Transforming Discovery with Video

Leadership asked us to explore ( authentic content ) — building on our success adding photos to reviews. The insight: travelers were increasingly turning to ( Instagram and TikTok ) to find activities and plan trips. That was our opening to differentiate.

My team owned two questions: how do we show these videos on our platform, and how do we measure their impact? Marketing moved ahead in parallel, commissioning influencers to make short-form vertical videos we could use across social and product.

This was rare for me — a project driven by leadership conviction rather than a proven user need. That shaped everything about how I ran it.

• Lead Product Designer — organized the design sprint, crafted user journeys and IA, designed and prototyped the experience, validated concepts, and helped set priorities across engineering teams.
• Sprint Facilitator — guided the week end-to-end and made sure we walked out with a working prototype.

Our HQ is in Berlin; the platform teams are in Zurich — so I took the team to Zurich for a week-long sprint to build one shared understanding.

Given user signal and marketing's capacity to supply clips, we focused the MVP on ( video on the ADP ), and I refined the design to scale across platforms.

• Flex gallery (mobile) — a new gallery grid to hold the vertical 9:16 format; we shipped this alone first to de-risk before adding video.
• Core video experience — a full media player with subtitles and creator attribution, plus a ( Check availability ) button that dropped users straight into the booking assistant for a faster path to purchase.

Built with engineers and stakeholders in two-week agile sprints — MVP live in two months.

• Engagement: users watched videos in full on first view, and up to 30% again on a second viewing.
• Return rate: people came back to ADPs with video more often, and spent more time there — suggestive of a conversion link, though we couldn't prove causation.
• Supply love: 75% of surveyed B2B partners welcomed video on their product pages — some even offered to pay for it.

Being straight about uncertainty matters: the primary metrics didn't clearly move at first, which set up the next iterations.

• V2 — video on Destination pages. Hypothesis: ADP visitors may have already decided, so video couldn't sway them. We built a module with title, supporting text, and CTAs.
• V3 — multiple videos on Destination pages. After V2 lifted primary metrics, we went mobile-first with three videos per destination and a new browsing experience to test conversion on featured activities.
• Today: video is part of the core experience (not yet every destination/ADP) while marketing tests which formats perform best before scaling.

• I'd anchor to a customer problem. Starting from leadership conviction was a great chance to innovate — but tying the feature to a known user need earlier would have given us the clarity to move faster and truer.
• Not only KPIs matter. It was rewarding to ship something that delighted both travelers and our supply partners, even where the headline metric was ambiguous.
• Ownership travels. Running the sprint in Zurich pulled two locations into one team — a reminder of how much good happens when you make space to collaborate in person.