Shaping environments for products
Using strategies and processes to create shared goals
Bring everyone together
The FTI Group is a large company with more than 24 sub-brands, each offering a touchpoint within the customer journey. They are expanding from providing vacation ideas, booking flights, hotels, cars, luxury packages to even building backend solutions for travel agencies. This setup creates a significant advantage compared to smaller companies but can also become a disadvantage if those products don’t connect well with each other.
To solve current problems and tackle potential future challenges caused by the high number of sub-brands, we started to work on a strategy for the product to provide holistic and flexible steps to bring the subbrands together. At first, we needed to understand where we are currently and which implications the current landscape had. In close collaboration with different departments and stakeholders, we were able to identify four areas that we needed to focus on for the strategy. Structure, communication, processes and system are those areas. Knowing this, we could start shaping a new environment for our products.
To solve current problems and tackle potential future challenges caused by the high number of sub-brands, we started to work on a strategy for the product to provide holistic and flexible steps to bring the subbrands together. At first, we needed to understand where we are currently and which implications the current landscape had. In close collaboration with different departments and stakeholders, we were able to identify four areas that we needed to focus on for the strategy. Structure, communication, processes and system are those areas. Knowing this, we could start shaping a new environment for our products.
Shape structure as it’s needed
Blindly scaling teams nearly never equals increased productivity. That is why we looked into the possibilities our current team size provided. Our goal was to set up a structure for more collaboration, exchange of knowledge, and reusability to increase performance.
Discovering the core
Stakeholders, different work styles, and maturity levels, all that needs to be taken into account, when it comes to building products. To ensure consistency, effective and faster production, we created the first draft of a process using all the feedback we gathered from interviews, workshops and daily observations. Aiming to accelerate the whole workflow for teams and provide better market fit for our products.Painting a collective picture
Analysing the technologies and codebases of our products, revealed that we need to think about a scalable environment in which all products could be created and exist. Together with the development team, we created a vision of a system staying simple enough to be able to start conversations. While at the same time, providing a level of detail that showcase the complexity that was needed.All to enable more great work like this app prototype
Prototype for the FTI travel companion app
My role and learnings
To drive the strategy forward, I had to be aware of my roles and the balance they contain. On the one hand, I have provided frameworks, templates and moderation workshops so that others can also participate in the strategy. On the other hand, I had to actively promote the strategy through holistic problem analysis, 1-on-1 interviews and solutions as a basis for discussion. In this context, I also had to see how we could implement and test parts of the strategy without endangering our daily work. Working on the strategy has made me more aware that communication, collaboration and a sense of responsibility are essential elements that have to be worked on in companies of all maturity levels. Almost every company has to address these areas in its strategy to align people under a common goal. For us, the best indicator was that we were on the right track with the development of the strategy, that applicants had chosen FTI based on our strategy.
