Category: Product Development

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Insights from Phocuswright Europe 2024: You, Me, and the Machine

Attending Phocuswright Europe 2024 was a transformative experience, immersing me in the latest trends, technologies, and innovations shaping the future of travel and hospitality. This year’s event, held in the vibrant city of Barcelona, gathered industry leaders, tech innovators, and forward-thinking professionals to discuss the evolving landscape of travel. Here’s a rundown of the key takeaways and lessons I learned during this remarkable conference.

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Creating a Gamified Experience for Better Product Engagement: Insights from “Hooked” and “Atomic Habits”

In the competitive landscape of today’s digital age, businesses strive to capture user attention and foster long-term engagement. Two influential books, “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products” by Nir Eyal and “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” by James Clear, offer invaluable insights into crafting experiences that not only attract users but also encourage sustained interaction. By blending the principles from these books with gamification techniques, businesses can significantly enhance product engagement and satisfaction.

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Onboarding materials

When a new member starts, I find it good to provide some 3rd party training material so we can ensure we’re all at the same level. Udemy provides a great cost effective source for video led materials.I use this in addition to our own LMS materials (confidential!) to ensure there’ s a common business understanding.

Here’s a link to some of the videos I use;

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Conversational vs traditional customer experiences.

I’ve been working on a project with Pat.ai/EC.ai for several months, and what those guys can do with linguistic understanding (and context) is pretty amazing.

Looking at a traditional customer experience in travel.

A traditional UI for example google’s multi-itinerary flight search form, has prescribed inputs

google.com/flights

The customer enters data, select dates, and builds their itinerary. – comparing this to a dialogue with a travel agent the questions would be mostly the same. (“I’m interested in going to Singapore, I need to go via doha to attend a meeting but just for a day. Here’s my dates”)

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Deliver innovation via micro services orchestration.

Traditional applications can be monolithic beasts with APIs as the final layer These services present a prescribed flow are often inflexible and were built to do a specific purpose.

Traditional applications are usually object oriented with a series of services being called internally, and eventually rendered as a soap/rest API. Quite often with all functions being within a single code repo.

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A day in the life

During COVID-19, I received a few linked-in requests for interviews about the day to day challenges of a CTO. I have to admit, I didn’t participate but it did trigger me to write this post.

As a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) I am responsible for the operation of technology and its associated systems. So I am responsible for technical infrastructure, monitoring, deployment, development and all 3rd party systems and integrations. The CTO also delivers against a strategy drafted from a joint vision of the business vision shared by the board.

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