The project aimed to develop a commission system for suppliers to gain more exposure on Viator's marketplace by allocating more commission, functioning as an advertising platform using commission instead of cost per click/impression. This was a significant structural change, involving Legal, Engineering, Design, Product, Account Management, Product Marketing, and Customer Service departments.
Viator is a global tours and experiences marketplace with an inventory of 300,000+ products. The commission structure for Viator's suppliers (the operators of tours and experiences across the world) was manually managed by Account Managers, and was cumbersome. This ultimately limited the long term growth in take rates for Viator as commissions stayed much the same over the years.
I was part of the Steering Group, along with the company President, Chief Product Officer, Chief Commercial officer, and Senior Directors of Product, Design, Product Marketing, Engineering, Account management and the our Legal team.
I helped guide product strategy, and was the conduit between the Working and Steering Groups for the project.
As the Product Manager for the project left the company as the project was kicking off, I stepped in as an interim Product Manager to guide the kick off process and onboard the incoming Product Manager.
I carried out User Research, organised and ran all workshops, and all Product Design for the MVP of this project. I later hired and onboarded a Product Designer in my team that I handed over this project to.
The goals and metrics for this project were talked about at length, as this was a high-risk project that could jeopardise Viator's overall revenue.The MVP goals were determined to be to maintain the current take rate, with a stretch goal of a 1% take rate increase over the first 3 months after launch
My initial responsibility was as product manager - Bringing a core group of Engineering, account management, product management, finance, and product marketing to carry out the task handed down by the Chief Product Officer. This task was: “Build a competitive commission structure for our tour operators that would ultimately give them more opportunity for their products more exposure on our platform, and provide an increase in take rate for Viator”
We had to answer a few questions with our competitive research:
For the next three months, I was a jack of all trades, carrying out multiple roles:
For the initial MVP research, I created/carried out:
Throughout the process, I was exploring UI concepts, taking into account the multiple different metrics that had to be considered:
I conducted usability testing with 8 suppliers, including the:
Following successful testing of the prototyped UI, I handed over finalised designs to the front-end engineers, and checked in with them in daily stand ups as to whether they had any questions or concerns around how the UI operates.
UAT engineers created automated tests, and I tested the UI on staging environments.
Working closely with the Product Marketing Manager and the rest of the working group, we developed a GTM plan that included a manageable subset of tours and experiences operators.
