Episode 221: Balancing Strategy and Execution at Scale with Kristin Dorsett
In this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast, we are joined by Kristin Dorsett, COO at Viator. We dive into how Kristin and her team are building a culture of experimentation, and what it takes to move fast without losing alignment.
Viator, under the TripAdvisor umbrella, has embraced a learning mindset that blends data, customer feedback, and rapid iteration. Kristin shares how cross-functional collaboration empowers decision-making and why they’ve built systems that encourage teams to learn from both successes and failures.
If you're aiming to understand how to balance experimentation with measurable success in your organization, this episode is a must-listen!
You’ll hear us talk about:
15:14 Embracing Failure to Succeed
Kristin discusses the importance of cultivating a mindset that celebrates learning from failures and iterating quickly to achieve collective success.
22:50 Leveraging Customer Feedback
Kristin explains how Viator's voice-of-the-customer program helps product managers identify key areas of improvement, leading to significant enhancements in their checkout conversion.
28:29 The Role of AI in Product Strategies
How Viator uses AI to improve customer experiences by focusing on solving practical problems, avoiding the trap of using technology for technology’s sake.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Kristin Dorsett: I learned I'm never gonna be a technical expert. Do you have to do this in product anyway? Like where you have to be fluent enough to have conversations and be able to talk at a high level with engineers, but I'm never going to be able to code the way they code. But what I can do is help listen to what are the challenges that you're having in being able to do your job and how can I help unblock you?
in our planning cycle, we have two different ways that we prioritize what we're gonna fund. So one of them is what we call our big bets, and that is where those are top down mandates of these are the three big problems we wanna try to solve as a company. And then there are certain pods that are pointed at those problem spaces, and then they get to figure out like, how are they gonna do it? And then we have other problems where it's more, it's not one of the big bets of our company, but there are areas that we know we want to fund. And so we basically, we fund a pod and we write a lightweight charter for that pod of, you are here to make logins easier. Then they go and figure out how to do it. And they're driving their own roadmap.
prioritization's always hard, but when in a business like ours, marketplace, it's complicated. There's a lot of high ROI opportunities. But we found in the past, we've tried to do too many at once and we didn't have enough progress on any of them. So this year we really committed to doing fewer things and so far so good. What we seem to be making a lot more progress because we pick fewer things to focus on.
[00:01:15] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:01:53] Melissa Perri: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today I'm excited to introduce Kristin Dorsett, the Chief Operating Officer at Viator. Kristin has been with Viator since 2016, witnessing its incredible growth and transformation under the TripAdvisor umbrella. We'll be talking about how Viator drives innovation through experimentation and how overseeing all the customer facing functions, including product, customer, service, and design, allows her to build a very collaborative product environment.
But before we talk to Kristin, it's time for Dear Melissa, this is the second of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions. Go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are.
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[00:03:10] Melissa Perri: Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa, I'm a seasoned product manager who's just joined an organization, still new to product management.
We're in the maturity stage and a big challenge is that each customer is onboarded via large long implementation project, including complex configuration and customizations developed. Resulting in non-standard individual circumstances that require a lot of effort to maintain and build against. How can I best communicate this to leadership to help them understand?
And do you have any specific advice in transitioning away from this configuration trap? I see what you did there. And I like the configuration trap. So I really think this depends on what your company is looking for. There are two considerations here. One is that if you are trying to be a product company, you do wanna stay away from as much custom development as you can, right?
Because what we're trying to do is build one thing and sell it to multiple people and expand that to meet their needs, right? That's how we make our margin and that's how we can scale as a software company. But I would also look at what is your differentiation and why are people buying you? So are they buying you because you're configurable?
And is that the target audience that you wanna go after? Now, configurations aren't bad, it is just about who does the configurations. So for example, Salesforce is built an entire business over a highly configurable product, but they work with services teams to outsource this to other vendors. So they're not taking on all this work themselves.
Instead, they basically made a pipeline of other people who can go do that and it brings 'em revenue. So you might wanna think about what is our differentiation and why do people come to us and how do we wanna grow and how do we wanna make money? Is it through configurations and if so, is there a partnership model here or do we make it easier for customers to configure it themselves?
Also, how do we think about standardizing configurations and what we say no to? Businesses will always ask for everything, right? Everybody wants everything custom. They want it to their unique needs. As a product person, we're trying to go out there and figure out what is standardizable? Who are these types of personas that we wanna solve?
And then who is the right customer to solve this for? So maybe you start this conversation from two lenses. One, who are our customers and who are our good customers? What are their unique needs? Do they have areas where it's very different with the needs or are they pretty similar and should we just concentrate on that?
