Kristin Dorsett
===

Jeff: [00:00:00] hey, Kristen. Thanks for joining today. So happy to have you on glad you can make it.

Kristin: Thanks, Jeff. Glad to be here.

Jeff: Yeah. I think you've had a really cool career and I know you were able to join us for spotlight interview a little while back. We wanted to dive into some things and go through some of stories about how you guys operate in product over at Viator.

But first I kind of want to talk about how you got into product is I feel like you have. Especially interesting story. I was listening to 20 Minute VC and Zaria Parvez was on um, she's the social media person over at Duolingo who took them from like 50, 000 TikTok followers to something like 8 m ion or some absurd number.

But she talked about hiring troublemakers and they're the ones who will really change your business and push it forward. And I feel like. You kind of have a story about that. When you were over at a home away, you started in, sales, but ended up in product. Can you talk about that a little bit and kind of explain how you got in the product?

Kristin: Sure. I think, no one studied product in college. At least not 20 years ago. And so all of us have a slightly different path, but my path was [00:01:00] definitely, I studied PR and marketing, and that was my first role at HomeAway. And then I, over time I started getting more involved with sales. And sort of sales enablement and then eventually, running some sales teams and my sales teams were tasked with selling to property managers.

So HomeAway two sided marketplace now called Verbo um, two sided marketplace for short term rentals. And the short term rental supply comes from either individual homeowners. Which was where VRBO started, VRBO but they were also trying to grow on the property management side or the professional manager side.

And it was a very different set of needs. And my sales teams were trying to a homeowner product to professional property managers. And the tools were all made for a single product to be uploaded. And it was a nightmare if you're trying to do anything in mass. And there was very little connectivity with the back end systems that those companies were using.

And so we did our best. The sales team did really well and grew that property management business with the tools we had. But I had a [00:02:00] very long list of the things I thought we needed that would help us sell more. And I would just bang on the door and bang on the door of the product team to get them to go build it for us.

And eventually the HomeAway leadership was like, okay, fine. Like you, you can have a small team go build what you think we need. And that was my first foray into product management. I had no idea really what I was meant to be doing. But I knew what the customer needed. And so I was learning product management on the go, but I had that vision of what, what was needed because I knew the customer so well.

And so over, over a couple of years after that to build a bunch of different tools built out of a lot of connectivity that they needed. And property managers became a much bigger part of the HomeAway business.

Jeff: That's, I love that story. I find it. There's been so many instances where people will say, you think you can do better, go do it. And I love the instance where you actually. Okay, I will. Let's do it. 

Now, we can fast forward a few years to where we are now. And uh, I think you have this cool theory about being a CPO that I loved that, that

I had read about the role of in [00:03:00] general leadership, right? Like, how do you affect. At scale and drive what you need to, but not be too in the weeds.

And you put it really well, the job is find problems and opportunities and match it to the best person. I probably butchered that but can you explain, what is that theory? What do you mean? And , how'd you get here?

Kristin: Sure. So I think calling it a theory is generous. Thank you. I mean, For me, it's more of a reality of as you move up and get more responsibility, you can be in the weeds less and you have less time to understand the detail well enough to be the one to solve the problem.

mean, I love solving problems.

It's what energizes me. But I can't do it for all the most pressing problems in our business. It's just impossible. And so what I have to do is make sure I'm staying at 10, 000 feet and seeing, okay, what are the most important problems we could be solving as a business and matching them with the right people who can most effectively solve them. and that's not me anymore, even though I would love for it to be. 

Jeff: I know what you mean. You operate at a scale where you have enough people on your team. , there's always that fun thing you want to poke. I [00:04:00] think my team gets, a little frustrated because I might poke a couple of, a little too much. But yeah, I mean, that's the important thing, right?

You can't do all the things you need. You can't have the impact you need to have. If you're in

Kristin: mean, I still have to helicopter down every so often. We all do. But

Jeff: that's the fun part 

Kristin: I try to stay at a higher level. I've hired a good team. I have to trust them that if I make them aware of the problems that they can find the right solutions

Jeff: Yeah, I definitely should run. That's my favorite 5 percent of the job is laddering down and jumping in and getting my hands dirty. Even though I think there's a good chance. I'm probably not the best marketer on the team anymore by far. So it's probably better.

