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#ProductCon London ’24 Harnessing the Power of GenAI for Exceptional Product Outcomes

#ProductCon London ’24 Harnessing the Power of GenAI for Exceptional Product Outcomes



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Delve into the future of product development with Joe Futty, VP of Product at Booking, as he takes us on a journey through the transformative power of Generative AI (GenAI). Drawing from his extensive experience at Microsoft and Booking.com, Joe shares compelling insights into how GenAI is revolutionizing the way products are conceived, developed, and improved. From enhancing customer experiences to driving internal productivity and innovation, discover the endless possibilities GenAI offers for product managers and developers alike.

Main Points:

- Gain insights into the practical implications of GenAI for product development and innovation.
- Explore Booking.com's strategic approach to harnessing GenAI for enhanced customer interactions and streamlined operations.
- Learn about the broader implications of integrating GenAI into business operations and the importance of staying ahead of technological advancements.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Joe, VP of Product at Booking, got us off to a fantastic start with his deep-dive into what everyone’s talking aboutâ€Ļ Generative AI in product development. Reflecting on his journey from a 15-year tenure at Microsoft to the helm of product innovation at Booking.com, Joe shared compelling insights into GenAI's role in redefining how products are conceived, developed, and improved.

ABOUT US:
Product School (https://prdct.school/3DYNwmd) is the global leader in Product training with a community of over two million product professionals.

All of our instructors are Product Leaders working at top Silicon Valley companies including Google, Meta, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, and Amazon.

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Our methodology features the hands-on experience you need to build digital products, lead cross-functional teams, and career coaching to get your product management job or promotion.

#ProductSchool #ProductManagement #ProductManagementCertification #ProductDevelopment #AIInnovation #GenerativeAI #ProductManagement #TechTrends #FutureTech
Good morning product people Hi how are you um super excited to talk to you today um I'm still looking at this this is a different slide H I'm uh super excited to come talk to you today about uh one of my favorite topics it's around uh gen Ai and what I want to

Share with you in the next 20 25 minutes is basically how it's booking we're thinking about this and share a little bit about the product that we launched a little while ago and lessons and hopefully those are some of the information that I Shar with you you can

Take back home today and actually act and uh incorporate into your product plans um do you guys like the title of the session uh actually I didn't write it that was Chad GPT when I gave it to contents and I asked for a catchy title

That's what it came up with so uh it kind of stuck um so before I get into the session just wanted to share a little bit more about me um you can tell by my accent I'm probably not from around here I was born in the US but I spent most of

My childhood in in Europe I've lived in six countries uh worked my way back to North America uh doing my education in Canada and then my most of my professional life in the US um I live in Netherlands now I've been in Europe for four years and and loving it um prior to

Joining booking which I did about 14 months ago I worked 15 years at Microsoft and that's where I transitioned from being a product developer to focusing on product around 20 years a ago I've dedicated my life to using technology to solving problems for our customers um I've gone through a lot

Of uh in in my years I've had the luck or I guess uh to be part of many many disruptions when I first started coding actually we were taking character-based systems and moving them over to graphical user interfaces um when I started at Microsoft we started moving apps over to

The internet um I was very first in working on on mobile search mobile payments as the mobile Revolution came around this was a few years before the iPhone even and then probably the most thing that I'm most excited about and lucky to have in my in my career is

Disruption that we're going through with generative AI I joined booking because I wanted to help using technology to make um make the make it easier for everyone to experience the world um it's super exciting um looking at booking with some of the numbers we have actually fairly large

Scale um I think we're the largest OTA in the world right now started out of uh Amsterdam in 1996 so we're one of those mature e-commerce companies um the thing with scale it's it's pretty impressive uh while I'm going to be talking to you we're probably going to book anywhere

From 50,000 to 100,000 trips for our Travelers which is super exciting because most people are right now are thinking about what they're going to do the summer dreaming and planning and then executing on on booking and in that um with large scale also comes large responsibility as a PM uh what that

