Vision for a holistic discovery experience.

At GetYourGuide, we had recently launched and scaled an updated version of city discovery pages and built infrastructure to group activities in curated "collections".

We needed to create a holistic user journey and a mid-term vision for destination discovery on our platform. The goal was to inform product strategy and guide organizational structure.

I was part of the leadership team that developed the initial direction for the project and shared it with our CEO. We then collaborated with our teams to align on a direction and enable them to take the next steps.

A task force including the CPO, 2 Product Directors, and myself worked to create alignment on the problem space and a rough vision.

This included presenting the work to our CEO, gathering his feedback, and aligning key principles. For example, it was important for him that discovery of destinations was made primarily through the GYG inventory (aka the activities) rather than higher-level groupings.

1. Agreed on clear definitions for different traveler intents. We had done previous research and wanted to be able to speak the same language throughout the organization.
2. Aligned on specific traveler journeys that were important for the vision. These were hypotheses that we wanted to validate through generative research.
3. Created guiding principles.
4. Created a rough vision prototype to align the leadership group. The main purpose was to utilize this as a communication device and stress-test hypotheses.

We believed that travelers created a shortlist of experiences rather than specific activities in early travel planning.

We wanted our product to offer a browsing experience that matched this mental model. If confirmed by user research, we would create "experience" groupings and showcase them on our discovery pages.

Four ideas formed the backbone of the rough vision and framed every discussion downstream.

With high-level directional thinking created on the leadership level, we got our teams involved. The goal was to get feedback on the definitions and principles, and discuss their ideas on how we can achieve our goals.

A team of 2 product designers, 1 content designer, 2 PMs, and one merchandizing lead ran a design sprint with us as the leadership team coming in and out of the process.

We worked with an external agency that conducted 30 diary studies and 12 in-depth interviews with people from the US and Germany who fit our target audience. The in-depth interviews were done in 2 sections: exploratory research to understand traveler planning behaviors and concept testing.

Part of my role was to onboard our new product designer and collaborate with her on concept creation. We did a few design jams to define our primary research questions and 2 concepts that would help us answer them.

Our teams started working on the foundations based on the findings, so we could start A/B testing them. One core initiative was creating a scalable way to group activities in order to surface them in our product.

In March 2022, organizational changes were made, resulting in my group's main focus shifting to user engagement and retention. All search & discovery work was consolidated under another product group. As of 2023, many of the core ideas from the vision have been tested and launched.