I leave it to them.

Kristin: and that's where there are things I'm better suited to do. There's no one else who can think about how our org structure needs to look in two years, but there's plenty of other people that can optimize a funnel.

Jeff: exactly. Can you maybe, I think the idea and broad concept is a theory is a good one. Can you talk maybe about instance or kind of give an illustration of how this works? And what does this look like in practice?

Kristin: Sure. So like with any business, there's dozens of different opportunities or [00:05:00] problems we could go after at any time. So partly my job is to make sure we have a framework for assessing these opportunities and that we're going after the right ones. And when one comes in, that's especially attractive, making sure we can quickly move and put the right people on it.

And for example, they're like, we have a recently a startup has approached us with a pretty interesting idea of how they , could provide value for the operators in our marketplace. And it's something that we've talked about a problem since we talked about internally, but we just haven't been able to put the resources against it.

And this is a company that wants to go solve that problem. And so we want to figure out how we partner with them, but it's a, it's a shaggy problem space. And so I need someone who's very flexible and creative and who can just go in and create the shape that doesn't exist.

And so I have a particular product director on my team that's really good at this. And so I've asked him to the partnership on this.

Jeff: separate, I guess, , when you're building a product team, like that, how do you balance those kind of skills, flexibility versus maybe more rigidity, but they have other superpowers that are helping them do other things [00:06:00] really well.

Kristin: I think you, you definitely need a portfolio of different strengths. 

And I mean, there's certain core things we look for in all of our product people. You have to be fluent in data. You have to be curious. You have to have a pretty good understanding of how experimentation should work. So you have to be somewhat mathy.

And everybody needs that. But what, where I find the aptitudes might differ is the types of projects that people excel at. And I didn't invent this theory by any means, but like there's zero to one PMs. There's sort of one to 100 and there's 100 to 101. So the optimizers and I, we need all of those because again, we have different types of problems in our business at any given time where we need to be able to deploy the different types of PMs.

And what's important is making sure we're matching the right aptitudes with the right problems. Because where I've definitely seen things not go so well is if you put a zero to one on something That's risk or compliance or fraud those aren't the right that's not the right fit Like you need someone with a different mindset and the opposite if you put an optimizer [00:07:00] on a ambiguous Zero to one problem.

They're gonna struggle and it's not that either is better than the other they're just better at different types of problems

Jeff: makes sense. And, I think with that, comes the trust you need to build with your team that they'll, that they trust you, put you in the right, put them in the right situations. 

That's a tough one, right? Cause you can know exactly what to do with people. You can have the best idea and the best high level strategy.

But if the people aren't trusting you, put you, put them, use them correctly. It's going to fall down. So how are you building that trust? How do you work with that kind of team of diverse skill sets to make sure that not only you have the right people that they trust you that when you're putting them in, there's a good reason and they're picking up where they need to be.

Kristin: I think, with anything people related, you're you're doing your best and you're trying to build those relationships and building that track record over time. Because it has to be earned. No trust is implicit. It has to be earned over time. 

So I think it's just showing people that you're matching them with the right types of problems.

And sometimes, I mean, we'll move people around and they'll be skeptical of, okay you put me on this domain, I've never done this before. What do you see in me that is why you think I can do it? And we usually, we have a reason [00:08:00] and I, for the most part, like it's proven true, but , we have to try it and then have the evidence and then over time we build up that trust.

Jeff: I guess that's the big thing, right? You can't, you don't magically get trust. It's a, you earn it. Through 

Kristin: I mean, sometimes we have to put people that aren't a match on projects. It's just a reality of sometimes something will pop up and the only person who has any capacity to do it , but it is, it's what we have to do as a business at the time.

Jeff: right. Do you find those are, we talked about helicoptering down a little bit sometimes. Do you find that those are situations where you're more likely to maybe spend a little, you know, I always have like my one or two projects where I tell people, I try and tell people up front I'm going to be more involved.