Means is every time you make a slight change to your product you can easily positively impact end users and your business or negatively impact your your business and your end user so we've kind of been doing AB testing on every little thing that we've done for for as long as booking has been

Around now let's start thinking about gen so this was about what 13 14 months ago when I'm sure you've all seen chat PT launch back in November 2022 and um if you were like me you were in awe with what the technology brought together so we quickly this was very uh

Very early in my in my book and career I think it was day 10 um while I was there uh thinking about what does this mean to us what does this disruption feel like I talked to some of my friends back in the US that I worked for a very long time

And they also shared the same excitement as I have so I thought there was something there we need to do something about it so we looked at three main buckets one is kind of like our product traveler and partner facing we're a two-sided Marketplace so we serve both our

Partners and our Travelers we thought about demand generation not sure if you've seen if you go on to Google you probably see an ad by booking uh we rely very heavily on demand Generation Um for our for our business and we are worried that if the demand generation business

Like the likes of Google or other search engines gets disrupted we need to figure out what's going to happen and how we actually play into that ecosystem and then lastly we thought about internal productivity um especially for for Developers for engineers I've I've never in my career ever seen Engineers just

Sitting around with nothing to do uh so the idea of making Engineers 10 to 15% more productive is super exciting for us to be able to build our products really want to build much faster than we are capable of doing that today um then we looked at what is it

Actually that we need to address and while all of those things are super important uh data and infrastructure legal risk ethical AI talented people today's session I just want to really focus on something very specific which is the product opportunity so with many disruptions in the past um it's super important to really

Understand where things are going to and I believe that the art of possible is going to change just like it changed in all the other disruptions that I've gone through in my career so it's super important for product product people for designers user research and so on to

Kind of get on the same page and really understand and try to not predict the future because that's super hard but to really see where things are going to be going um before I get into the examples I just want to ground everybody on what

Geni uh is this is an example I think you can go and probably tell your parents about uh this is something that one of our product uh product person and designers came up with in order for us to tell the story and internally uh when

It first came out just to make sure it makes sense for people so the example here is let's say a chef with the best recipe and I'll use the analogy so if if you want to become a chef uh you most likely will go to some sort of culinary school you'll

Start learning about some very basic recipes then you'll get a little bit more advanced recipes you will create the dishes uh based on those recipes you'll get feedback you'll start understanding you'll start fine-tuning so basically As Time grows and you become an expert you will create your

Own recipes in a way that no one's ever done that before now imagine with this gen uh right now what we can do is take every recipe that has ever been recorded in human history um and feed it in there uh imagine every cooking show ever recorded every cooking book every blog

Vlog whatever have you you give it to this special brain it's going to be very much like the chef I talked about that goes to color inary school it will start learning analyzing look at at the outcome and then over time it will actually start creating its own recipes

Something unique um more at a scale more than any other Chef in the world could ever do the magic will then start learning the the patterns and we'll start creating these uh recipes the interesting thing that uh it will also start doing if you are not careful is it

Will start even creating uh ingredients that don't exist and some people call that hallucination I just call it like interesting content creation but it's really up to you to figure out when when when there's an answer that is hallucinated or incorrect to ground it and make sure that the the content that

It's creating is is correct there was a in a travel scenario I'm not sure if uh other seen it Air Canada was just sued last week and lost where a chatbot was talking to a traveler and the traveler was asking for a refund and they shouldn't have got a refund because

Based on Air Canada's website it uh told them exactly um what the policies were and refund wasn't due but the chatbot uh looks like it hallucinated answer and offered the refund to this traveler um then they took him to court and the court said that the chatbot speaks of

Speaks for you so um super important to to make sure that content's grounded uh I kind of touched this already so what is this mean to you how do you approach it we're all not going to go home and start building uh Chef type of software although I think it

Would be kind of fun um I've seen a video a couple weeks ago by by Henrik neber who referred to this as kind of like Einstein in your basement I really like this analogy so imagine Chef is like one kind of Einstein and this Einstein knows all of the knowledge ever

