 Hello, everyone. This is George Bakovsky here, VP of Trips Product at Booking.com. Today, we're going to be talking about scaling beyond just accommodation and doing that at speed. So, as you all probably know, Booking.com has been on a pretty wild ride over the last 20 years or so, really focused on accommodation. And today, we're really running you through how we kind of run product for everything that is outside of accommodation and how we approach that. But I want to start off with something a little bit different to set the scene. Does anyone recognize this little thing in orbit? It's a little mere space station. This lovely piece of technology represents a previous life of mine when I was working in the realm of space tourism. A very, very interesting project, you know, been up there for about 25 years in space and was a destination for obviously cosmonauts and astronauts alike, which was amazing. But I joined a company called Mircorp back in the early 2000s, which had a very, very lofty ambition of how to send people, normal people like you and me, or perhaps not like you and me, but people who could afford at least a $25 million ticket to space as part of the space tourism movement. Something super interesting and exciting. It was actually just completely revolutionary at the time, and we still haven't had too many space tourists go. But one of the people that we enabled to go to space was this young fellow called Dennis Tito who was able to finance enough of a ride, spent $25 million US, to go up as the very first space tourist on this very Soyuz rocket and return back to Earth a very, very happy customer. That experience of going through and trying to figure out how to take some older technology, really repurpose it for something that was truly amazing and industry-changing, or something that is dear and close to my heart. This trajectory here is a completely different type of rocket ship. This is the trajectory that Booking.com has been on over the last 20-odd years, year after year, growing ridiculously in terms of volume, off the back of basically a single product. And that's our ability to create an experience for customers to book hotels that has been unparalleled by anyone basically on the planet. In recent years, it's really been about hotels and alternative stay accommodations where Booking has been an incredibly powerful business, being able to really generate returns, revenues, and profits like no other. And that's because of our incessant focus on the customer experience about booking something relatively straightforward and simple. But a big realization is that the people actually don't book hotels, people don't book stays, people actually take trips, people go on holidays. And that is something that has been part of the DNA of Booking from the beginning, but not something that we've necessarily focused on over the last few years. People really do take trips, and over the course of our history, we've really figured out that the various different companies that we've put together within the portfolio of booking holdings, whether it be around flights or hotels, whether it be car rentals or taxis or attractions, all really need to be stitched up together in order to provide what we call the connected trip. Our approach to that has been very, very interesting. And traditionally, Booking.com has been very much a portfolio company with a number of entities and brands all working together as part of a whole, but not necessarily integrated, and certainly not from a product perspective and integrated experience. We've been much more of a holdings company, as the name would suggest. In fact, Booking.com started off as Booking.nl and was actually purchased by a company called Priceline Holdings back in 2005. So the very genesis of Booking.com is actually through buy. In 2010, seeing the fantastic need of people to have rental cars when they book their hotels as well, Priceline Holdings purchased rentalcars.com. In 2015, and this is actually quite a regular rhythm there you can see kind of every five years, we decided to build an entire taxi transfer business, basically taking people to and from airports and their accommodations. So providing a great linkage between all these different parts of the trip. And then attractions was again a buy decision in 2018 by one of the biggest attractions companies on the face of the planet powered by Fair Harbor. And then flights we decided to build as well for various reasons in 2019. So you can see this kind of pattern of build versus buy, but only recently did we start thinking about how to stitch all these things together in the form of the connected trip. So what is the magic that we really bring to the table? And there are five things I'm going to focus on in terms of how we do product in a very special way, in a very different way of booking that has helped us really power that true rocket ship. One rocket ship that is not just of growth, but of revenue growth and profitability over the last 20 years. So what are these five things that we're going to focus on today? The first one is really OKRs. I'm sure lots of you have heard of OKRs. I'm sure many of you have seen implementations of OKRs that have worked from a scale of OK to good. But I think we embody the concept of OKRs and at a very, very excellent level than booking. So what do I mean by that? And what do OKRs mean to us? So first of all, OKRs or objectives and key results are something that we set both in a bottom up and a top down fashion. We really want to understand from product teams, from engineering teams, from data teams, from design teams, what