I would also work with sales to see if they're just targeting way too many people and people who are not great customers, let's say, or not people that you wanna sell to. That might be why you're configuring everything all over the place. It could be for a bunch of different use cases. So I would line on that with leadership. And then two, I put your business hat on and then start talking about differentiations, what's contributing to our revenue, what's contributing to our costs, and start breaking that down for leadership so that they can see how you can grow and what you might wanna look at there.
Take that business approach from it rather than from a building perspective and a supporting perspective. Tie it all back to revenue and cost. And that's usually what gets leaders to buy in and start to understand: Oh, this is a landscape of what I'm dealing with and this is what I want it to be. This is what I want the business to look like.
So I hope that helps. And again, if anybody has questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. Now let's talk to Kristin.
Welcome to the podcast, Kristin.
[00:06:16] Kristin Dorsett: Thanks for having me, Melissa.
[00:06:18] Melissa Perri: So you have a very interesting role at Viator where you're the Chief Operating Officer, but you see product and you also see oversee other functions. Can you tell us a little bit about that role and what led you to it?
[00:06:30] Kristin Dorsett: Sure. So this changed fairly recently. I was look looking after what we internally call R&D, which is product engineering and data. the last several years. And then we had a new president just join us and when thinking about what the composition of our leadership team should look like, they saw an opportunity to have a COO and tapped me for the job because I've been at Viator a really long time and I've overseen a bunch of different functions within Viator, and I'm really passionate about how the work gets done and how the work gets done across functions.
I've done roles in my career that work very product oriented, but also sales, marketing and customer service. And so I like being able to see everything and see how all the all the different things come together ultimately in service of our customers. so really that's my role now. I am overlooking all the functions that sort of are customer facing.
[00:07:20] Melissa Perri: What do you feel like are the benefits of orienting towards a role like this where you can see the whole span of everything and maybe what are some of the challenges too?
[00:07:27] Kristin Dorsett: I think the, the benefits that, as I said, like I think we, are trying to take a very customer centric approach and we have to be thinking about how a customer experience is. And we, we are a marketplace, so we have multiple customers. I can talk about that in a second, but specifically for our traveler customer, they are thinking about the whole experience from end to end, not just our app. And so it's where it's what are those marketing channels that they're finding us through? What's the messaging on those channels and does it align with the landing page that they land on and ultimately the funnel that they end up in. If something goes wrong in their trip and they have to pick up the phone and call our customer service, how do we make sure that our customer service agents have all the right information to help solve that customer's problem and maybe even point 'em back to the app for self-service. So all of these things have to come together, and I love that I get to think about it holistically and really through that customer lens. What's hard is that it's our whole business and I'm trying, and I'm very much a detailed person and I'm trying to understand, okay, what are all these touch points across our whole business? So for me it's a lot of details to try to understand, and I've had to let go of a lot of things that previously I would've tried to be really deep SME on. Now I just can't anymore. So I'm picking, okay, what are the most important journeys I need to understand, and that's where I'm focused.
[00:08:44] Melissa Perri: What's neat about it is you do get to see that whole user journey that you were talking about, like from the, first moment. They almost hear about you all the way through. What does the, I'm curious, what does the rest of your executive team look like too compared to what you oversea, 'cause it's a huge chunk.
[00:08:58] Kristin Dorsett: Sure. So we have a head of our B2B business, and like I said we're a marketplace, so we're actually a multi-sided marketplace. So our B2B business consists of our suppliers. So those are the tours and activity operators that actually list on our platform well as our third party distribution partners.
So we work with people who work with us mainly through API, where they're taking our inventory and selling it on their own site. But we also work with, different affiliate partners as well as travel agents who are actually booking products on behalf of their clients. And so we have ahead of our B2B business, we have a head of our B2C marketing teams.
And so they own all of the channels. And then we have a head of engineering. Head of product and hiring a head of data offer out. Hopefully it all works out. And then a head of customer operations,
[00:09:48] Melissa Perri: Cool.
[00:09:48] Kristin Dorsett: Who looks after our customer service operation as well as a few other operations internally.
[00:09:53] Melissa Perri: When you started to look after all, all these different teams, what did you feel like you had to do to get up to speed on some of the areas you may not have overseen directly before?
[00:10:03] Kristin Dorsett: I think I've been fortunate. I have overseen a lot of these directly
[00:10:06] Melissa Perri: Cool.
