When Adjusting Mid-Project Saved This Product Manager's Career

Uh, I wouldn't, OK, uh, just again, I would like to give a context, uh, in the context of, uh, uh, with the initial partner we were launching, uh, occupancy-based pricing. So typically at, uh, regulars, if you actually shop at regular hotel, you will see the price of one person would not vary significantly. With the price of 2 people or 3 people in a room, but typically for a resort hotel where they would actually want to attract more number of people to stay in the hotel because, uh, they would gain revenue through the other services at the hotel, meaning more like, uh, a dinner or, uh, a, uh, uh, a theme park that is associated with that particular hotel kind of so, so in this particular resort hotels where they needed a, a requirement that says like we need to price by occupancy, meaning. If you're 1 adult, you get a different price. If you have 2 adults staying in a room, you get a different price. 3 adults, different price. And in fact, like 4 adults could be cheaper than 2 adults staying in a room. So 4 adults' price could be much, much lower, uh, on the room. Because they want more people to stay in a given room, so, uh, this is the kind of requirement that we got from the customer that they need an occupancy-based pricing, uh, based on number of people, and, uh, uh, we kind of designed the initial requirement was for adults, children, teen, infants, so number of adults, number of infants, number of teen, and number of, uh, children. I mean, we'll have to cater, so we kind of designed the entire solution. To cater for 1 adult, 2 adults, 3 adults, 4 adult, 5, same children, same teen, 1 adult, 1 teen, 2 teen, 3 teen, kind of, and we kind of modeled our pricing engine to be able to take the prices from the user for all this entire matrix, uh. And uh almost went through with the implementation and at one particular stage of the integration uh implementation is integration with the property management. So initially when I said like we're a CRS product and then there's a property management product. So one of the market leaders in property management is Oracle, which is they have a product called Opera, uh, which is, uh, Oracle PMS. Uh, now we had to integrate this with Opera. At this particular stage, we kind of realized that opera doesn't support 1 child, 2 child, 3 child, 4 child. Of course they do support 1 adult, 2 adult, 3 adult, 4 adult kind of dimension for adult pricing, they support this occupancy based, but for child, teen, infant, they don't, they don't support this. Uh, dimension of one child, two children, so you can't have a different prices based on number of children or number of teens in your room. So at this stage we kind of realized that even if we, we kind of design and almost develop the product in CRS and, uh, then we realized that one of the prominent player in the market that like you have significant or at least 80% of the resort hotels operating on Opera PMS don't support this. Uh, so we had to, uh, kind of at this stage we had to kind of, uh, scale back on the design, but, uh, to integrate just with Opera, so we had to redesign, uh, on the last application. So I kind of volunteered up to, uh, take this up, uh, escalated to the management, uh, saw that, uh, for Oracle integration adoption layer we need to come up with a new cost, went back to resizing of that, uh, aspect. But then I saw an opportunity in this problem as well where like I saw that, uh. OK, this is a shortfall on an existing market leading product. Now we also have MODS as an another product on property management as well, but we are a very, very small player up there. So we kind of said, OK, that product, which is a market leader, don't support this feature, but we have a product within MIDS where it is an integrated CRS PMS product, so we could, we could have the same capability up in, in my, in our particular product. So we tried to this kind of in a way uh kind of helped us in a different dimension to cross sell a different product within our portfolio on the PMS side where we were able to uh leverage this benefit so we kind of had to, uh, res redesign, uh, for the end when halfway through the development. And I kind of took a lead to uh see an opportunity there where, uh, we were almost halfway through and then realized this issue with the, the opera and but then it kind of uh helped me pitch in, uh, and cross sell a different product within from our portfolio.

Sorry, can you repeat

Exactly. That, that's the, that, that's, that's the surprising factor because we were, uh, currently we don't, the CRS don't have this dimension. So when we had to envision, uh, building a new, new future on CRS, we were more focused on building it within the CRS. We never saw the, uh, the layers outside the CRS. That was like, uh, that was a mistake. We, we kind of and uh in fact it's not just a mistake from memory side because even the partner who actually handles the integration with all the channels they even they did not see that issue at that point in time.

So we, uh, kind of being able to integrate with, so this is like a tricky one, because there's no predefined result up here, uh, which to say like whether it's a success, it's not a, it's not a black and white, uh, definition of success and failure in this particular case. It was, it was a delayed timeline, so technically we could call it as a failure, but the success from MDS side is we were able to point out. Uh, a shortfall in a market leading product and we were able to cross sell, gain business by cross selling our product at a couple of resort hotels which were ready to take Amadius PMS product in lieu of Opera.