You're going to, you're going to see more of me on this. It's not a lack of trust. It's just either interesting, or I think there's a specific thing going on or something. Do you find that those are more often? One's where you may be spent a little bit more time or

Kristin: Yeah, definitely. Or I partnered them with another senior leader who can help make sure that the project is moving in the right direction.

Jeff: make sense. Moving to a little bit more fundamental on this whole idea, right? Is this idea of, laddering up getting out of the details a little bit [00:09:00] and, theory of finding the problem and matching the right person to it. I found that usually when you have a broad setup like that or a thought or kind of a macro thesis, it came from earlier experiences where maybe things went.

wrong, or if not wrong, not as right as you would have liked. Like I've rarely learned much from when things go perfect. It's usually, in post mortem of when things didn't go the way I wanted. Can you talk maybe a little bit about how, what is that background? That got you into, that kind of delivered this theory, like, where did you see this maybe happen or go wrong or, develop this kind of idea that you have?

Kristin: Sure. A lot of it comes from my own experience as a product manager and the different kinds of problems I was put on and not on and the ones I was a better fit for.

And so one, one example is at HomeAway, we had a as I mentioned, property managers, they use these different backend systems.

Those backend systems needed to be integrated to a HomeAway system. And the team that we had on it was a very scrappy zero to one team who built all of these bespoke integrations. [00:10:00] That started to fall over and it was, it just wasn't built in a platform way. It wasn't built for scale. It was built for solving the problems in front of them, which at the time was the right thing.

But when I was brought in, it was like, okay, we have this spaghetti mess and we have these big partners coming on board like Wyndham that expect us to have enterprise scale. And we needed to build something that, that, that was going to be able to scale for the next five years. And so it's and I would say I'm more of a one to 100 type PM, like where I can take something that's a kernel of something that's good and turn it into something that can scale.

And so I was able to say, okay, like my skill set is the right thing for this time, whereas the earlier scrappier bit, maybe I wouldn't have to have been as good. And I definitely late later in my career, like I've taken on roles or had projects that were more optimization Like if I'm not building something, I get really bored.

And so I really value the optimizers I have on my team [00:11:00] because they just go into the data and they just chug along and keep finding those one to 3 percent wins and that's awesome. But for me, that's not where I, what energizes me

Jeff: I've seen that, LogRocket is still pretty, pretty early stage startup, and I've spent a lot of my career at those smaller ones, and I've seen that a lot where, You have fantastic people who will grow your grow, whatever your kernel is into, something pretty big, but then they start to, you realize, after two, three years of doing it they're slowing down.

Maybe they're not as passionate and you think, oh, they're burning out and it took me a while to realize that, that, Maybe it's just, they need to be redeployed to growing the new thing, because now it's about the, you said the 3 percent wins, the 2 percent wins and those add up and they're important, but it's a different skill set and it takes a different drive. So yeah, so I mean, it's a great theory on matching people. To the problems. And obviously if you don't have the right skillset on it, it's, the project's not going to work, but at the same time, it's vital that you work on the right problems too. You want the right people and the right problems.

That's the other half of the theory [00:12:00] here. And we haven't really talked about that much. There's a lot of ways to pick and a lot of ways to prioritize and gather data. I've definitely found over time. A lot of them don't work that well, or a lot of them will yield you results are mixed.

There's a few really good ways to do it. It varies depending on your business. And the, usually the good ways are the hardest ones. So how do you guys do that over at Viator? What does that look like? How do you discover what you need to be working on and what you need to prioritize? And I think you put it well, like what are the big rocks in your plan?

Kristin: so I'll talk, I'll talk a bit of how overall we plan as a company and then how that translates into what we work in product. 

So overall as a company, we have a sort of longer term strategy and vision for where we want to go, like where we're going to play, how we're going to win. And then that translates every year into our annual company OKRs.

And this is, okay, for this year, these are the five things that we're going to be focused on as a business. And then what we do is have a bit of a bottoms up process of, okay, what are those big bets that we want to make as a company that we think will help us achieve these outcomes that we're looking for?[00:13:00] 

And I'll say, it's bottoms up. It's a bit of bottoms up and tops down because we have some things, bigger strategic things that we know what we want to go after and capabilities that we want to be building. And so some of those, we, like we, we all have to write proposals. So even I will write a big bet proposal every half for things that I want to see happen.

