# trivago: Head of Product, Hotel Search → Global Product Lead, User Profiling

> Built trivago’s first production personalization stack from zero in six months.

- **Period:** 2016 to 2019
- **Company:** trivago N.V. (NASDAQ: TRVG) (Global hotel metasearch)
- **Location:** Düsseldorf, Germany
- **Scope:** Grew the hotel search product organization to 15 and built a 15-person User Profiling team of data scientists, engineers and product managers. Supported the reorganization around the IPO.
- **Themes:** Personalization & ranking, Metasearch, Data products, Org design

## Outcomes

- +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.

Source: https://zoltan.peaktopeak.hu/work/trivago