Foundational Product Design & Management @ Hotel Trader

The Task At Hand

I joined Hotel Trader as it's first design hire, 23rd member and as it's 1st full time Lead UX designer, working remotely from home ( and sometimes mountain ) with a multi disciplinary team hailing from more than 10 different countries. Needless to say the challenges were evident from the very beginning as I was charged with handling ' anything design ' , which included but were not limited to :

1. Hiring UX designers, power-bi experts and content writers in order to form the fist product team of the company ( image above ).

2. Overseeing existing tech infrastructure ( designed by the dev team ) and improving design, accessibility and performance.

3. Overseeing the design, development and launch of 3 products, under the Hotel Trader umbrella ( Client portal, Supplier portal & Global Controls ).

4. Identifying redundancies in day-to-day work processes, laying down foundational principles that streamlines discussions, designs and deliveries.

5. Being hands on with each and all design external design collateral such as banners, posters, employee ID cards etc.

In my first year at Hotel Trader I also went on to hire individual product managers for each product in our pipeline as well as assisting the CEO and CTO in selecting and appointing our new Head of Product.

Understanding The Problem / Defining My Approach

Understanding the company meant understanding the people and so I started off with thorough user research, the target demographic being the company members themselves. I conducted weekly interviews and follow-ups to understand the nature of how and why the employees do what they do, and how they interacted with each other. Identifying redundancies and opportunities to save on time and resources was a crucial element baked into my research and within a solid month of user research, Q&A sessions and affinity mappings of research findings I arrived at a plan of action that not only addressed the problems of the day, but worked strongly towards future-proofing organizational structure and efficiency.

All said and done, after implementing core foundational principles there was a marked improvement in productivity and delivery times, freeing up over 24 hours a week and creating a system that relied heavily on separation of concerns. Some of these new activities included:

1. I Introduced a meeting strategy called the Rose-thorn-bud method which is a framework for identifying the positive (rose), the potential (bud), and the negative/problem (thorn). It allows designers to quickly analyze data by revealing focus areas, allowing the team to plan their next steps for further evaluation and exploration in the design process. It gives every team member an opportunity to participate and voice their honest and constructive opinions around difficult topics about the product’s success (or lack thereof).

2. Ensuring adherence and proper use of design systems, page logic and external libraries in all of our existing and future products.

3. Creating collaborative Docs for research and documentation, building Kanban boards to visualize the design process, and using ClickUp Forms to gather user feedback that automatically converts into trackable tasks.

4. Get stakeholders familiar with user research by writing usability tasks , standardising feature requests, design updates, handovers and feedback collection.

   
   

5. I introduced a SUS scoring system ( System Usability Score Questionnaire ) in order to set up an effective usability audit mechanism, and invited key members of the team to participate in reviewing, rating and suggesting new features.