Groupdesk

simplifying group travel

Overview

The group travel industry is broken. Sales are inconsistent, operations are scattered, archaic methods like paper forms and mail-in cheques are still being used, and travel agents and group travel staff spend hundreds of hours managing payments and customer service for each trip. With razor-thin margins, these issues needed to be solved.

Alex Handa, a life-long traveller and travel professional saw the opportunity for innovation and created Groupdesk. The most flexible and streamlined group travel system for sales, operations, customer service, and more. Bringing together the essential tools for agencies to run group trips successfully, while saving hundreds of staff hours per-trip.

Role & Process

I joined the team with prior experience using this product and knew some of the low hanging fruit that we could tackle together. Product performance, new clients, scaling the team, and integrations were all priorities. I needed to get up to speed quickly, gain the trust of the team, and launch us into the wider market.

Preliminary Goals:

• Onboard our first Enterprise Client

• Consistent & Reliable Release Process

• Set Up New Clients for Success

Priorities:

• Gain a Technical Understanding of the Product

• Create and Manage shared roadmap with Enterprise Team

• Develop Sales Tools and Onboarding Process

• Document and Communicate Groupdesk Processes

Validation:

• Established Agile Development process and brought consistency to release schedule

• Launched and on-boarded first Enterprise Client and SMB businesses to platform

• Created knowledge base process and training materials from scratch

• Championed projects to resolve technical debt, maintenance, and improve stability

• Enterprise relationship management including on-site visits, user interviews, partnered integrations, a shared prioritization roadmap and weekly meetings

• Fast-tracked MVP concepts with team workshops, wire-frames, and iterative releases

• Contributed to automated processes for retail users that saved 100+ hours per trip sold

• Reduced customer service requests with in-app admin controlled customization centre

• Launched GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) and Transaction dashboard, and Trip Calendar

• Prioritized feature development with long-term strategy and balancing customer requests, enterprise requirements, competitive needs, bugs, and technical debt

• Improved user value with automating processes, increasing ui legibility, reducing clutter, adding accessibility features, and implementing notifications for key stakeholder events

• Developed team Hackathon with CTO that outputted double our typical sprint output in an 8 hour event and strengthened team morale and engagement

• Led daily standup and weekly retros with development team (in-office and remote)

Community

Recommendations:

“I simply don't have the words to sufficiently recommend Amy. She worked tirelessly while leading product decisions at Groupdesk. She set ambitious goals for herself and for our product and poured everything into achieving those goals. [...] And, on top of all that, Amy is an incredibly fun person to work with. Every product and project I've worked on since would have been better off if Amy had been on the team.”

- Aaron Jarecki, Groupdesk CTO