CASE: Haven
Product Director
The Situation
We were approached by Haven, one of the largest holiday providers in the UK, to recruit a Product Director for their digital team.
Haven is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bourne Leisure Group. Across its various brands, Bourne Leisure employs more than 16,000 staff, hosts 25,000 holiday-home owners, and attracts 4.5 million guests to 56 sites across the UK a year. In February 2021, Bourne Leisure was acquired by the US-based private equity firm The Blackstone Group.
Our CEO, Bryan MacDonald has had a longstanding professional relationship with a member of the advisory board at Blackstone Group who heard about the role opportunity. He suggested that we work on this exciting new project and put us in contact with Haven’s CDO, who Bryan had also worked with before.
When we began the search, the company was investing significantly in Digital, with plans to double the existing team of 90. There were also aspirations to improve engagement with guests, owners and employees at every stage of the Haven experience from booking holidays to being at a park itself. The aim was to deliver a seamless experience for all users across Haven’s website and apps, and the Product Director was set to play a key role in this.
The Opportunity
Haven was looking to recruit an individual to join Haven.com and lead the Sales Product Tribe in the digital team. They needed a world-class Product Director to replace the incumbent seamlessly. This role would be responsible for selling £200-250M of holidays a year by reducing friction and improving the experience of buying a holiday at Haven.com. The role-holder would also help thousands of new owners to understand the Haven proposition and find their new Holiday Home on one of their parks around the UK. The individual would own everything on the Haven website, including content, SEO, CRO and merchandising.
Recruiting for this role was an exciting opportunity as Haven was in the middle of their digital transformation. Around 80% of the user-facing products had been re-platformed, but the majority of the back-end products were still on legacy platforms. As a key leader in the digital team, the candidate would play a role in this transformation. As in any digital transformation, the individual would need to be able to take people along on a journey with them and communicate in a way that less digitally-literate stakeholders would understand. There was a need to craft a vision for Digital product and sell it to the rest of the business. The role-holder needed strong influencing skills to push-back against company default positions and win buy-in from traditionalists and digital-sceptics.
What made this interesting?
This was our first time working with Haven so we spent a lot of time in the early stages getting to know the culture at this leading holiday provider.
Another first for us at The Digital Board was recruiting for a Product role. To ensure success, we spent a lot of time understanding exactly what the client was looking for in the role. Additionally, hiring for this new role meant that we would be interviewing candidates of a different DNA from many of the other roles that we are more accustomed to hiring.
What made this challenging?
A key challenge at the start of this search was that we were tasked with finding a replacement for the incumbent Product Director, who was well-liked and highly respected at Haven - in other words, we had big shoes to fill.
Another challenge during this process was that the search fell over the holiday period, which affected the momentum of the search and impacted the willingness of candidates to want to seek a new opportunity.
Further along in the search, there were two candidates that fit the brief exceptionally and were well-liked by the client. One of these candidates unfortunately had to withdraw at this late stage for personal reasons. This meant encouraging the second candidate, who was also in advanced discussions with another organisation, to prioritise this opportunity.
The Digital Board Process
As we had never worked with Haven, the client briefing calls were vital for fully understanding the organisation and its culture before we could begin our search. We worked with the CDO, who was our main point of contact throughout the search, as well as the incumbent to get a feel for her contribution to the organisation and the ins and outs of the role itself. Following these initial conversations, we briefed our research team. To form a target list, our team had to identify candidates with a number of key elements:
Product evangelist – the Digital team had a truly ‘product-led’ culture and the candidate would be responsible for managing the full product life cycle, accountable for creating and implementing Product Roadmaps, Product Strategy and Product vision. Therefore, the candidate needed the necessary experience to promote a product-led culture in the organisation.
Conversion experience – the successful candidate would be responsible for the entire customer acquisition strategy and the products that underpin it from browsing to checkout and booking.
Strong communicator – the candidate needed sell Digital to stakeholders and drive forward the digital transformation by taking them on a journey.
Using this criteria our research team found a comprehensive list of potential candidates that fit this brief, setting up calls to assess (1) level of interest in the opportunity (2) how far they fit the criteria (3) key achievements in their role and their (4) culture alignment and beyond.
We then began the first stage of our Digital Board assessment. This was a qualification with Alexandra (our leadership consultant). In total we conducted nine qualification assessments to take a deeper dive into the candidates’ suitability for the role.
Several candidates then progressed to their final interview with Bryan, who produced a shortlist for the client.
In case there were any issues with the shortlist, our team worked behind the scenes to find new potential back-up candidates throughout the process.
Success Story
We were able to deliver a candidate with an excellent fit to the brief. They had transformation experience and many years of travel industry knowledge behind them which was exceptionally important to the client. On top of this, they had experience with conversion rates across web, mobile and app.
The successful candidate also had an excellent leadership ethic with a desire to coach and mentor their teams. The client felt this candidate fit the Haven culture incredibly well and would gel seamlessly in the company. The candidate had been in advanced discussions with another organisation, but they too felt the connection with Haven, and accepted the offer that was made.