Agoda (Booking Holdings) · Product culture change
Turning a 5,000-person company into researchers.
Context
Agoda had run for years with no human-centred design process at all. The "design process" was product managers instructing visual designers on what to build — no user research, no design reviews, no hypothesis-driven experimentation. I was hired by the VP of Product to build the UX practice from the ground up: no playbook, no precedent, no initial budget, just a mandate to change how product decisions were made across a company of thousands.
The problem
Introducing UX to an established organisation isn't a design problem — it's a change-management problem. Teams had never done research and saw it as foreign. Some PMs viewed UX as a threat to their control and a source of delay, with no evidence yet that the payoff was worth it. A/B tests ran without clear hypotheses but their results were still used to push features. And nothing ever came back — no retrospectives on what shipped.
What I did
Knowing a top-down mandate would generate resistance, I designed a three-phase strategy: start lean, show results, scale by organic adoption, then enforce only for holdouts.
Phase 1 — Foundations: make good design structurally possible. I adapted the Google Ventures design sprint into a single business day and ran it with every product team, established VP-mandated cross-team design reviews before anything moved to development, and proactively scheduled sprints and reviews into the roadmap before teams could bypass them.
Phase 2 — Create appetite: step back from pushing, and let PMs come when ready. Partnered with a research vendor for weekly testing slots and added generative methods to the evaluative ones — proving HCD produced better results.
Phase 3 — Create thirst: teams began requesting formative research before they had concrete ideas, using it to shape product strategy rather than just validate designs.
Outcome
Within four months, 100% of customer-facing product teams had adopted a human-centred design process — including the holdouts who first resisted — and the results unlocked additional UX budget and headcount.
What it proves
Culture change doesn't come from telling people what to do; it comes from making the new approach obviously more effective and letting the demonstration do the persuading. Top-down mandate was the last resort, not the first move.