We recently sat down with fmr Breather VP Experience, Packy McCormick, to discuss his experience working on hospitality products and using customer feedback to evolve on the fly. It’s a great chat for anyone interested in creating hospitality products or working in a start-up.

All products should be created with the customer in mind, but that’s especially true for hospitality products. Packy McCormick reflected on his time at Breather and shared some insight on how they built hospitality products.

On what drew him to a hospitality product-focused business.

On the exciting nature of operating at capacity with hospitality products.

“The really cool thing about it is when you build a product, and when we launch a new space, you have these companies going in and out of the space. You have these people who show up to your product every single day. I mean, your daily active users, or our monthly active users, for the office spaces, you’re at 100%. So, you have to get it right because people are showing up, unlocking the door, and working out of your space every day.”

On what’s important for hospital products

It’s essential to know what matters to your customers to be a great product manager.

“What matters to us and to our customers is where we put our spaces. How we design our spaces and how easy it is for them to access our spaces and binding them and book them. And so product is really central to what we do.”

On evolving hospitality products based on customer feedback

In his time at Breather, McCormick saw the company evolve quite a bit thanks to the ability to understand their customers’ needs.

“Over time, as we kind of talked to our customers, and listened to our customers, we’ve realized, you know, one, they wanted to have larger meetings in the spaces. So. a space that we had designed for people. It’s the six people, eight people showing up. And so we evolved the product to the certain kind of larger spaces for longer meetings, and all the things that you would need for those larger meetings. Faster Wi-Fi, TVs, whiteboards, all those kinds of things. 

And then the craziest thing happened and this really has been the biggest shift in the past year. People started booking our spaces, day after day after day after day, 30 days in a row, 60 days in a row. They’re trying to turn our meeting spaces into office spaces until we talked to them and listened to them. They said we love what you guys do. We don’t like co-working. We just want to make one of your spaces our office. So, the past year that the evolution of the products has really been adding the purpose-built office space to the mix. 

Now we have a network of meeting and office spaces where companies can choose, hey, this is our own base. When we have performance reviews, we do it in this space, when we want to record a podcast, we have this great space down the street. And so it really is kind of a la carte real estate for the companies who work with us.”

About the speaker
Packy McCormick Breather, fmr VP Experience Member

Packy McCormick was the VP of Experience at Breather, which offers startups and established brands a global network of flexible, thoughtfully designed workspaces that can be rented for hours, days or up to two years at a time. In his capacity there, McCormick worked with all the teams who create and manage their physical product which ranges from real estate team to design, construction operations, user research and customer care teams. Prior to joining Breather, McCormick worked in finance. An interest in joining the tech world led him to Breather.

About the host
Thomas Daly Principal Product Manager

Thomas Daly is Principal Product Manager at Samsung NEXT leading zero to one initiatives. Prior to that, he served as the Chief Product Officer for Spacious.com, which was later acquired by The We Company (WeWork). Before that, Daly was at Samsung Electronics by way of an acquisition of BOXEE, a TV-connected streaming device. He has worked in various product roles for nearly 15 years.

Provide your rating for this post
If you liked this post, please use the buttons to the left to share it with a friend or post it on social media. Thank you!

Leave a Reply

Read more

Resy Fmr Product Lead on Building Hospitality Products (Part 2): General Principles

Resy Fmr Consumer Product Lead on his approach to hospitality and the general principles and criteria for building great products.

Resy Fmr Product Lead on Building Hospitality Products (Part 3): New Opportunities

Resy Consumer Product Lead on growing companies through 10x opportunities, product launches, and how economics helps him at his job.

Yelp Product Director on Building a Hospitality Product That Serves Businesses & Consumers

Yelp Director of Product Management, Guang Yang, discusses building a hospitality product that serves both businesses & consumers.

Resy Fmr Product Lead on Building Hospitality Products

Resy Fmr Product Lead, Tomer Molovinsky, discusses hospitality products and how to identify market solutions through like-minded philosophies.

Sign-in / Register for Free

Don’t be left behind in your career. Join a growing community of over 500K Product professionals committed to building great products. Register for FREE today and get access to :

  • All eBooks
  • All Infographics
  • Product Award resources
  • Search for other members

Coming soon for members only: personalized content, engagement, and networking.