Been recorded in in human history um oh I get my my thing scrolled here um but imagine for you what what can these Einstein be so imagine that you could have uh let's say Architects doctors lawyers designers and then for our case and booking it would be like

Imagine if you can get the best travel agent that that ever lived that could scale to to millions and millions and help our customers so not just the travel agent but let's say even a coner a coner that would know all the ins and outs for where you want to travel that

Could share that information with you built into your app something that you you cannot do today um so what's also very interesting like I mentioned a what we've learned is that imagination is great start figuring out what what's possible but then start playing around with doing prompt engineer enging

Because that's really where you start teaching this Einstein of what is that information that you want to convey to your customer what is allowed what isn't allowed what is on brand what are things that you absolutely do not want it to answer because uh it could be very very

Chatty and it would love to answer all kinds of things even give away all the secrets uh early on there was an example where somebody launched uh a chatbot type of feature uh based on open Ai and and if you went and asked it for all the

Secret prompts actually it told you so imagine it would share all your secret code um I want to also spend a little bit of time looking back in the past I know I've I've already mentioned a little bit about uh the evolution software Evolution but it's interesting

To look at history uh about 50 years ago uh Bill Gates and and Paul Allen had this dream of having a computer on every desk and at that time it seemed prosterus even experts from IBM or or heila Packard at that time which were the the Leading Edge software companies

Thought that maybe we can have thousands but we'll never have a computer on every desk little did we know that 50 years later I bet most of you have uh what at that time would be thought of as a supercomputer in your back pocket always connected and another interesting one to

Me was Mark andreon that's that's his photo in around 2011 talked about software eating the world and at that time many people didn't really understand what that meant but what his context was he believes that all the products and services in the future will be powered by software will be made much

Better by software and to me a great example would be a vehicle I just bought a electric mini just a little while ago and the one of the reasons I bought it is because the app that comes with it um I'm able to remotely control the vehicle

Um I can actually my favorite feature is preheating it because it's very cold in Amsterdam in in the winter and I love to go to the gym wearing my shorts early in the morning so that's a feature that I guess maybe 15 years ago people wouldn't have thought of but it's something that

People expect and maybe not even buy a vehicle without that and I feel the same with Gen so gen is although there's quite a lot of hype and we really haven't seen very much consumer adoption yet other than let's say Chad gbt or or Gemini C or perhaps Microsoft's co-pilot

But I really I believe that it's fun going to transform the way we do things the way we look at the world uh it will revolutionalize uh creativity help you automate tasks uh would personalize content generation and help you with decision- making as well all right so what does this mean to

Product managers how should you approach it um another one of my favorite quotes from my time in Canada who knows who this person is a few of you uh it's the great one Wayne Gretzky actually I didn't realize the name was on there he had this quote that

I I use uh I use with my my product managers or the team quite a lot especially in in times like this and I think it stands the T time a good hockey player plays where a puck is and a great hockey player plays where a Puck's going

To be if there's anything that you should remember from today I think that's one of the one of the better quotes is think about what will happen in 18 months in 24 months and 36 months what will happen to what your customers will be expecting just like I mentioned

I will not buy a car that doesn't have a remote app uh people will not be looking to use your product the same way that they use it today so the idea is while it's super hard to predict the future um I'll I'll share some things

That that we did in order for us to make sure that we're moving just as fast as possible and the thing do you guys how many of you have uh some sort of a customer Journey great I think it seems like most of you um probably been around for a while if

You're a mature company right you probably know exactly what your customers are doing one of the things that I urged our team is to really go back and understand is the customer Journey something that we believe our customers are doing with respect to our business or is the customer Journey

Really reflect the unmet needs of our customers that can potentially be met now with this new technology and I believe the case is more like the later as great I think it is right now to use our apps to uh buy and manage or travel there's so much more we can do just

Imagine back if the if we had the Einstein version of the travel agent all the things some of you may be old enough to have actually used the travel agent before um they could really give you that tailored customiz experience which is really not available yet today especially in a single

