🏔🤯No More Backlogs?!
Sometimes it feels there is such an avalanche of feature requests coming to mobile, it will never be possible work your way through the backlog. This can feel quite overwhelming for everyone in our team.
So this Interesting idea from Basecamp – who’s CEO Jason Fried was tweeting last week how much he loved flying KLM and the KLM Houses App -. caught my attention.
He states that a backlog takes a lot of time to manage and to maintain – can’t argue with that. And gives us a feeling like we always behind, even when we’re not. He argues for distributed backlogs, where every stakeholder maintains his own list of ideas. “This approach spreads out the responsibility for prioritizing and tracking what to do and makes it manageable”
Every 6 weeks, pitches are made on what to build next. Good and urgent ideas return, bad ideas die.
https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.1-chapter-07
🏨 ✈️There’s trouble within internet darling Booking.com
Interesting article in the NRC two weeks ago. The online hotel platform suddenly replaced their CEO, Gillian Tans, who had only been in this position since 2016. So whats wrong? Apparently the growth in turnover is slowing down. Turnover in 2018 was 14.5 Billion Euro’s with a growth of 14.5% compared to 18% in 2017. Also the first quarter of 2019 turnover was lower than the year before.
75% of the turnover of Booking is generated by hotel bookings. But new competition is slowing growth down. Especially the rise of AirBnB is hurting Booking. Other competition like Expedia is successfully trying gain access to the complete travel value chain. They are aiming to become the gateway to the complete travel experience. From hotel, to flight to rental car.
Interesting to think about KLM’s position in this market. How do you work with these powerful platforms without them eliminating access to the your customer and cutting your margins.
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/07/15/van-alleen-de-overnachting-naar-hele-reis-a3967186
https://skift.com/2018/09/27/how-booking-holdings-is-plotting-the-next-decade-of-online-travel-innovation/