[00:10:07] Kristin Dorsett: my time at Viator. But some of them, I mean, engineering. So we had A-A-C-T-O up until about two years ago, and he and I were partners and like we were coming up with our shared R&D strategy. I was looking after product and data, he was looking after engineering and when he left, I absorbed engineering. I was managing engineering directly for the first time, and it's a different world. It's a different type of employee. It's a different mindset, but I thought that at the time was a really interesting opportunity, again, to be coming at our R&D strategy and what we're delivering for our customers together, where product engineering and data are all rowing in the same direction. And so I learned I'm never gonna be a technical expert. Do you have to do this in product anyway? Like where you have to be fluent enough to have conversations and be able to talk at a high level with engineers, but I'm never going to be able to code the way they code. But what I can do is help listen to, okay, what are the challenges that you're having in being able to do your job and how can I help unblock you? really that's what my role has turned into is I am just listening and trying to find, okay, how do I unblock people so they can move faster?
[00:11:16] Melissa Perri: When you look back on your career and your journey up until now, what do you think are some of the defining challenges or moments that really shaped how you approach product leadership?
[00:11:26] Kristin Dorsett: I think it's I've had a lot of opportunities where new things were thrown at me that I'd never done before. One in my very first roles as a product manager, I ended up PMing our integration platform. Which was highly technical. There was UI but it wasn't a, a customer facing product and I wasn't technical at all, and so it was where I had to figure it out.
I read books about APIs and platforms and basically got confidence in myself that when I need to learn a new domain, I can. That's helped me along the way, just pick up I'm not t-shaped I'm like, whatever the is where like I'm like two clicks down on everything, but not super deep on anything anymore. And I think that's served me well. I have confidence now I can do that because I've done it
[00:12:09] Melissa Perri: And I,
[00:12:09] Kristin Dorsett: a number of times.
[00:12:10] Melissa Perri: yeah, and it also sounds like your ability to learn and to dive into other pieces definitely contributed to you being able to be the COO and look over all of these different areas too, which I think is important.
[00:12:21] Kristin Dorsett: Yeah.
[00:12:21] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:12:22] Kristin Dorsett: is where I can learn enough to help hire good, 'cause really, I see that's my main job. Besides unblocking people. Is hiring good leaders and then helping teams get out, like us, get out of their way so they can just get work done.
[00:12:34] Melissa Perri: So when you're unblocking those teams and trying to figure out how do you shape a culture that goes across this entire user journey and this whole life cycle and all these different teams, what are some of the philosophies that you are bringing into place at Viator?
[00:12:48] Kristin Dorsett: I think we, we definitely, I mean, they're instilled in our core values. But we have a big one around, iteration and constant improvement. And we don't do big product launches. For example, like we mainly do we'll have a hypothesis, we'll construct the lightest weight tests we can to validate or invalidate, and then we'll iterate until we find something that works. And I, I think that's really baked into our values. And it's definitely in R&D, but it's also increasingly, showing up in marketing and customer service and other teams. That's again why I think it's so important that these teams don't live in silos. Because the same product practices work in other functions. And that's what I've always done without even realizing I was doing it. Like when I did take over other functions was just come and okay, how do we test into this? What's your hypothesis? And I think that's really become core to our Viator values.
[00:13:39] Melissa Perri: I see a lot of other organizations who are getting used to experimentation are trying to do it for the first time struggle is communicating out to the rest of the organization or to leaders Hey, this is a hypothesis, we're gonna test this. And sometimes people are also like, Hey, I also wanna know what you're gonna build.
We're like we're still testing it. We don't know. We're gonna iterate into it. How do you manage that communication and keep the rest of the company aligned with what you are doing, but not stick everybody into boxes of when they have to release if you're still figuring it out.
[00:14:09] Kristin Dorsett: I think, I mean we, we've been on a cultural journey with this. It is where like we definitely, five years ago had a culture where it was all about celebrating your wins and to celebrate a win you had to get it to a certain level of statistical significance. Otherwise people would poke holes. And if you had something that wasn't a win we never talked about it. So something I've tried to normalize is we have a weekly learnings meeting where you come and you're, you talk about what worked and what didn't work, and we try to celebrate the things that didn't work and perseverance of, okay, the first thing you tried didn't work, but you did five more iterations.
And eventually we found something that did, I see it like we have a lot of momentum now where that's happening more and more. But it took several years to change that mindset. Because everyone wants the wins. The wins feel good, but it's ultimately like if we iterate faster, we're gonna have more collective wins.
[00:15:01] Melissa Perri: What do you think were like defining points of getting that message across to where you started to make people feel more comfortable with communicating the failures or saying when they were gonna change course and also, as part of the executive team, getting the executives comfortable with it too.
[00:15:14] Kristin Dorsett: I think it, it's just repeating the message. I don't think we had a silver bullet and we may probably could have gone faster if we had others, but it was just like repeatedly saying yes. Like we are embracing learning, we're embracing failure and iteration. And eventually people started to believe it and they saw, that certain teams were celebrated that did, have a first test that was a spectacular failure and they kept going. And then eventually they found something that worked and we really have tried to lift those examples up.