are the objectives that you're going after? How are you building things as a team? What are the things that you know are important about your customers? And at the same time, we align those with the top down vision of where the company wants to go. For example, focusing on the connector trip and making sure that we offer a seamless experience to our customers across all the vertical products that we have. That allows us from a leadership team perspective to provide guide rails to the team. There is great power in having 200 plus product teams all working in a very, very specific domain, but at the same time, without guide rails, getting the most out of those teams, making sure that we have true alignment and focusing on what is most important to the user is tricky. So we need to balance that top down and the bottom up practicality. What we also make sure is that OKRs cover everything. We really want OKRs to be a true objective setting mechanism that covers everything that we do. So it's not just for some of the things that we're working on, but it tries to cover the entirety without being too complicated. The thing that gets people traditionally is that OKRs seem to be in conflict with user centricity and user needs. I'm going to go through that a little bit more, but we have really made sure that product and engineering and design and data and analytics all work with the commercial parts of the business to ensure that OKRs are very reflective of the customer, whether that customer be the end customer booking a trip or booking a hotel with us, or whether it be our amazing marketplace of supply partners and individuals who provide properties and other services in our marketplace. We do that on a bi-retly check-in basis to make sure that there is true alignment across the business and we can track what we're doing in a very non-heavy way. And the last bit is, despite trying many, many magic tools or tools are promised to deliver magic in terms of managing and driving and reporting on OKRs, we haven't actually found anything that really fits those needs. And so we do rely on Google Sheets in a pretty cool format that works quite well for us that actually does serve the need that we have. So that's kind of the first point is OKRs is how do we organize across a couple hundred product teams. So what's the second point? Second point is you really use a research. If you don't really truly understand the user in a highly quantified way, then what are you really doing? We have an amazing team of people who focus on user research, but not just in the traditional sense. We have a lot of people in data science insights. We have a lot of people in market research. We have a lot of people in strategy. All of those functions we try and combine and distill to give us a north star. So the user research, we're very, very lucky in as much as we have hundreds of millions of active users in our company. We can reach out to those people. We can talk to them very regularly, whether it's by a survey, whether it's over the phone, whether it's in person. We have a great team of people who really understand this at a scientific level that allow us to distill the insights and the user needs that drive our business forward. Secondly, we combine that really kind of qualitative data with quantitative data. And our data science insights team allows us to process huge amounts of data across our websites, across our apps, across our other properties in order to bring the insights together. Thirdly, we manifest these as a set of user needs that we're able to quantify and prioritize and align with our OKRs. And I'll take you through that in a second and show you a template of how we actually take that research from a variety of different sources and translate it to a series of prioritized user needs that allow our teams to really prioritize work together across a couple hundred different teams to effectively build the right product for the right user at the right time. This process really facilitates the alignment with the OKRs. So we have that very, very, let's say healthy tension of dealing with business priorities and commercial priorities, along with ensuring that our users are happy and delighted, right? We all know that that drives activation, that that drives retention. And this is, you know, a template and a format that we use from research to product. As you can see on the left hand side, we take a whole series of inputs around customer research, market research, UX customer service, which is an incredibly powerful treasure trove of information and insights, product analytics, data analytics, commercial and marketing. We pull those into user needs that we work through our various different product families. We pull those needs together and we start mapping them against the customer journey against device brands. We map them to brand proof and core attributes of our brand that we stand for. Then we map them to different parts of the business and we align those with the OKRs and allow those to fundamentally shape the way that we want to help people with the outcomes, behaviors and satisfaction. So we use this kind of template. It has many, many steps to it, but we use this to align the different functions across product and engineering to really output where we should be focusing and have a very crisp idea of the type of value that that drives. As you might expect that at a company of our size, there are quite a few different levels of user needs. So we go into very big primary user needs, sub-user needs, and then we can start mapping those to a very crisp organizational structure that is