By Teresa Torres · producttalk.org · @ttorres on X · LinkedIn
When COVID-19 closed international borders in 2020, Seera Group's Digital Hotels team saw demand shift from hotels to domestic alternative accommodations like chalets and Istrahas. Using opportunity solution trees built from customer interviews, the team separated guest and host journeys, reframed clusters into actionable opportunities, and used the tree to find an underserved market. They then ran competitive analysis against the top opportunities and kept stakeholders aligned through informal Miro walkthroughs. The story shows how a visual, evidence-based discovery structure lets a team pivot quickly when the environment changes unexpectedly.
01Key takeaways
- Keep talking to customers regularly, even when insights start to feel repetitive, and shift interview focus as needed.
- Separate opportunity trees for distinct customer types, such as guests and hosts in a marketplace, since their journeys differ.
- Let the tree evolve; reshuffling it after new insights is correcting course, not failure.
- Rank opportunities by how often customers raise them and their estimated impact to decide what to explore first.
- Share findings with stakeholders as informal, two-way walkthroughs of evidence rather than one-way presentations.
- Have every team member, including engineers and designers, interview customers directly to build shared understanding.
02Key sections
- The sudden collapse of international travel
- Border closures wiped out the team's core international bookings and pushed customers toward domestic, alternative lodging. Research and supply data then revealed gaps in certain cities.
- Building separate opportunity trees
- The team split the tree into guest and host versions because each had different journeys and goals. Early clusters were loose labels that were later reframed into five high-level opportunities with more specific children.
- Using the tree to prioritize
- Interview frequency and estimated impact guided which opportunities to explore first, and color marked the most valuable branches. Competitive analysis was then scored against themes drawn from the tree.
- Sharing findings with stakeholders
- Opportunities were translated into customer-need themes and shared through weekly, informal walkthroughs on Miro rather than formal slide presentations. This invited open two-way discussion.
- Challenges and lessons
- Recruiting hosts, sizing opportunities without existing data, and choosing which opportunities to validate first were hard. Supportive management and proactive engineers helped the team move forward.
03From the post
“Hi there, Product Talk readers! We can’t wait to share our latest Product in Practice with you. For this story, we spoke with a product team leading the Digital Hotels vertical at Seera Group, a travel and tourism company based in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The team”
04Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.