[00:15:42] Melissa Perri: When you said, uh, think about setting up a good environment for people to go out and do experimentation and iteration the way that you do. We talked a little bit about like culturally just having that be acceptable. What else does a leader need to put in place so that their teams can operate this way?
[00:15:57] Kristin Dorsett: I think for us, we've really had to in invest in our experimentation platform and tooling to even enable testing that we can maybe call a bit earlier. So we've, employed different statistical methods that, people way smarter than me, had devised for us to be able to run a test for a much shorter period of time, so then we can run more successive iterations faster.
[00:16:18] Melissa Perri: Oh, cool.
[00:16:19] Kristin Dorsett: I think having the tooling in play is really important.
[00:16:22] Melissa Perri: So it sounds like you're, you're going after statistical analysis here. You're still like making sure it's in with the confidence in intervals of if it works or not. And then this all sounds like it takes a lot of data and being able to interpret the data too on the product side.
What's the, how do you embrace that data mindset with your product managers and with your other teams, and what do they do to make sure that they are reaching their hypotheses?
[00:16:45] Kristin Dorsett: Yep. We're very data-driven and we it is, again, it's just kind of part of our culture of we're always asking for what's the evidence? Even if you have a hypothesis what's your evidence? That's driving this initial hypothesis. And we've embedded analysts into almost every single pod. On almost a one-to-one ratio, which is higher than I know what a lot of other companies do. And it's because we want insights. We want analysts who are not just producing reports, but bringing ideas to the table. So it is where we want, we have very cross-functional pods with a pm tech lead engineers designer, usually one-to-one at least on our B2C products is, and then an analyst one-to-one in the pod, if possible. And actually increasingly ML scientists. We're trying to embed as much one-to-one as we can.
[00:17:31] Melissa Perri: That's cool.
[00:17:32] Kristin Dorsett: And we're trying to have everybody at the table bringing ideas, bringing hypotheses, and looking at the data. And so that's where, it's again, been a cultural change to get us here, but I think we're get, we've have a lot of momentum to using data every single day to make every single decision.
[00:17:48] Melissa Perri: When you're looking at AI and those machine learning engineers as well ,what are you using those skills for? Are you using them internally? Do you bring 'em out to your customers? What's your philosophy on it?
[00:17:57] Kristin Dorsett: So definitely in our customer facing products. This is one of those areas we're hiring as fast as we can, and we would love to have them embedded across everything, both internal and external products. But for the most part now they are embedded in our customer facing teams and focused on the things you would expect, like sort, search. We describe our biggest problem to solve is product matching. So we're a marketplace over 400,000 experiences you can book, but as a customer you don't want 400,000 experiences. You want the five that are maybe the most relevant to you and your party. And so we have a lot of our AI resources focus on trying to solve that problem for our customers.
[00:18:38] Melissa Perri: Cool. And what when you're, trying to figure out the AI strategies, I feel like a lot of companies are. How do I use this? Or they're just throwing AI on stuff. What's your way of looking at this and figuring out how do we intertwine AI into our product strategies?
[00:18:53] Kristin Dorsett: I think we're definitely starting with what customer problems do we want to solve, and then what technology is available to help solve it. Like I said, like we're using traditional ml still for most of our customer-facing problems. We're using Gen AI more for more of our internal use cases. And so it will be, like we have the Gemini suite across a lot of our internal tools and yeah, like we're using AI a lot for internal productivity but really more traditional ML in our products itself. 'cause really that's the right tool for the job. In a lot of like generative AI is overkill and LLMs are overkill for a lot of the problems we're trying to solve.
[00:19:29] Melissa Perri: When you're looking at how do you use it internally, are there any use cases for generative AI that has really been amazing for your team or that you found that is really worthwhile?
[00:19:38] Kristin Dorsett: We're still testing. Yeah, we're using it for meeting notes and for, I mean, definitely very liberally in our CS operation, like even training up, our agents, we're using a pretty cool tool called Zenarate.
[00:19:50] Melissa Perri: Cool.
[00:19:51] Kristin Dorsett: That is basically helping simulate customer interactions for our agents so they can get up to productivity faster. And so I think there we're, there's a lot of cool use cases, but I wouldn't say it's fully in our culture yet.
One of the shifts that we're trying to make this year, is how do we get every single problem, internal or external, where people are thinking AI first as far as what the solutions could be. But again, it's about deploying the right tool to the right problem,
[00:20:16] Melissa Perri: Yeah, you don't wanna just blanketly say that AI has to solve all these problems. It's like we gotta figure out what's good for it.
[00:20:23] Kristin Dorsett: right? But
[00:20:24] Melissa Perri: Cool.
