INGA LATHAM
HOW SITEMINDER’S PRODUCT AND TECHNOLOGY TEAMS STAYED MOTIVATED AND INNOVATIVE DURING THE PANDEMIC, WHILE SERVICING THE TRADITIONAL HOTEL INDUSTRY by Inga Latham, Chief Product Officer at SiteMinder Leading a growing team of product and technology
environments that suited their needs. We also
professionals comes with the excitement of
introduced Social SiteMinder, whereby all managers
collaborating with the best talent to build industry-
were given their own budget to organise team events,
leading services. However, keeping everyone aligned
rather than being dictated to by executive or global
on both the long-term strategy and the immediate
mandates.
requirements is a daily challenge. Throughout the pandemic, these aspects of my job at SiteMinder were heightened, as we doubled down on the drive to develop products that would help our hotel customers succeed when the impacts of limited travel abated. At the same time an almost overnight shift to company-wide remote working forced us to redefine what successful collaboration (a process that usually involved a lot of face-to-face interaction and whiteboards) should look like.
Post-it notes were digitised overnight. We explored new tools allowing us to mimic our typical physical whiteboarding sessions, and we found we needed many more alignment meetings than usual to ensure everyone was on the same page. When you don’t have everyone in the same room, it’s harder to gauge how actively people are listening and you can’t see the body language to understand how well something has landed.
While there were many potential distractions and
At the same time, we took the opportunity to step
temptations during the pandemic to pivot our
up our customer research capability and testing
business towards, what was critical for motivation
efforts to ensure we had the evolving needs of
and confidence was maintaining our focus on the
our customers at the forefront of our product
strategic programs of work we knew would surprise
development. Team members now have much more
and delight our customers; alongside delivering a
empathy for our customers’ context and needs, and
couple of tactical initiatives to alleviate COVID-driven
it helps us all to focus on real people and real needs
customer needs. We then turned our focus to our
versus “highfalutin” ideas.
ways of working.
REALIGNING OUR WORK HABITS New initiatives like Open Working @ SiteMinder, which allow staff to choose how and when they work remotely or from the office, provided everyone with the autonomy to consciously choose working
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Collaboration sessions that had involved lots of
WOMEN IN SECURITY MAGAZINE
Once we were allowed to return to the office, it was a good time to run regular small group events to keep the spirit and culture of SiteMinder alive and integrate new team members. People need to feel a sense of team, start forming the relationships required to get their jobs done, and create a connection with the organisation. Communication has always been