based on product families and product groups and product teams that allows us to very systematically see how we're addressing and what level of resource and team support we have for different types of user needs. There's a really, really handy way of doing this that really requires lots of people to be synced up, but ultimately yield something that's very clear and very, very usable and very transparent. So it's a third area that kind of differentiates our ability to deliver amazing products. So I put in this amazing little fellow as we all know he's called ET, but ET is actually the name of something internally called our experimentation tool. We have a very substantial dedicated team to EB experimentation and really understanding how everything that we roll out affects everything else. It's quite complicated, it's quite technical, it's super interesting, but it allows us, and we've built all of this internally over the years, to really have a highly quantified understanding of how what product features and elements we roll out affect different type of audiences, different type of metrics, everything from conversion rates to lifetime value of users, which is really, really powerful and is really part of our DNA at booking, that's how we build product. We're able to really measure the impact of everything that we do, whether it's changes in marketing or visuals or features or even technology, which gives us, frankly, a very strong advantage over the competition. Also, this tool is something, because it is so well supported and invested in, it is something that we train up our teams on, it empowers our teams at scale, it allows huge amounts of parallel testing, which allows us to really understand the quantifiable effects of what we're doing on our users and helps them work very quickly and effectively. It allows us to not only track individual products, it allows us to track across portfolios of products, and ultimately, as we evolve this tool, it is helping us really understand the impact of how we do our products, but how that also affects the experience of our fantastic users on how they take tricks. So it's super important in terms of understanding the quantifiable impact that your product has on your users. Unfortunately, though, I can't show you any screenshots of it, it's quite a proprietary tool, it's part of our core DNA, so having talked to it a little bit, I'm going to continue on to the next point. The other area that makes really our ability to experiment so strong is our ability to collect great quality customer data. One of the areas that we're really aspiring to, that we've done a great job really trying to get towards, is getting a single view of our customer. Really understanding how our customers behave across our different verticals, our different brands, our different portfolio of products. This, for a company like ours, has come from a history of really portfolio development rather than building up of a single tech stack. It's definitely been a challenge, but it's a vision that we're realizing that is having great value for our users, especially as we focus more on the trick. That customer data, plus our unrelenting focus on experimentation, is allowing us to really personalize the experience for our customers. As we know, and as any of you know with large populations with hundreds of millions of users, what we really want to understand is our key audiences. Everything from our most valuable and frequent users who purchase with us all elements of their trip to people who have just arrived and are starting their trip building experience with us and trying new vertical products with us as well. We want to make sure that via personalization and having that single customer view helps us really craft a differentiated experience, not only in our app and our website, but also in our direct marketing communications and other channels as well, to ensure that people are really onboarded and understand in the best possible way how to get value out of the product that we offer. Increasingly, we're able to understand the context of users, federating data from a variety of channels, whether it's marketing source or previous behavior or how people have interacted with different parts of our brands across our company. Providing an understanding user context is super important to helping people navigate through the millions of properties that we have and the tens of thousands of permutations that people have available to them with rental cars or flights and other products. So customer data is key here to ultimately simplifying the experience and making it better for people when they book their trips. All of this is yielding our ability and we have a very substantial ML and AI team as well, a number of teams across a variety of different geographies to focus on recommendation. We know from your search results and your previous behavior and history what type of properties that you're really interested in. We can surface those more simply, more clearly to you, whether it's a preference of property type, if you like to stay in hotels versus apartments versus shadows or anything else that we offer on our platform and we have the widest range of properties, frankly, in the world, recommendation becomes super key to that. Also, recommendation of what you're likely to need for your trip based on your preferences, based on your geography, all of those things we combine together to make it much simpler and easier for you to book everything. That becomes increasingly important as well as we see a huge and continual shift to the mobile app, which represents a massive