Executive Interview: Google

[Music] imagine running the entire travel product organization for a company with over 85% share of global online search well our next speaker does just that from Princeton history degree to a combined Stanford JD MBA to over 16 years in the hallowed halls of Mountain View his career path has been absolutely fascinating ladies and gentlemen please welcome Google's vice president product management mr. Richard Holden oh hello - thank you for joining thank you I can't imagine what it's like I think he said there's about a hundred employees that have been there you're of a group that's been at Google the longest about a hundred yeah I think that's probably about right it's less still only company has two one I look for what's that like being one of the originals at a company like Google goodness I mean it's still a stimulating great place to work which is why there are so many people that were there early on are still there in many ways yes it's a big company now but we still talk about product in the same way we always did frankly yeah one of my favorite topics having run focused ride and sitting on a lot of travel you know ecommerce some commerce companies is product which you own travel product at Google and in many many many travel organizations around the world especially intermediaries they still use the word product to refer to supply and inventory you know and I'm always the one saying that's not that's not a good idea that should be supply or organization so how important do you think you're like when I push that how important do you think that is for an intermediary in today's travel industry to have a separate and equal discipline for product than from supply I mean I think it's generally important than any of these businesses in this space as a whole our philosophy of our product has always been that the product manager sort of at the hub of a spoke system about building a product we used to sometimes talk about a sort of a mini CEO and we all always viewed product development from a standpoint of a pairing of an engineering pair a lead together getting in a room with a small group and building a product from their product at the center of a wheel is very different than I don't have somebody that owns product so you think or the other one is you know Phillip shut up it's too confusing that's not the way we call things around here and can can an organization like that really sis compete and sustain competition if they don't have a strong product discipline well I'm I'm biased because I sit in product but yeah I think this necessary for building good products we're always a product though we're you know uh well I've always been a product at Google yeah actually so join but yeah and actually all my time in tech it's been product oriented that's why I got into tech how in the world at Google o Sole it so what the audience understand so how many people how many travel product folk are there in Google in the world well we don't usually say specifically but hundreds we have people in Zurich people in Boston and people in Mountain View California and everyday as a travel product person they do what generally speaking before we get into details every day I spend most of my day in meetings like most people these days most of my time is spent on one-on-ones with product managers range leads and then also in product reviews where we're just going through the product what's it how's it working what do we need to change about the product debating the features how do you how do you generate new ideas new hypotheses the test in your how do the travel product people do that it's a combination it's as I say it's sort of an inch lead in our product lead together coming up with what we want to test next ever since I would say about 2011 that duopoly of our partnering there has become a triumvirate in the company as a UX pairing of the user experience paradigm with that very closely we spent a lot of time doing market in research in market with the UX team trying to understand what features we need to build we in the travel we spent a lot of time talking to partners asking them what's missing in the product and then we're experimenting with features that they're suggesting for the product to and obviously analyzing every click and lots of an alpha program and what about generating incremental improvements even so small you might not notice versus big new ideas or those different people that do that or how does that get no same sets of people but you know often you do get caught in this ongoing pace of just doing incremental changes and sometimes you step back and say what do we need to do new we did that recently this year was rolling out our new hotel search offer which was you know revamp back and run it together some companies say oh yeah we're really big on a/b testing test test improve conversion test test but you need something worth testing so has that discipline separated like how do you know what's the process to get to a point where there's something your team believes is worth testing really it's often based partly on research partly based on gut partly based on partner and consumer input and then we just we've run a lot of experience a lot of them don't go anywhere and aren't valuable at the end of the day but that's why we run a lot of them because some of them do prevent these experiments Rab tests they're typically yeah how many different versions of different like hotel search or flight search are there at any one time I mean it's hard to say because it may not be the whole product that's being tested it's elements of it so there are lots of tests across the team that are happening at any one protectin flight search hotel search in any one moment there's multiple tests in flight and then there might be different versions in different countries and what about when a new product is launched is significant enough that a revenue stream is upended like because it's