[00:20:24] Kristin Dorsett: if anyone's writing job descriptions anymore, they're doing it wrong.
[00:20:27] Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's a very good point. Yeah. I think this is a thing that people are struggling with, especially internally, is that there's so much available and everything's coming out so fast that people are I've seen it even with investors being like, Hey, we should be using AI for everything.
It's gonna, it's gonna decrease our cost and increase our productivity by 50% and. We're not there yet in some things that, it doesn't mean that we're not gonna get there soon, but it's been interesting to see what people are harnessing that's actually working versus what people are playing, like paying lip service to, and it's just not quite there.
It sounds good in theory, but not in practice.
[00:21:01] Kristin Dorsett: Yeah, I said we're pretty early.
[00:21:02] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:21:03] Kristin Dorsett: And like I'm, we're trying to put a bit of infrastructure in place internally to help map. All of our internal employee journeys and try to understand, okay, what are those things that are just manual that don't need to be a human doing something? And so we, I would say like we're gonna be, chipping away at use cases this year, but I would say probably next year and beyond is
[00:21:20] Melissa Perri: Yeah,
[00:21:21] Kristin Dorsett: start seeing where the work itself changes dramatically.
[00:21:25] Melissa Perri: This is a issue I see for a lot of companies out there too, is like who is doing that mapping and who should be looking at this stuff to figure out if it applies to internal use cases. Do you have a team associated with that, or does every division have people?
[00:21:38] Kristin Dorsett: We are trying to figure it out.
We've had, we, again, within customer service, we had people who were doing agent journey mapping, and so it was one of the easiest ones to start thinking about what are the right use cases to start deploying ai. And it's also just such an expense. So the more you can automate, the more money you can save and the better.
And in a lot of cases, the better experience you can give customers. So that already had a skill in place and, but it was very much through the CS lens. And so what we're thinking is do we actually create a similar thing that is across functions and not just just looking at internal efficiency and what we do.
[00:22:12] Melissa Perri: Yeah,
[00:22:13] Kristin Dorsett: we're playing around with different models, but it's where the job titles for this really don't exist yet. They will, but I think they're just now emerging.
[00:22:19] Melissa Perri: that's cool. When I think about what you oversee too, which, what's exciting for me is that. In many organizations because customer success and product and all these different areas are so siloed across the user journey, we might not be sharing data back and forth across these areas.
Do you do anything specifically to ensure that product is learning about what customer success and customer support is hearing and making sure that those people who might be talking to customers or talking to, even the B2B side of stuff is bringing things back in. Like how do you do that exchange of data?
[00:22:50] Kristin Dorsett: We have a pretty robust voice of the customer program that takes into account, all of the qualitative contacts that we get, so any customer service. Contacts. We look at traveler reviews, app store reviews, trustpilot reviews, and we take all of that and map it to the journey and try to understand, based on the journey, what are the problems that we're hearing the most frequently. And our PMs are using it, every single day to mine opportunities. We actually had a pm for our checkout team who was one of the first to really dig into this, and he just looked at, okay, here's the opportunities. We looked in our product analytics tool, here's what the data's saying. And then he just basically created a roadmap that just chipped away. These are all the frictions in the traveler journey that we're hearing, but also we're seeing in the data. And we improved our checkout conversion by 20% last year
[00:23:41] Melissa Perri: Wow.
[00:23:42] Kristin Dorsett: listening to what customers were telling us weren't working.
[00:23:45] Melissa Perri: It's a great outcome there too. And so it sounds like this person too went across like the entire journey and looked at every step and it wasn't just in product.
[00:23:53] Kristin Dorsett: He was, it was mainly the checkout part of our journey, like
[00:23:57] Melissa Perri: Okay.
[00:23:57] Kristin Dorsett: web and desktop mainly was the part he owned. And, but he was taking all the inputs from whatever source he could get,
[00:24:04] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:24:04] Kristin Dorsett: customer service.
[00:24:06] Melissa Perri: Very cool.
[00:24:06] Kristin Dorsett: know like people pick up the phone and call us when they're this step of checkout and these are the problems they have.
[00:24:12] Melissa Perri: Wow. Yeah. That's really neat.
[00:24:14] Kristin Dorsett: sometimes it'll be canary in the coal mine. Like something that it looks like we only got three calls on it. But it is something that's just really frustrating and you fix it and you see a big bump in conversion. And it's because most people don't pick up the phone and call. They just leave.
[00:24:26] Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's a great point too.
[00:24:28] Kristin Dorsett: love seeing our customer service is the canary in the coal mine of what's not working in our product.
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Yeah, that's great. So when you have your teams who are out there experimenting as well and they're running these rapid iterations that you're talking about, and, improving checkout like this, what I found is that sometimes we need to have a strategy that helps point them in the right direction around what to experiment around.