App so we went and did that um we thought about what are the what is this disruption what is it that it could superpower and really understanding customer intent now for us it's I think it's a little bit harder I spent uh many years prior to booking and I thought I

Understood how to do uh understand customer intent um I worked in Microsoft advertising group I I started up uh one of the groups on understanding really user intent and and for us it's it's a little bit more difficult because you take on different personas every time you travel just an

Example maybe some of you flew here or some of you fly to let's say Manchester for to your head office and you stay at some budget in um if that's all the travel you do and we look at try to create that Persona we think you like to

Go to Manchester and you like to stay at this budget in so now when you come and you try to plan an anniversary trip maybe it's your 10th or 15th anniversary trip it wouldn't work really well if we try to personalize you based on the knowledge we have so for us thinking oh

How can we get a better intent that we can get today um could be super powerful and then lastly the thing that I mentioned about about hallucination or creating content um imagine if we know what you're looking for and right now we have millions of property descriptions

Which are all the same have been fine-tuned for conversion customer lifetime value all of those things but imagine if we know that you like pools or a great breakfast or a great gym uh we could change that as one to one personalization based on what you tell

Us much easier than we could have ever done that before um little bit of uh recap this was actually uh very interesting for us when we thought about our lifetime sorry our our customer journey and our understanding of trip intent really trip intent isn't just that you want to go

Look for a specific spefic hotel that's just part of it trip intent would be something like cheap places to go for a week the summer that is beachy with a direct flight um probably most of you could relate to something like that um if you want to go and book that travel

Plan a travel today it's it's super hard you probably do it in multiple places maybe you get your inspiration on Instagram then you start researching on a search engine like Google and then when you kind of have some information that you want to double uh drill into or

Get some specifics you go to an OTA like booking or another one so it's clearly that we have an opportunity for unmet needs that nobody is serving our customers yet the second part is around understanding user context and I me I I mentioned a little

Bit about this if all we know is a little bit about you then the way we used to do personalization probably doesn't make sense imagine if we can ask you this information in a much easier way that you would share with us how we can personalize that and it's

Interesting I'm not sure if you guys seen the open AI uh launched a couple things last week one was memory um which they'll be sharing in plain English all the things that you ever shared with them that they use as input and also the things that they kind of came up with uh

Based on your interactions so this is another opportunity for us to to look at so I'm going to share a little bit of a video I think it's about a minute this is something that we launched last June we first launched in the us we've

Actually launched it in uh in the UK as well uh last December and it's fully ramped so maybe during break or later uh you can download the app and try it out and give me some feedback what could you guys see yourself using a tool like that in your next planning event

All right thank you all right give it a try um I want to intr another topic which I've been working through with my team just to see if I'm a little crazy or not but I think there's going to be a a paradigm shift in how we design apps

So if you look at like the example that that I just showed you there that's a combination of like a chatbot natural user natural language user interface and some other traditional pieces as well like the carousel with a recommendations so my my theory is that today we've been teaching our users how

To use our system based on how they use other systems like ours and we've been fine-tuning uh with AB tests on how we measure success and how we iterate on that let me give you an example um today if you go to an OTA you you give us your

Destination and a couple of dates we taught you to do that as soon as you show up you just know how to do that 30 years ago you probably wouldn't guess why that's the way it is U but all the other systems teach you that so then you

Input the value and most even if you've never come to our site you expect to see a search result which then you can start manipulating so this is kind of like learned behavior right this wasn't out there before when Computing started and when then we start getting

Better at it by moving around some of the filters we create some more filters if we're personalized if we remember used a filter before we go do that so that's kind of today's World um but imagine like the video that I showed you and then Tomorrow's World where the user

Doesn't have to learn this new paradigm or the Paradigm that we fit in today the user could just speak in their own natural language so then the Paradigm flip is that instead of us teaching our users how to best use our system uh which gives us the highest conversion uh

