“You’ve got to make your mistakes differently”, says Enggist
As a student, Adrienne Enggist, Senior Director of Product, Customer Experience and Platforms for Booking.com, had an epiphany, not a hallucination, when she listened to Timothy O’Leary, the late American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs.
He wasn’t talking about acid but of the future, she said. ““He asked us to imagine a future that’s less than 20 years away, where you can talk to anybody in the world instantly in real time without paying for long distance … and he spoke of how you could create content like Arnold Schwarzenegger with Loni Anderson’s head …”
That’s when she decided “that’s the world I want to work in”. Fast forward to now and Adrienne says all the things O’Leary spoke about – it was around 1987 – have come to pass – deep fakes that you can generate with an app, for instance.
Before she got into computers though, Adrienne worked as a chef in Virginia for five years, and that route took her to hospitality and then travel. And travel tech has now become her “amazing playground” that O’Leary spoke about.
Her first foray into online travel was when she worked with Icelandair and “I started selling tickets on the Internet”.
That was her second epiphany – that “there’s a huge opportunity here for people to be able to do this themselves”.
It wasn’t all smooth flying. She recalled the moment when she made the Icelandair website disappear with just the press of a button. She shrugs about it now, saying it wasn’t a big deal. “Things were very forgiving back in the early days … setting up an online booking engine. It wasn’t the core of your business, people were still sort of trickling in.”
The website came back up in 20 minutes “but can you imagine what a 20-minute outage would be like these days?”
With a less forgiving environment, her advice to developers is “you’ve got to make your mistakes differently” – she shares some valuable tips in Episode 4 of our “Customer Love” series, which focuses on “AI & Product Love”.
It is with this guiding principle in mind that she sees her role as creating a safe house for her team to work, experiment, try and fail, and succeed in. Here’s how she describes it.
“The way that we are constructed is that we start with the customer, everything that we do, we try to phrase from the perspective of how the customer will experience it, or what the customer needs, customer must be able to statements are baked into how we think about the work we do. So, the customer experience is at the forefront.
“But in order to facilitate that, you need to have healthy platforms, you need to build on top of a stable foundation. So … you have your front-end pieces, the customer experience, and you need to build in lots of dynamic two-way doors, the ability to run experiments, do tests … sometimes big changes, sometimes small changes, sometimes features and so forth.
“(You need) a stable environment in order to take those risks because that’s the part that allows us to be agile in the front end and to take the brittleness out of our back end as well.”
As for how she thinks AI will impact travel and how you can cook up “AI and Product Love” into your business to win “Customer Love”, have a listen:
