trivago
Head of Product, Hotel Search → Global Product Lead, User Profiling
Built trivago’s first production personalization stack from zero in six months.
- +10%revenue
- +8%booking conversion
- +20%NPS
- 10%+of revenue from the native app
Restructured hotel search around the user value chain, then founded User Profiling as its own line, from price-sensitivity models to user-level acquisition.
The situation
trivago compared prices well, but treated every traveller the same. Marketing bought traffic by channel, not by person.
What I did
- Restructured hotel search around the user value chain, with small autonomous teams defining and picking their own projects. Integrated an acquired mobile team fully in-house and hired 8 product owners.
- Founded User Profiling. Defined the price-sensitivity feature set and the ranking objective, and shipped the first production version in six months from scratch.
- Changed how marketing acquired users, from channel-based to user-level targeting, and launched long-tail inventory promotion.
What changed
+10% revenue, +8% booking conversion, +20% NPS, and the native app grew to more than 10% of total revenue.
What I took from it
Personalization is an organizational capability before it is a model. The first version had to be small, shippable and owned by a team that could keep improving it.