portion of our bookings, but we need to be able to make a very concise in your hands experience even more relevant to you in order to make it easier to conclude on a mobile app. Ultimately, though, all this customer data helps us really refine the concept of customer equity, which is what we have as our internal name for customer value. That incorporates not just how much you're spending with us, how valuable you are to us, but how much you value the brand, how you interact with our customer service agents, and how we can build a long-term relationship with you over time to really help power your holidays, your trips, and your enjoyable experiences traveling around the world. Here's just a couple of examples of where we've used our customer data, our recommendation technology. The moment that you come into the app, for example, we're able to tailor and understand not just your upcoming trip, but what verticals and services that you would actually like to do in that location were able to recommend the huge number of experiences that we offer via our Attractions product in the app that are pertinent to your location. Again, this content changes depending on whether your booking is three months out, two months out, one week out, or you're actually on a trip. We understand the context, we understand the timing, we understand what trip stage you're at, and that over time is getting stronger, better, and more relevant, which ultimately makes it easier for you to enjoy your trip, spend less time searching for things that are interesting to you, and more time focused on your friends, your family, and ultimately enjoying the trip. So what's the last component? What's this wonderful Superman symbol here? As everyone here knows who's listening to this, we all work in technology. Technology is a bit of a funny business in as much as we don't really create a physical product. We tend to create on-screen, on-device, and now even augmented reality experiences. The key that we use everything together here is awesome people who love to solve very complex problems. Booking has an amazing culture of attracting the best, the brightest, the most demanding people who really are interested in travel, in trips, and pulling together an amazing experience for our customers One element that is, I think, really interesting and I really want to call out in terms of the product, the design, the data aspect is T-type personalities. It's really a concept that originated with the folks at IDEO. Not only do we focus on people who have a depth of expertise in the domain, that's super important. Whether you're a data expert, even an ML expert, or whether you're a product management guru, or a mobile app designer, or something even more specific, an experimentation tool, platform engineer, that's what we want, right? We need that expertise that helps us become different, more powerful in that domain. But what really helps that work at scale in a big organization with a couple hundred product teams is the top of the T is that breadth of willingness to collaborate. It's that exposure to different verticals. It's that willingness to help expand your depth of experience and teach other people about how it works. It's about collaboration. It's about working together. It's about striving to create an outcome that works for everyone. So when I think about it, all those elements together help us massively differentiate the type of travel product that we're building. The amazing growth that we've had so far and the wonderful set of customers that we have who keep coming back to us, but also our ambitions to really grow in the future as well. One of the things that caps that all off in terms of people is BAM. And for anyone who's been there and hopefully some booking people looking at this talk, this is the booking annual meeting. It is an amazing meeting for just about every person in the booking.com family that allows us to all come together in one place. And of course, unfortunately, COVID has affected our ability to get together right now, but that'll be short lived. But imagine tens of thousands of your colleagues all in one place. One of the most amazing experiences where you can meet face to face, where you can party, where you can network, where we share talks, where we share insights from speakers who are internal to domain experts all around the world. It's a few days long. It's usually in Amsterdam. It's an absolutely phenomenal experience. I've had the pleasure of enjoying it myself. And it's just something where people get together, and that's something that we just can't take away from the way that we build product that's so successful. It's not only understanding our customers, but it's working with one another to exploit all the depth of knowledge that we have, the expertise that we have in our different domains to come together to hang out, to eat lunch, to talk about projects, to talk about work. And it is just wonderful that we can, as a company, bring that type of environment and that kind of culture together. So again, hopefully that gave you a bit of a flavor of how we, at booking approach product management, how we've successfully leveraged data, customer focus, customer data experimentation, and ultimately great people in great culture to create something that over the coming years is going to keep growing, keep expanding, and take us beyond our awesome classic focus on accommodation and really drive phenomenal growth across all of our different new verticals that together provide a connected trip. So bon voyage. I hope you get out there in travel. And thanks for taking the time to listen.