Data + Platform = Customer-Centric

To create customer-centric products and delightful experiences, data must be central to your strategy. Vrbo is a vacation rental marketplace with 750M+ visitors per month. We address the needs of travelers, property owners and property management companies. I love this product since it takes the stress out of booking and helps people focus on the overall experience. Simply put, data makes it all possible.

Data Explosion is Opportunity

Vrbo is an Expedia group company which gives us a lot of data leverage. We’re now in 190 countries and have over 2 million properties registered. Every day we process billions of data events and signals to learn from. I work with product management, design, product marketing and customer insight. One key to our customer-centric success was merging market research and user research to unlock key learning.

The data at our fingertips is massive and it’s growing rapidly. With video, VR and AR, things will only get bigger which creates opportunity in every industry. Tesla is a great example. They inspired car buyers to think about software and got them excited about things that never existed in the auto industry before.

Things are moving so fast, tools like AI and machine learning are already table stakes. The cutting edge is almost a blur. Today, the only way to create quickly adaptive and competitive products is with ML.

Think about it. Over 90 percent of all the data in the world was created in the last two years, and there are 3.8 million Google searches per minute. That’s a lot of people asking for things. Also, some predict that 80% of the world’s Internet traffic will be video by 2021. Despite all these big numbers, a customer-centric strategy rooted in data can serve any sized brand.

Think Platform

A platform makes your data light up and become useable. A platform mindset means you are data-oriented, and data is at the forefront of your learning. It also means siloed technology stacks must be torn down or else you lose your advantage.

If you build with a platform mindset you enable teams to work within an organized structure. This fosters a customer-centric culture. Your teams can operate and move quickly, but they remain unified as a whole.

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About the Video:

About the host
Michael Paulson Jungle Scout, Chief Product Officer

Bazaarvoice helps brands and retailers find and reach consumers, and win them with the content they trust. Through our commitment to innovation and collaboration with our clients, we're building products and solutions to create the world's smartest network of consumers, brands and retailers.

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