And then we basically assess all of these proposals and decide, okay, what are the ones that we think will drive the most immediate short term impact, as well as what are the ones that are the more longer term strategic rocks that we want to be making sure we're making progress against. And we get that list down to 10 to 12 things typically, and those are the big initiatives that R& D focuses on, and that takes up about 50 percent of our team's capacity is the aim.

Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less. And the goal would be, like, these are the big bets, these are the big rocks. And then teams each have their own individual charter of this is the part of the journey we want you to be optimizing. This is the customer problems we want you to be solving [00:14:00] and the teams can fill in the rest of their roadmap with the team driven work that helps drive their charter forward.

Jeff: Yeah. I think that it's great to have the agility to move quickly, but at the same time, you need enough time to actually do something impactful. 

Kristin: Back to the prioritization of those bets, which I didn't really answer. So for every single bet proposal, we do have an opportunity size. That's a very back of the envelope. And we're looking at the, again, the short term versus long term impact. And so we were weighing, okay, that actual opportunity size, what are the biggest opportunities we could be going after layered in with the strategic side, like sometimes we'll do something and maybe it's a bit smaller opportunity size, but is more strategic.

And then sometimes there's just those compliance things that come in that you just have to do.

Jeff: It's always, always the things you have to do that just are no, no negotiation that's when you want that optimizer in there that right person who knows can button it up, do it right and just get it done.

Kristin: Yeah, hyper detailed people on

Jeff: yeah. Going kind of one step down below, that kind of [00:15:00] planning. How do you all get there?

What fuels kind of those proposals or you know, what gets you to that kind of level of knowing what you have in the hypothesis that you think is going to move the business, right? I'm sure there's lots of different kinds of data out there. I think PMs are in the enviable and probably unenviable position of there is no shortage of data information you can use.

So much. The process over in the product or via Tor to understand that from a data perspective or to get your inspiration or drive these projects forward. 

Kristin: we definitely have a lot of sources for data. So we, start at the more macro level looking at the market and we do market research around, okay, what's American traveler trends and what are the different things that different personas of travelers are looking for, specifically for experiences.

So that's one, one, one lens we take is how do we super serve those personas that we've decided we want to be super serving? Then we take it down to user research and we have we do a lot of qualitative research with [00:16:00] our customers. Existing in perspective of what's going well in our products now, where is the friction in our journey?

When we're rolling out features, we do usability testing before we roll them out to make sure that people can do the thing they're trying to do. And so that produces a really rich data set. We also have a voice of the customer program where we are collating all of the data we get from all of the written and spoken contacts we have with customers.

So everything from customer service contacts, both phone, email, chat, as well as all the reviews that come in, as well as external reviews like app store or trust pilot. And we put it all in a big database, use a bunch of models to get insights out of it. And it helps tell us some of the themes of where we can do better.

And it actually, it like, it's one of our most valuable tools. Like it can tell us, even down to this page in this destination is causing problems. And so that's qualitative. And then on the quantitative side, we have product analytics tooling. Obviously it's just like we, we have BI tooling where we can help you use it to [00:17:00] spot opportunities as well.

Jeff: I'm really curious about this voice of customer program. Cause I read, you talked about it before and it gets into the point of even being a queryable database of customer feedback and that's one thing in the, a B2B tool, you have hundreds of customers, maybe.

A few thousand but Viator has, what, I think I read 300, 000 vendors alone, let alone end customers. So how do you, can you talk about how you do this? Cause that's just a massive, that could be a product unto itself almost. That's a massive undertaking. 

Kristin: It is basically an internal product. It's owned and driven out of our customer experience team. They actually created it originally because they were looking at all the contacts we have coming into our call center and they were trying to figure out, okay, how do we make some of this self service?

So that these travelers don't have to talk to a customer service agent at all. 

And so we started with just that job in mind and over time have just added more and more data to it. It is an internal product and I think there's a very, there's a small team that owns it. And [00:18:00] continues to bring it forward.

