Cold Call At Booking.com, Innovation Means Constant Failure (Summer Repeat)
20 snips
Jul 8, 2025 
Join Harvard Business School Professor Stefan Thomke, an expert in managing innovation, as he discusses Booking.com's bold approach to experimentation. He explains how the company restructured their landing page despite the potential for failure, highlighting the tension between innovation and user expectations. Thomke emphasizes the importance of a culture that celebrates testing and learning, revealing how leveraging small data can lead to strategic insights. Get ready to embrace an experimental mindset and discover how agility in innovation can set companies apart in today's digital landscape.
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Radical Booking.com Experiment Proposal
- A Booking.com director wanted to radically change their landing page to look like Google's during a busy season.
- This risky experiment challenged years of optimization and user familiarity with the site.
Intuition Often Fails Testing
- In experimentation, intuition is often wrong; data shows nine out of ten hypotheses fail.
- Testing is essential because actual outcomes are frequently surprising and counter to expectations.
Bing's $100M Experiment
- A Bing employee made a simple change that increased revenue by over $100 million.
- This was discovered through large-scale experimentation, initially dismissed by the team.