I arrived at Triptease when the squad was focused on helping hoteliers improve conversions on mobile. A solution was already in place and the team was focused on finding product -market fit. It took me a few months to get familiar with the product, customers and industry but as I did so I interrogated the problem space and design strategy for the product.

Design strategy re-evaluation findings

While supporting the delivery of the product as designed, I iterated through my design strategy process.
- I discovered there was a discrepancy between the customer perception of the product and the product strategy
- I posited that we had not focused on the riskiest assumptions and would need to pivot to tackle that
- I confirmed that the problem was well understood but the solution was the wrong one

Outcomes:
- As a result, I influenced the business into sunsetting the product. This has since proved to be the right decision.
- Sunsetting the product meant that the squad was able to refocus on our flagship product - shipping highly demanded features and rebuilding stakeholder confidence in our processes.

The hotel industry was decimated by COVID. Since Triptease clients are all hoteliers, the business had a massive retention problem during the pandemic. As a result, the business prioritised pay-as-you-go revenue. In the aftermath of the pandemic though, it became clear that we needed to refocus on generating more licence revenue.

Tackling churn:
Diagnosing the problem: I worked with the product manager and customer success team to identify churn reasons that were within our remit. It turned out that hoteliers perceived our flagship Onsite Messages product as stale and so I proposed that we ship some highly demanded features to increase delight and signify innovation in the product.
This resulted in a “churnaround” and net increase in monthly recurring revenue of 2.9%

Increasing revenue per customer:
We repositioned our business from a tech supplier of marketing channels to a Data Marketing Platform in January 2022. Given that was the business need, I proposed to the business that we redesign the landing experience for the platform to align with hotelier expectations of data.
This involved identifying what reporting was required and executing the first multi-squad delivery of features at Triptease for a number of years.
The DMP now accounts for nearly 70% of new deals won, the attach rate for clients with more than 1 channel has tripled and we have grown our licence revenue per customer overall.

In the face of stiff competition from some of the other vendors in the market, the business wanted to grow licence revenue from new sources. Selfbook launched a booking engine overlay that was a better version than our Express product so mobile was not a viable direction to go in the short term. The Hotel Network has a larger team focused on personalisation of the guest journey so doubling down on features within our flagship product was not an option either.

Discovery (How might we make hoteliers want to pay more?)
The product manager and I looked into the general problems that hoteliers were facing and identified two things. First, hoteliers needed to create strong first-party relationships with their prospective guests and secondly hoteliers were ill-equipped to drive direct bookings using data.

Defining an MVP
We decided to expose some of the data that we had available to see whether hoteliers would run better email campaigns and therefore want our data.
While there was excitement with the general description of the product, hoteliers didn’t take action - showing no interest in using or paying for the product.

Finding product-market fit
The last quarter, my focus was on finding product-market fit. If hoteliers were excited about the problem space, how could I ensure that they wanted to use the product? I identified three things to improve
- Make it clear how the product works
- Make it simple to set up
- Make it clear what the return on investment is.

The release of cart abandonment and back-in-stock recovery emails resulted in an increase in licence revenue per deal and an increase in upsells/expansions and new deals across Q3.

What’s left?
While we feel confident that we’re solving the right problem and have a viable solution, it is yet to be proven how much hoteliers are willing to pay. This is the focus of the current quarter.