Jeff: this is one of those things I always love to hear about because I could talk to you for an entire hour just about this. you know, Can you talk about maybe with that level of data? What have you been able to do with that? What does that actually driven from an end result?

Can you talk maybe about a project or a change that you guys have been able to pull out that was material that came from that program?

Kristin: There's dozens. I, when I the head of this program to give me some wins, she had a very long list. But what I'll talk about is we have recently been investing a lot in our app and we're seeing more and more of our travelers using our app versus our mobile web or desktop experiences.

, but our measurement of our app isn't as strong because it's less mature. And so we were trying to figure out, okay, what are the biggest customer problems we're seeing in the app? And so we mind the voice of the customer data and the overwhelming theme was manage my booking. Was just one of the key jobs to be done that people were really struggling with and it was actually driving cancellations And so it was one, it came [00:19:00] out loud and clear in the data and we actually, it was a big enough opportunity that it became a big bet.

And we've spent the last year trying to make those jobs to be done a lot easier. and we use the voice of the customer data to mine. Okay, what are the other, when people are in this part of the app what are the other things they're calling CS about? Or what are the other things that we're hearing about in the app store reviews?

And we were able to, come up with a short list of, okay, these five jobs, like we're not meeting expectations right now. And we've been working through and fixing them.

Jeff: And how does that kind of slim down process work? Because I'm sure with that many users it's not like something where you can go off of, Oh, 20 people mentions. I'm sure there's even the most esoteric things, get a few mentions. How do you, how are you really narrowing in on what those five priorities are from this?

Kristin: So I think we use voice of the customer as the canary in the coal mine. Often of it's telling us where the problems are. It may not be able to tell us the size of them, but because again, account, it may only be 20, 20 of these customers that actually picked up the phone and called CS about it, but it's [00:20:00] enough and it spikes in the tool and we're like, okay there's a problem there.

Let's go size the problem. And that's where we will then lean into our product analytics tooling or do user research studies to really get into the underlying why.

Jeff: Right from that though, it's great to, you know, obviously users are vital and they'll let maybe where they, where you're not meeting their expectations or where something's has too much friction, but it's always those are like the known unknowns almost, but there's always the world of the unknown unknowns as well, the things that they're not telling you because you just don't touch it.

I think you mentioned you, your team will also look outside of Viator or, at the industry or at even a little bit wider than that. How do you take that into account? What's going on in the market? What's going on with, the kind of target audience in general and build that in so that maybe it's, that's the innovative stuff.

That's a real, a real big boulder, if you will.

Kristin: I mean, I definitely encourage all teams to look outside the building or even outside our industry. Because we find within experiences, we're all doing things the same way. There's pockets of innovation here and there, but in competitors, but for the most [00:21:00] part, we're tackling products in a very similar way.

so we have to look outside. And so one of the first places we do always look is at hotels or short term rentals because they're just more mature and they've been thinking about these problems longer. So things related, an example would be we were looking at updating our search bar. To be able to capture different use cases.

And so we could just try to reinvent the wheel and dream up all the different ways we could do search differently. Or we could look at booking. com and Airbnb and how they're doing it for hotels, which is a similar use case. Then you still are wanting to be in a specific destination on specific dates.

Maybe you want to be close to the specific POI. And so point of interest. And so we, we look at what they do and then we adapt it. And so I definitely encourage teams to look at what other industries are doing. Think about their own favorite apps that they're using and what can we learn from those apps.

Jeff: That's my favorite thing is how can you take, something from maybe your own industry or even outside the industry and apply [00:22:00] it in a novel way. I think my team always gets frustrated cause I'll come in and make some analogy to, a book I read over the weekend and it's just has no bearing at all.

It's like, how does the economies of, salt trade in the 1500s apply here in 2023 SAS, 2024 SAS. 

Kristin: that, that is a bit esoteric.

Mine are 

Jeff: make sense. gonna be honest. Just cause I make it doesn't mean it's right. 

Kristin: Mine are typically, I have a two year old and I do, a lot of shopping and other things for her. And I'll send a bunch of baby sites that I think are doing interesting things to all of my examples for a bit, for about a year, where all e commerce sites that it, in the baby space of Hey, this is a push notification that, that this site is doing.