How do you set that tone, but also give them enough space to, surface up problems that we might not have known about.
[00:25:21] Kristin Dorsett: So some of it, in our planning cycle, we have two different ways that we prioritize what we're gonna fund. So one of them is what we call our big bets, and that is where those are top down mandates of these are the three big problems, like we have three this year. These are the three big problems we wanna try to solve as a company. And then there are certain pods that are pointed at those problem spaces, and then they get to figure out like, how are they gonna do it? And then we have other problems where it's more, it's not one of the big bets of our company, but there are areas that we know we want to fund. And so we basically, we fund a pod and we write a lightweight charter for that pod of, you are here to make logins easier. Then they go and figure out how to do it. And they're driving their own roadmap. So we're a mix of tops down and bottoms up.
[00:26:05] Melissa Perri: Okay. And is it like the the big bets that you're funding? Is it, across like product lines on that area and then these pods are off to the side for these other things? I find that a lot of, when companies are trying to figure out how to budget and portfolio plan for like how much do we invest in strategic versus bugs versus this, they always struggle 'cause there's so much to do. What's your philosophy on like pulling people out of, areas to, to go tackle certain problems versus keeping them aligned into product streams?
[00:26:32] Kristin Dorsett: We try to have streamlined teams in
[00:26:35] Melissa Perri: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:35] Kristin Dorsett: longstanding teams as much as possible. But it will be where the type of problem we have them solve may be slightly different
[00:26:42] Melissa Perri: Okay.
[00:26:42] Kristin Dorsett: from year to year. So this year for us, product matching, it's like one of our big problem spaces that we want to solve.
And so for people who were working on a certain part of the funnel, they're now, the problems they're mostly focused on is that matching problem and maybe not other customer jobs to be done that maybe they've worked on previously. They're, they own the same domain or stream, but just the problems they're solving are now more pointed.
[00:27:04] Melissa Perri: Okay. When you're thinking about iteration and experimentation as well, one trap that I see a lot of product teams get into is iterating around let's say the local, what is it, the local maxima, right? Rather than rethinking things from like a holistic point of view. What's your balance that you see there and how do you encourage people to not fall into that trap?
[00:27:24] Kristin Dorsett: I think it's tricky, especially if you are aligning a pod with a certain part of the funnel. They're thinking about that part of the journey and maybe they lose the bigger picture. And so it is where we're trying now, like with everything the teams are doing is they have to show the journey. They can't just show their page and how they're pushing pixels around. It has to be no. What is the problem you're trying to solve? Where's the customer coming from before they get to where the change you're making and where do they go next? And how do we make sure that whole journey makes sense? So that's one way we're doing it. And then it is also where some of the, that the, our big bets is those bigger problem spaces that one pod can't solve in their, on their own. It is where're, like, we're just gonna cite like product matching. It's gonna be really hard and it's gonna take different teams trying different things.
Some things will work, some things won't. But hopefully overall we make major progress this year. Whereas an individual team wouldn't potentially have that same level of ambition.
[00:28:17] Melissa Perri: With something like product matching, how do you kick that off, right? Like it's an initiative that spans so many different people and you wanna bring them together. What's that whole process for kicking off one of those big bets Look like?
[00:28:29] Kristin Dorsett: So we are very document centric. I think we'll talk about remote work in a minute, but we're primarily remote. We write lots of documents so that people can think about things async, and we're also fairly left-brained and thoughtful as a culture and the type of. Of people we hire. So not everyone's comfortable in a manic brainstorm session. Like we like to write things down and think about it for a bit. And so usually things start as a doc, like a doc that can be, can in theory be written by anybody. But typically it's our product directors and end up writing most of them. And so product matching would've started as a doc of, here is a problem space, like a major meaty problem that we think is worth solving.
And here's the rough problem, here's the rough opportunity size. And we then talk about these docs at an executive team level and prioritize, okay, which of these big problems spaces do we want to try to go after next year? And then we pick a short list of the things that we think could be interesting, and then we have the teams then take it to the next phase of fidelity. Okay, product matching. If we were to do this, what are the milestones? What are the more discreet problems we would try to solve and what's the opportunity size of those more discreet things? Cause obviously like a finger in the air opportunity sizing, you can say, yeah, if we increase conversion by 10%, it's worth millions of dollars.
But that's if you're solving the whole problem, like what do we actually think we can solve in a given year? And then how do we understand, okay, is that gonna be valuable enough to put a bunch of resources against for a whole year? And so that's how we got to our top three things.
[00:30:00] Melissa Perri: Cool.
