Agoda (Booking Holdings) · UX research
The $5MM question nobody was asking.
Context
Agoda's hotel-partner dashboard was built by people who understood the business, for people who ran hotels — two very different worlds. Partners kept calling support because the tools didn't match how they actually worked day to day.
The challenge
Product investment was being decided on opinion and internal assumptions. Nobody had watched a partner use the product inside their own property. The risk was straightforward and expensive: pouring engineering capacity into features that didn't move the business.
What I did
I joined as Agoda's first UX hire and built the research function from scratch — methods, tooling, participant pipelines, and stakeholder frameworks. Then I ran contextual inquiry in the field, observing hotel staff in their own environments rather than in a conference room. Those findings became a research infrastructure that validated high-impact bets before they shipped and killed low-ROI ones early.
How I led
The research itself was only half the job. I trained teams from VP level down to individual PMs and designers to embed research inside their agile cycles, so evidence rather than seniority drove decisions. Within four months, every customer-facing product team had adopted human-centred design as part of how they worked.
Outcome
$5MM per year in cost savings, by redirecting product investment away from low-ROI features and validating the high-impact ones before build. Discovery research also surfaced an entirely new product opportunity, which became the YCS mobile app for hotel partners.
What it proves
Hand me an ambiguous, high-stakes problem and I'll build the mechanism that turns customer reality into business decisions — and get the whole organisation to actually use it.