant choice to consumers?” 

Hotels could consider offering rooms to guests for blocks of time shorter than a day. This could provide significant /value to customers. Imagine resting for a few hours during an airport layover or catching an early morning flight. Maybe you arrived late on the first day and need to leave early on the final day. Some guests might want to book a short block of time at a luxury resort simply to experience it but stay in more affordable accommodations. Perhaps locals would just want to access certain amenities, such as a gym or pool for a short period. In all of these circumstances traditionally, guests are charged for many hours that are going unused. By giving guests more choices, hotels can generate value in between the economy they have built around full-night stays. 

This kind of thought exercise can reveal flaws in an existing platform design. It’s worth asking how we can prepare for possible unintended or unfortunate consequences. 

This example leads to powerful thinking. What kind of producers might we want to attract into this new world and what new kinds of support would we offer them? It helps us make the right technical choices for flexibility. It can help us make the right trade-offs and even identify common capabilities we can safely invest in to boost the existing product lineup. Ultimately, if we perform enough pressure tests like this one, we can drive customer obsession from every technology layer and our framework can extend to future business models as they arise.