What is Hotel Labs?
- A design thinking influenced agile framework for co-creation, rapid prototyping, and user testing directly with customers in a curated selection of hotels.
- A laboratory that provides real-world insights, actionable points of view, and operational feasibility assessments through testing directly with hotels and associates
My Role
I founded Marriott Hotel Labs. I worked tirelessly on the branding and internal evangelizing of the platform, and promoting the value of rapid development and testing of products directly with customers in our hotels. I managed a six figure annual budget, and built partnerships to fund and test experiments beyond those budget thresholds.
I led the design and development of the core testing platform. This architecture was entirely cloud-based (Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, iOS/SWIFT), The platform was managed using a custom developed iOS app, was highly available, and cost effective.
I mentored junior product managers, providing an environment to develop their skillsets and deliver products for testing in market.
Product Development and Testing in the Lab
Concepts were selected from the Mobile Guest Services and Marketing orchestration product road maps. Additional concepts were submitted and prioritized through an intake process. Upon prioritization and funding, a lean product team was created. At minimum, this would include a product owner role, researcher, UX/designer and developer resource.
User Research
Projects would typically start with an investigation into the current state and leverage user intercepting, interviewing, surveys, etc. A design thinking process would employ empathy to dig deeply in the mindset of the customer, Findings would be synthesized into a journey map and several personas to help guide stakeholders towards alignment on key opportunity areas.
User Research | Stakeholder Interviews | Personas & Segmentation | User Stories | Journey & Flow Mapping | Feature Definition | Requirements
MVP Development and Testing in the Real World
Research was used to guide solution development. A product owner role was assigned to identify and manage creation of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This consisted of custom development within the Hotel Labs Platform or the customization and use of 3rd party vendors where a product already existed that could be used to perform testing, gather insights, and establish POV’s.
Sketching | Wireframing | Mockups | Prototyping | MVP Build | A/B Testing | Usability Testing | Usage Analytics
Scale or Fail – (always capturing lessons learned)
Finally, at the end of the project, data was aggregated, synthesized and visualized. A project brief was created along with lessons learned and recommendations. Some experiments would be stored and shelved, while others would use the output of the lab to build a business case, expanding the product into a broader commercial release.
Go-to-Market Strategy | Deployment Planning | Marketing | Pricing | Packaging
