Case study · Career, setbacks & entrepreneurship
1,200 Extra Bookings a Day Through Speed
I led a cross-team front-end initiative that made the customer journey faster and added 1,200 bookings a day.
The context
As a product owner in the core customer journey at a major online travel platform, I saw that page load times on our highest-traffic landing pages were holding back conversion. Most large-scale experiments generated between tens and a few hundred additional bookings per day.
The challenge
My goal was to prove that a faster site would lead to a significant increase in bookings, our north-star metric.
How I approached it
My team rebuilt the front-end infrastructure behind the customer journey. To demonstrate the full impact, however, the changes had to be deployed across pages owned by several other teams, including the homepage, search, property details and the first two booking steps.
Not every team initially wanted to participate in an experiment affecting its pages, so I built support one team at a time. We ran the experiment several times before finding a reliable way to measure the cumulative effect of faster load times across the entire journey.
What it delivered
The faster experience generated 1,200 additional bookings per day—far above the typical impact of a large-scale experiment. It demonstrated that a site-wide technical investment could deliver greater business value than many customer-facing feature initiatives.
Looking back
I learned that proving the value of foundational work takes more than rebuilding infrastructure. The hardest part was aligning several teams and finding a reliable way to measure the cumulative effect across the journey. I would involve page-owning teams earlier and agree on the experiment and measurement approach before deployment.
The result changed how I think about product impact. Customer-facing features are not the only route to meaningful growth; site-wide technical investments can create even greater value when tied clearly to the north-star metric. The principle I carry forward is simple: treat performance as a product opportunity, and prove its value end to end.