not there anymore or it's not as prominent anymore do product people worry about monetization or is that some somebody else's dilemma no we think about it holistically but I would say that we focus always on build the right consumer experience and then we'll figure out how to do the monetization the end of the day you know we don't use this phrasing very much anymore but Larry and Sergey and Eric Schmidt when they ran the company together would always talk about let's book it to quality and what they were saying in those meetings too build the right thing from a quality from a user perspective we'll worry about the monetization later right if we do that effectively we'll be able to monetize as well I'm not gonna pull the audience right now but a lot of companies I know work with don't do it that way because they don't have the guts to change something that's generating revenue and then say we'll go figure out where the revenue comes later and but I think what you're saying is that could thwart improving their customers certainly can yeah so generally your team doesn't worry about if a monetization process has to be refigured out or changed well we worry about it because we're trying to figure out what the next iteration may be but for most for asking what's the right consumer product to build we think we'll be able to monetize it then and which which team at Google picks up on new product and really focuses on monetization we do in the development side but we work very closely with the sales organization that's responsible for ultimately selling the product but we work in close partnership there's teams that sit between us and sales that help us make sure we have the right input from sales as well and making sure we're incorporating that into the product ooh I have a keen sense this audience has a collection of questions they're dying for me to ask so I think the first one is explain that transformation process I guess it's over certainly over a year now where the blue lengths that work for many many years went away and a new array of search responses were displayed some of them are more ads and some of them are Google answering the question questions themselves explain that transformation for this yeah they sort of philosophically we look at it as consumer demands are changing and the consumer is changing over time what they're looking for from us is changing so we'll often talk about ten blue links no longer is enough that people in an app centric thought it was eight no I guess time okay but in an app in an app centric world that people are looking for answers or looking for a complete solution so that's part of what our transformation from timber links to more answers was and interestingly if you listen to Ben Gomes now had search at Google he's now talking about the next step beyond answers which are journeys and what he's referring to is not a travel journey but he's referring to the fact that consumers come and interact with Google across sessions and that there have interests they carry across sessions and we at Google should do a better job of helping them pick up where they left off taking the next step in that journey it actually applies very much to travel as well which is multi session in nature so I know you work in product and out other departments but when you're on a stage like this and you your employer is Google you're gonna get a lot of questions so picking up on the 8 to 10 blue links that are no longer there after a consumer hits return what do you say when critics say yeah but like now Google you're answering the questions and you've just crushed a lot of businesses that used to answer those questions for a living yeah I guess what I typically say in that case is that what we're trying to do again is be relevant to the consumer if we're not relevant then they're gonna go someplace else at the end of the day so we need to continue to iterate just like all of our partners at our 8 innovate as well too when we do that we think if we build a great flight search product or a great hotel search product we're building more and more qualified leads through that which is great for our partners too over time it just may happen in a different stage in the funnel yeah and obviously a lot of people if they raise money and built a so business and all of a sudden one day the answers they used to answer or now being answered by Google they probably wouldn't feel about it that that way I think there's plenty of space out there I don't think we're we're not we're not all we're not all answering all questions for all people yeah so I was at a board meeting the other day and I jotted this down one of the people I was presenting he said SEO is pretty much dead because well at least in the travel space he said because Google doesn't really show any organic results anymore rather they show their own resort results and there and ads or marketing paid responses so do you think SEO with Z right was it he yeah no I don't think it's dead I think there's plenty of room with an organic search you'd be surprised actually how much traffic that we generated and deliver organically to customers today within our hotel product today the bulk vast majority of the clicks evening that product itself or organic is well too so since the quest for always giving consumers great answers so how do you balance at Google that quest of providing good organic meaningful responses and supplier and partner needs that give you a lot of feedback how'd it happen how do you do that I mean to be honest I don't think it's changed a lot frankly in the last twenty years ever over the last eighteen years or so since we launched AdWords we've always been in this business of having something that's relevant to a consumer that they come for we deliver good paid links and a good ROI to a partner we're just doing that in a new environment I would say with more complete answers in this context but it is a balance at the end of the