[00:30:00] Kristin Dorsett: I mean the, prioritization's always hard, but when in a business like ours, marketplace, it's complicated. There's a lot of high ROI opportunities. But we found in the past, we've tried to do too many at once and we didn't have enough progress on any of them. So this year we really committed to doing fewer things and so far so good.
What we seem to be making a lot more progress because we pick fewer things to focus on.
[00:30:24] Melissa Perri: I see that trap a lot where we try to do way too many big things and then nothing gets done. How did you all come to agreement to focus on less? I imagine it wasn't a, an easy discussion, but what type of.
[00:30:37] Kristin Dorsett: a journey over several years. It was where, probably four or five years ago we started doing OKRs at the company level, period. Like we, it used to be very much bottoms up, like every function and team would come up with their own OKRs and they roughly laddered up to a higher level strategy.
But it wasn't always, what wasn't always fully aligned. And so we moved to company level OKRs a few years ago and, but we still then tried to satisfy every, everyone's bottoms up idea of what they wanted to do. so we would have 30. Big bets in a year and because we were just trying to make everybody happy.
And then I think we've had enough years, and I think we went from 30 to 14 to I think six maybe. And then now it was like we still didn't make enough progress across the six, so we're gonna do three. And I, everyone had seen enough of that evolution to realize we can't keep trying to do as many things at once.
[00:31:28] Melissa Perri: With that that focus as well. What I've seen is sometimes things that we would like to get done in other departments are just not prioritized. We're not gonna be able to do that. How do you balance that too, as an executive team and talking to other departments on what's the tone in the culture there to, to get people on board with that?
[00:31:47] Kristin Dorsett: On the whole, we're very collaborative and very helpful. And again, like sometimes it's where we're too helpful and we have too much work in progress because we're trying to be helpful and help everybody. But I think it is where, like these big bets, they're not just r and d they're cross-functional. so it is where every single person in the company knows, okay, we have these three big things that we're trying to do. And so any resources that are needed to go after it, that gets first in the pecking order of any project. And the next would be anything, that's what we call a team driven project.
So that's the thing that again, for a pod, it's the thing that aligns with their charter. For a marketing team, it's the thing that's gonna drive performance for their channel. But everyone recognizes big bet take priority over everything else.
[00:32:28] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:32:29] Kristin Dorsett: and then, yeah, and then we do have, a lot of pods are aligned with sales, marketing, cs, and we see those team members as extended members of the pod. Something I, that kind of rubs me the wrong way, having been a stakeholder for a lot of my career, is the term stakeholder. Like when I was like I was leading sales and very active in our, in the product pod, supporting my area. And like I was there at the table with ideas just as much as anybody, and my team was the one on the phone selling the thing. And then it always rubbed me the wrong way when product would claim the success. And that's no wait. We all contributed to this. And so I think that, that's something like I get, as I, I've taken on more cross-functional roles is I want us all to everybody gets to win. There's no one team that gets success because every team has to work together collectively to really drive the big results.
[00:33:19] Melissa Perri: I love hearing you say that too, 'cause I feel like the sales product divide is an interesting one. And on some side I hear the opposite sometimes from product teams where they're like, oh, sales is just selling whatever the hell they want over there. And. When we have to go clean it up, like we have to tell 'em, no, we can't do it.
Or we get in trouble for not releasing it. But it's true, like the teams I see that operate the best, they have such an intertwined relationship there. And it's no we're just throwing this over. We're not fighting. It's like we're all in this, in the same boat.
[00:33:43] Kristin Dorsett: Yeah, I think that's the only way to have sustainable results long term.
[00:33:47] Melissa Perri: I feel like a part of that too though, is doing what you guys do, which is the big bets on the top that go across everybody, and it's what I try to push when I call 'em strategic intents. But it stops like the infighting, I think between like between departments being like, Hey, I have this sales goal over here and we have this product goal over here, and they're not aligned.
And they don't roll up into anything that's like company-wide. And that's where I see like a lot of the fighting or the headbutting.
[00:34:10] Kristin Dorsett: Yeah. Again, I mean incentives drive behavior. have their own individual team goals, that's what they're gonna even if they are, like our culture, we're collaborative, we're nice, but it's still ultimately like someone's individual performance is based on what their manager tells them to do. And so let's make sure that their manager is telling them, what the company overall is trying to do.
[00:34:29] Melissa Perri: Yeah, what do you do at the executive level and what do you encourage to, because this is a friction point I see for your like, direct reports and maybe like that, that middle level of managers to be cross-functional and not just get stuck in like product world ux, world, customer service world, but to actually be like collaborating across all of these functions.