And I think it's really clever. What's our version of this.

Jeff: I have a 10 year old, a seven year old, and I gotta say the baby sites have it down we would buy so much stuff because of that. And they, I've definitely done 

Kristin: beautiful. 

They make you feel all the feels like I think, yeah, there's some really good products.

Jeff: Yeah, I definitely that was one of those moments when I [00:23:00] realized. , you can be more emotional even in B2B marketing and B2B product. I know you guys are B2C, but on our end we're much more B2B. And if it affects you and drives behavior, it's probably good.

I pushed on that for a little while. I think people got sick of hearing about my kids and how it informs marketing for analytics software. So I dropped that one, Do you have an example of something where that kind of maybe, I'm sure it didn't port one to one, but.

Maybe came in a little bit or been influenced.

Kristin: I'm trying to think. I can't think of a specific baby product, although I definitely did send lots of things I got, I do I love the Domino's app. It shows that I have terrible taste in pizza. That's fine. But I, I think as a product and as a tech company, like I think Domino's is actually great.

And so there's a lot of things they do. They just telegraph every step of the way. Where you are in the process, there's zero ambiguity. And I think there's a, I mean, a lot we can learn from that. And I've basically sent it to people in our, we do have a B2B side of our business the operator side of our marketplace.

And yeah, I sent it to the team working on our product builder. [00:24:00] And I'm like, hey, like, how can we learn from this? Because it's I had a our product builder is pretty long. And we don't give you a lot of, telegraphing along the way of how long it's gonna take you. And I like the Domino's heat map thing.

I think it it tells you it tells you what's happening.

Jeff: they do make waiting for a pizza fun. It's the best experience I've had waiting for pizza. And I'd like to dispute, I don't think it, it does not show bad taste in pizza. Domino's is 

Kristin: I get judged big time when I tell, when I share the Domino's map with people.

Jeff: I live in the North end of Boston, which is a big, it's like the Italian neighborhood of Boston and it's very big on pizza. But still, I gotta say, if you're going for kind of mass market pizza, Domino's is my go to. 

Kristin: And even if the pizza wasn't good, and I do actually like it it just, it's so easy. And it's where they have my loyalty because it's so easy.

Jeff: , I think that's a great example of one that's really pushing value with just great design 

Kristin: I think it's amazing they've invested in this. Because the, plenty of their competitors, Maybe they're not doing well, I don't know. But they decided to really double down on this, and [00:25:00] hopefully it's done well for them.

Jeff: So pizza is another way I, we could get off on a tangent here, but I do have one other kind of bit of stuff I wanted to touch on.

I got the opportunity to talk to Mauricio Monaco. He's the CPO over at Wish. He had this really interesting view on marketplace companies much like, Viator is, which is you're matching end users and customers, but you also have this kind of provider level and you're bringing them together.

And you don't, necessarily control the end product, but he had this great thesis that basically the. best marketplace companies have mastered data pipelines. They're basically optimizing to get the right data to both those providers and to the end users. So they can make the right purchases, provide the right supply, all of that.

But how do you guys think about, being a marketplace, right? Cause there's so much that you don't. So let's start with you don't control the end product. How do you handle that? How do you ensure quality? How does that kind of come together in a way that, that you know, that your end users are gonna be happy?

Kristin: I mean, That's definitely, [00:26:00] when companies are deciding what kind of marketplace they want to be, that's one of the key questions you have to answer. And actually earlier in Viator's history, it was a much more closed marketplace. It was highly curated. I mean, Not necessarily every product was experienced firsthand by an employee, but they were cherry picking who were the very best operators in each market and giving a lot of care to those product listings.

Like we did professional photos. Like we we were really putting a lot of care into those listings. But that's not really a scalable model. And so we decided to go in a very different direction and open up our marketplace and enable anybody to sign up. Even if if you wanted to do a tour of your neighborhood in Boston, you could sign up and do it.

There are then, I mean, quality control issues that come with that, because how do you know that? One, if your tour is no good, then people will probably write you bad reviews. So there is just reviews as a bit of a policing factor, but no one wants to be in a marketplace that has a bunch of lowly rated products.