day in a lot of my experience more than a decade at Google was building AdWords so I definitely come with a partner bent on this and fun to combine the consumer and the ad experience together but I clearly understand that there's an ecosystem there that we have to have both to make it work from the audience Thanks just wondering if you can give us sense for within the travel vertical for Google what sort of query growth have you been seeing and then you know what is the growth also that you've been saying in the number of qualified leads that you're delivering to your partners and and you know maybe a sense for what the trends underneath those those growth rates are would be great thanks in terms of query growth overall we're you know seeing slightly slower growth than we used to have Google as a whole but growing growing well still and travel in particular we're seeing in the vertical specific experience a good good lead generation goes for our partners over the last year actually very healthy year-over-year growth within that context as well as a whole so we think as we build richer experiences we're creating something that's better and better from a consumer perspective and that they will come back and they'll engage and we'll see query growth over time that's part of the part of the goal around building richer vertical experiences is creating something that's useful to consumers that generates more queries over time so assistive I'm not so sure I knew that word before I spoke to a lot of people at Google well that's a big word at Google assistive helped the consumer help the consumer help help help help and all of a sudden it gets creepy right at some point like that that's too much help right so how how do you navigate being as assistive as possible but not being creepy well I think you know Larry used to say this too we talk about personalization years ago and you would say you know people are comfortable sharing data with you if they're getting high utility from it at the end of the day and so usually our conversations my company are around what's the utility exactly and what this feature delivers to a consumer and if it's high utility then they're more willing to share that data I look at some of the stuff that we do in the trips context within travel as a whole - and do you ever get that wrong where you sincerely the testing you believe something's incredibly relevant and then you get like test results or feedback and say loops yeah we do user experience research where we show people things and they tell us I'm not comfortable with that so we do here pieces of that I would say frankly overall we're pretty conservative as a company and pushing that line in fact we have a lot of more discussions internally about there's more we could do here and there's a lot more skepticism the company as consumers ourselves say I'm not sure I want that so we move pretty pretty conservatively in the space I would say we have another question from the audience all right thank you wondering if you look at some of your biggest customers booking.com have pulled back on their performance marketing spend over the past year and it sent ripples through the whole industry trivago TripAdvisor has also pulled back you're their biggest source of traffic so how does it change how Google thinks about the world to see some of the largest customers pull back on performance spend and focus on brand and driving traffic to their own sites as a starting point and travel well I can't comment on particular partners I don't think that would be fair of me to do in this context but you know we work with all partners you suggest in others very closely on trying to make sure that we're generating more leads to them over time there's a mix that they're balancing between AdWords travel related ads in particular and in the vertical specific ads around hotel ads we think we're striking a good balance within them they're saying good growth of that but yeah we have a lot of discussions with our partners about building query codes they're probably referring to maybe going to more TV spend for brand building taken away from performance so Richard in February this year Charles Duhigg wrote a major piece in The New York Times Sunday magazine I would imagine most people at Google remember the title was the case against Google critics say the search engine is squelching competition before it begins so what's it like working and like article like that comes out I think we don't pay a lot of attention to various articles to be honest we have a bunch of people who are very focused on building great products are excited about building those products we think we're making a good impact from a consumer perspective and adding value to our partners you know there's a lot of articles that get written through the years that kind of go by do you worry about squelching competition I don't think we're spoiling competition honestly I think we're providing a great marketplace we're trying to innovate for consumers if we don't intervene for the consumers the consumers will speak themselves they'll go elsewhere at the end of the day so there's this feature called book on Google or it's currently called book on Google a hotel you are an airline and I guess even some intermediaries can live on Google and the customer can actually book without leaving the Google platform but they're definitely booking in the partner site yep it's not like a it's not a big popular thing or why do you why does Google do that we focus on a first and foremost because we think it's good drives conversion rate for a partner partners don't need to engage in if they don't want to our goal is really to make a better consumer experience by making the booking transaction as simple as possible I think there's been some confusion about the prices and confusion about the name but it's really a you know you could call it facilitated booking in many things have a better name it could have a