Cart & Trip Planning
Building a one-stop-shop trip planning and booking experience on Agoda
Approach
One of the first challenges I faced was getting all stakeholders to agree on the project's approach.
Approach 1: Build e-commerce like Cart and enable booking multiple items. Implement and get to market quickly, gather feedback, and iterate.
Approach 2: Research how people book travel, form a long-term product vision, break it into features and implementable milestones, and continue gathering feedback and iterating.
I favored the second approach for the reasons as follows.
As Agoda has majorly been a hotel listing platform, we never really researched how people plan their overall trip, and the research may uncover things we did not know beforehand.
Not forming any long-term vision can lead to unanticipated scalability problems. I had seen this pattern before in other Agoda projects, where we built experiences to deliver projects faster, only to realize that they were not interoperable or scalable; and we ended up spending more time rebuilding them. Scalability isn’t important, until it suddenly is.
To align everyone, I decided to present to all the stakeholders how this experience may scale beyond an e-commerce Cart and why it is essential to form a longer-term vision and work backward from there.
Long way to go
My team and I learned a lot throughout this project's journey, including:
- Taking a long-term perspective really helped in aligning all stakeholders on a common direction and encouraging teams to build scalable systems that can be used by future products to build on top of
- Research was extremely helpful in understanding the travelers' pain points and designing features and experiences to make their lives easier.
- Moving quickly and involving developers early in the design process allowed us to gain early insights and design solutions that were simple to implement.