So we, we've over the years introduced, [00:27:00] a program around quality that just automates a lot of it and does coaching for operators of sort of what we think they can do better. And then we also have destination managers that are looking after specific destinations and seeing, okay what inventory maybe isn't giving the best experience and how do we work directly with those operators to level up or level out.

it's constantly evolving.

Jeff: I think one point you brought up is innovation here can be also solving problems that, that no one else in the market like this is solving and you gave the example of pickup logistics, is there ever a world where. Viator might end up getting closer to the end user or I guess, have you guys looked more at how to solve things like that, that maybe others aren't solving, or is that still just a dream for the future?

Kristin: We're exploring lots of different avenues. What is tricky about our industry, and part of why we're not as far along as hotels or rentals, is that we're not one category of supply. We're actually about a hundred different distinct categories. And so we can't just solve pickup for one type of supply.

We have to actually be thinking [00:28:00] about, okay, how does this work for a helicopter tour that picks up from five different hotels? Versus a private guide who will come get you at your house to a jet ski where actually you just show up at the spot and get your rental. So we're thinking about like, we have a lot of different permutations of what we're trying to solve for.

And we're trying to do that with software where we can and trying to push best practice on operators. If we see something that's really working well encouraging other people to adopt it. What we haven't done is take a really hard line of no, everybody must do things exactly this way. That's what Airbnb experiences actually did and why their experience is a bit more homogenous as a result.

They also didn't get a lot of operators to work with them because they couldn't meet their specific needs,

Jeff: you always need to balance if you want the really esoteric, great, small, local. There's only so much you can control sometimes. There's a little bit of of play in that.

Kristin: right? But are there technology solutions we could develop that would help solve some of these problems? [00:29:00] Absolutely. And we are exploring which one of those might be worth looking at.

Jeff: that's exciting. I, I love this part of marketplace companies, which is just this dichotomy of end users and how do you work with suppliers? And this is something I could sadly go on. With you forever, I think, because I love this topic and it's just, there's so much you can do. Like you said, Talking about vendors and you have I think last year is 300, 000 tour operators approximately. 

Kristin: 300, 000 products, I think, from about 50, 000 operators.

Jeff: yeah, it's still a ton. There's so many SKUs 

Kristin: Oh, it's over a million SKUs.

Jeff: geez, that is, yeah, the scale that Viator is operating at is wild to me.

It's so neat to see. But I read about this program Accelerate and you guys just launched the beta around it. I think semi recently, 2. 0 beta for Accelerate. Can you talk a bit about what this program is? It seems like it's helping serve these vendors of yours, but what is the goal of it there?

Kristin: Sure. So Accelerate was a bit of a rethink of our business model of how we [00:30:00] work with operators. So how it worked historically is operators would sign up and pretty much everyone in a market was assigned the same commission. And what we found over time is that actually some operators were willing to pay more for more exposure.

And we had no opportunities in our marketplace for those that wanted to get more. And so what Accelerate does is actually for high quality operators. It gives them a lot of opportunities to buy additional impressions and get more bookings through our platform. So they get access to more of a share of the potential travelers.

Jeff: was that a process that went through product or, was that kind of a different team that, that really pushed that one forward?

Kristin: It was in partnership with the sales team. They're the ones working with these accounts every day and they're the ones that are able to, I mean, they know what, problems their customers have and they come to the product team and we work together on what a solution could look like.

Jeff: I love it. It all comes back around to sales and product working together and really getting that data from the ground level. That's [00:31:00] fantastic. Yeah, I think that, we covered so much today. I'm really glad we could go through this. And I also happy that we could end it on a full circle sales and product working together.

Which is great to see, I think that's something we look to do here as well as our sales team is always pushing back on what we need product wise. But, love that's kind of where you started. , but taking on that challenge of, people said, you think you can do it better?

Yes, you did. And then it did. and \ , here you are now. So yeah, Kristen, thank you so much for joining today. I really appreciate you, making the time for us. This is a great kind of to see the path of Viator and your path through product over the past years.

Kristin: Thanks Jeff.