Cold Call At Booking.com, Innovation Means Constant Failure
Sep 3, 2019
Stefan Thomke, a Harvard Business School professor and expert on business experimentation, explores the innovative mindset at Booking.com. He reveals how traditional intuition can hinder innovation, advocating for a culture of experimentation and learning from failure. The discussion covers bold redesign experiments that echo Google’s simplicity and emphasizes the importance of data-driven decision-making. Thomke illustrates how constant testing and decentralized employee-driven experiments can drive success in the competitive online travel market.
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Bing's $100 Million Experiment
- A Microsoft employee suggested a small change to Bing's search results page by moving text up to the headline.
- This seemingly minor change resulted in over $100 million in additional revenue, becoming Bing's most successful experiment.
High-Volume Testing
- Companies are shifting from aiming for perfection to prioritizing high-volume testing.
- Even with a 10% success rate, 10,000 experiments yield 1,000 successes, significantly impacting business.
Data-Driven Decisions at Booking.com
- Booking.com, founded in 1996, prioritized data-driven decisions from its early days.
- Instead of locating their first German office in a major city, they chose a small skiing village based on customer travel data.