Customer lifetime value and all that and make our customers happy uh we need to build a system that understands what the users actually want want to do and then complete the task that way does does that resonate with some people or is that crazy crazy res all right um so when we

When we did this we came up with some uh some principles five is quite a lot I wish we would have had three but we needed to have five and um for us we thought if we nail these things as we go through this transition the user should

Feel magical just like the video I showed you it would feel pretty magical in order to use software like that um the one thing that I do want to call out that I worry the most about and it's really retaining or increasing gaining trust with our users as we take them on

This journey from our current user experiences to what I view as a as the user experience of the future whether that future is 10 12 18 months from now um I believe that's coming so trust to me is is is super key and let me give

You an example I was just uh looking for a new pair of sunglasses last week I'm going on a trip and I want to have a cool pair and I think I clicked on an ad in one of the social networks and I start to get bombarded with a bunch of

Different sunglasses it feels like everywhere I go some people think that's creepy I actually don't mind it all that much it could be annoying once I already bought my pair of sunglasses the point I'm trying to make is imagine with the personalization ability and content generation of today's Tech that's using

There um how creep it feel imagine if we take this and supercharge all those capabilities in the future you could quickly come up with a system that users will just reject because it's just too too freaky for them uh so that's my my my personal opinion on so make sure you

You uh keep and earn more trust as you build this out so our learnings have been um revisit the UNM needs maybe you have some maybe you don't I think if you really go back to basics and understand what you're users are trying to accomplish uh you could probably come up

With some if it's possible validate the extended scope um if you put up a natural language uh interface it's very easy I personally read thousands of anonymized ones people are wanting to do things with us tomorrow that we never gave them a chance to do because we've

Only asked you to put in a destination and dates now they're telling us all kinds of information uh this was something the second point we learned kind of halfway through we're a mature business a high-scale business we've got our own metrics when you introduce something new

Um and you really don't know how to measure it or how to extrapolate it to the overall measurements that the company worries about um it may seem like what you're doing with the business results are lagging what we really need to do is really understand how do you actually measure a funnel that's

Conversational versus the to normal e-commerce funnel that people are used to and like I mentioned earn trust would use users um so to take away for you this is your homework three bullets not five uh figure out who's your Einstein and figure out what they can do for your

Customer uh next thing is build as much as you can as fast as you can um we had ran a hackathon b back last February in order for us to try to figure out what are all the different options what are the possibilities and this product that we launched was

Actually based on the hackathon only 10 weeks later last point is we're all just learning Embrace this even when you look at things like open AI last week's Sora release you're just in awe of what some others are doing but the reality is most of us are just still learning and

There's so much to learn and the more you do the more you will learn in order to make your product better I'll leave you with a A A disruption of another kind and this happened probably a little bit over 100 years ago but there's so many similarities of what happened there to

What's happening with Gen AI or the other Tech revolutions that we've had this is one of my other favorite quotes about uh overestimating the effect of technology today the reality is nothing's really changed as of today even though it's been out for a year and then we underestimate the effect in the

Long run and this image is actually very interesting because if you do a little bit of research on this at the time when cars are starting to enter the roads the biggest concern for everybody was that the horses are getting scoop uh spooked by The Cars they weren't worried about other

Things so there was actually you can you can uh Google this now somebody had a patent somebody actually built a car with a wooden horse in the front because they thought that if we do that all the problems are SOL solved and then horses and cars will be sharing the road little

Did they think at that time is well these cars are going to get much faster right they're going to start delivering a lot more people we'll have buses we'll have trucks uh there'll be accidents we'll probably need lights at intersections very similar to how gen is

Being treated right now I was a little bit spook last summer when Italy actually banned gener AI I don't know if you guys remember that for a few weeks but we were really scared of what's Happening how do we build a global do we need to build in all these features in

Order to turn some things off or behave in a different way so with that I think um the call to action for you guys is to kind of go back go back to your work uh listen about some of the things hopefully I provoked some things for you to go take

Back and uh incorporate in your product thank you

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