better name we name we may work on that name but at the end of the day it's about ultimately getting that consumer through that process more quickly the merchant of record is the partner it's not us when you come to the booking page the branding on that page is the partner branding and then the email and the customer support are being generated by the partner as well and then this happens all the time we've both been in the space the more Google helps users at every stage of their travel planning the more Google looks like an OTA what say you about that I say that we're focused again on driving value we're not we're not about trying to create it because the customer engagement in the OTA space the way the o shares are we're engaged in trying to deliver the customer to the an OTA at the end of the day and if we do a good job of piecing together the travel pieces together we think we've served customer needs better we maintain relevancy to the consumer at the end of the day if we're relevant then we're a good marketing and distribution channel for our partners if we're not relevant we're not the interesting cuz booking for other search and Meta Search players you know hasn't always worked as planned so maybe next year we will revisit that so true or false voice is the next big browser a voice is impressive in terms of growth overall for sure we're seeing really great engagement you know over 50% of our traffic is on mobile today 20% of that is on voice and growing rapidly and in emerging markets it's going even more rapidly we're finding at markets where you know people skipped and gone straight to mobile and also in markets where literacy rates may be lower that people going straight to voice and so we're seeing you know very substantial growth rates on those markets in the early internet days when both of us had hair I mean I got abused suggesting people would book travel online yeah and they wouldn't do this and they were and with great confidence right and so now we're here in this yeah but they're not gonna book a hotel room with their voice well I mean it is it isn't it is it's beginning to happen you know I should clarify a little bit a lot of people think about voice and they think about the home device that we have in our kitchen or living room that Google produces will go assistant with lots of the assistant lives everywhere we have 500 million devices now that our assistant enabled and in travel in particular were very focused on the phone just because we think having the screen is an important piece of the information flow that's coming back to the consumer in fact you know mentioned two things that we're doing in the assistant within our travel team in particular pre-announced that are coming out later this month one is that we are doing hotel booking on the assistant in particular you can think of an example of traveling to a location actually there screenshot here if I was going to go to the gem Hotel in New York yeah ask about that hotel would ask me what date I want to stay there reply with a date then come back with the booking options I want in particular show me the terms and conditions of that and just say yes please book that for me so that's happening later this month we've got partners suppliers such as choice participating in that intermediaries such as Priceline and integration partners like travel click participate as well I think people forget the old days all the interaction was voice and then we had to learn this typing thing yeah so I'm surprised how much pushback there is going back to the natural voice but we'll see yeah talk about like how do you distinguish search and meta search especially with the latest major upgrades of hotel search at Google and Google flight search in the search or meta search or it doesn't matter there I mean I would look at our products as ultimately meta search and the Sun and you know for us it's about again a more complete answer for the consumer in most of these cases you're interested in looking at a range of options and we're trying to do is present to a user and what was wrong with hotel search that that the team believed it needed such an overhaul you know I think a couple things that we were trying to focus on more than anything there one is we really didn't think that we actually were doing a great job of showing comprehensiveness to the user and this is part of our back-end overhaul as well now so we're able to show user on a map all the choices in a market we've revamped in terms of the content that we're offering too so we have a very rich photo immersion experience deep reviews in the product as well too and frankly just a better look and feel across the product - it feels better to use the product now final question do you see flight search getting as big say in Europe as it is in the United States Oh a flight search was quite big in Europe for us now as well - so it's growing quite rapidly we're happy with the engagement we have there with consumers on it ladies and gentlemen Richard Holden thank you very much I felt appreciate again very decades [Music] who says be cheap is a good thing we do CheapOair calm there's nothing wrong with being cheap with having fun with saving money so go ahead be smart be cool be cheap just download click or call and save on the best flights hotels cars and more CheapOair calm go ahead be cheap say do you know trouble boys Japan trouble is Japan yes I know Nami it's a largest digital terminal trade news in Japan and he has some 500 thousand subscribers a month got so many same but isn't a fake news no it's not how do you know it because President Trump doesn't pick it as fake news media [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Phocuswright

Views: 1,399

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Keywords: phocuswright, conference, phocuswright conference, travel, tourism, hospitality, research

Id: oCFBrj4uldw

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018