[00:34:50] Kristin Dorsett: I think again, this has been a journey over many years, but I think some of it is, we do planning cross-functionally. We and we write documents cross-functionally. So it is where if we're writing a doc on a new problem to solve, it should be co-written typically by someone in product, someone in design, maybe someone in analytics who are all thinking about the problem from different angles. and so I think it's just more, and they see that sort of from the top all the way down. And so they see us like I co-write documents with my peers all the time. And it's, and so you see it's no, like this is just how we do things around here. and for people, some people that, that's a challenge and I would say like in engineering's been the hardest to get to come into the fold because engineers are different and they culturally, like they work on a different rhythm and so getting engineering leaders to come to the table and have ideas about what customer problems we should solve, that was uncomfortable for some of them. And like telling them like, no, you're not just here to supervise your engineers and make sure their code is good. You're here to solve business problems. And I've been very proud of the engineering leaders and the journey they've been on and where they are today. But it wasn't always easy.
[00:35:59] Melissa Perri: I've seen that mentality too. I've had the privilege of working with a lot of engineers who are super customer minded, and they'll just jump into those problems. But then I've also met engineers who are like I, I'm the architecture person, like elegant code. I just wanna, I wanna manage my stuff over here, but I don't know why you're inviting me to customer interviews.
What did it what did you find were a couple things that really worked. Bringing the engineering leaders to the table to get them to shift their mindset a little bit.
[00:36:23] Kristin Dorsett: I think making it more obvious that they were just as accountable to the outcomes as the product directors were that they were invited to speak. At our we, we have monthly OKR meetings where we talk about how things are going and like they didn't used to be even invited to those, and now they're not just invited, they're expected to speak. And we also, similarly like we have our heads of analytics or the ones presenting the, our KPIs. And I think it's just like everyone knows, okay, no, this set of people, cross-functional leaders are the ones accountable for driving this OKR. And it's just like they're sitting there at the table and it's just visually obvious that know, okay, wait, I'm actually accountable for this too.
[00:37:02] Melissa Perri: I like that.
[00:37:03] Kristin Dorsett: And lifting up the behaviors you like to see. Celebrating the engineering leaders who have done really customer-centric stuff and who have gone above and beyond on partnering with design on something or analytics on something, or ML on something that I think it's just and I think we, we could do even better at this. We've actually been, since our new president joined, we've been talking a lot about our culture and what we what we want it to be. And I think these are areas where we can be even better than we are today.
[00:37:27] Melissa Perri: It sounds like a big step up from a lot of places that I see though. Where you're I love the philosophy too, of you all collaborating around like a document and it's we own this, like we're owning this strategy together. It's not just your strategy and that strategy. It's like this is us together, and I think that's a really nice practice there.
Yeah. So Kristin, it's been lovely talking to you. I got one more question for you. When you look back on your career, what do you, if you could go back and tell your younger self some piece of advice, what would you do? What would you tell 'em?
[00:37:57] Kristin Dorsett: I think it's the, so simple, but don't sweat the small stuff in that whenever some of the stuff that I used to just have a lot of anxiety about or go over and over my head of did I say the wrong thing in this meeting? Just really, it's no one's thinking about the thing you said.
I. has moved on immediately except for you. so I think I definitely would wanna tell my younger self of just, say what you wanna say. Don't overthink it. And don't worry about being too perfect. No one's perfect. And it was definitely something I've learned as I've moved up, is that everyone's learning on the job. And if you're not learning on the job, you're in something where like it's not a growth opportunity. And so if you're not learning on the job, you should find something else where you are learning. And I think having just that mindset of no, if you don't have it all figured out now, it's fine. Nobody has it all figured out. And that if you think they do like they're just better at masking than you are.
[00:38:45] Melissa Perri: I think that's I think that's great advice, especially for people younger in their career too, where every little problem sounds like it's gonna be the end of your career.
[00:38:53] Kristin Dorsett: No I used to, yeah, just the things I would stress over. Now that again, like it's in perspective, but it's just like it wasn't that big of a deal. like I would send it, send an email, and someone would get cranky and it's yeah, it wasn't the best thing. But they're over it. I should be over it faster too.
[00:39:09] Melissa Perri: Cool. Thank you so much for that advice and thank you for being on the podcast. If people wanna learn more about you and Viator, where can they go?
[00:39:16] Kristin Dorsett: So I would love for people to play with the Viator app especially as head of their summer vacations. So we are the world's leading marketplace for tourism activities. So if you're going to a destination abroad or even domestically within the us just give us a try and I would love, love, love your feedback.
You can drop me a line on LinkedIn is probably the best social to connect with me on. I would love to hear your feedback on what you think about the product.
[00:39:38] Melissa Perri: Great, and we will put the links to Viator and we'll put the links to Kristin's LinkedIn at our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next week with another amazing guest. And in the meantime, if you have any product management questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. We'll see you next time.