Why You’ll Never Plan Another Vacation with Vipul Hingne, CTO at Booking.com

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Vipul Hingne, interim CTO at Booking.com, about the AI advancements in travel tech. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:16) I am excited about this topic that we have for today about why we will never plan another vacation again, I guess. Is AI—is that what's going to plan everything for us in the future?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:00:28) That's a great hypothesis, and one I would like to believe is not completely true because I do love to plan my vacations. It brings me so much joy to plan vacations. I don't want to take all of that away and give it to AI. There are lots of things that cause friction and cause stress and are not intuitive. Those are the things I want AI to handle for me.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:00:54) But the joy of planning a vacation, I hope that still stays with humans and for me to plan my vacation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) It will. It'll just look different. It'll just be me planning it with the AI, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) And there's really very little joy planning complex business trips. So we could probably talk about that. I travel. I've got like 60 different flights this year, so I would love to just get the spreadsheet and send it to AI and then tell it all of my preferences and then have it propose a bunch of different itineraries and me just click accept, accept, accept. How far are we from that?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:01:30) I think that part is not too far off. I think we should be able to do that. From a technology perspective, things exist. How ready are humans to accept the technology and trust AI or trust some agent with your credit card? That's the part that I think is, you know, human behavior and where we need to understand how that evolves and get comfortable with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:02) Well, I'm ready, just so you know where I'm at. If you guys could roll this out by Friday, that would be great. The human in the loop stuff, that seems like where the first stage is going to be, right? Because obviously, when you look down at the most magnificent situation, it gets it right the first time. You tell it, "Hey, I want a trip here or there or whatever the details are," and it just figures everything out and it just knows you. But that's like way in the future. I think what's really close is me just giving it information or telling it, and then it proposing itineraries to me that I can then accept. So we're—you think we're like two years from that? I want you to put a time on it.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:02:40) Yeah. Well, let me take it a step back, right? I think what is interesting about travel is it's not just one thing. It's not just a flight. It's not just a hotel. It's a combination of flight and a hotel and maybe a rental car or a taxi or an experience that you want to do. And bringing it all together into one cohesive experience, or what we would like to call at Booking the connected trip. That is the hard part. And there's also still multiple aspects to it. There's one part which is just planning the itinerary. And that's where I think AI, Gen AI, is starting to play a huge role where it can take a human-centered conversational language and turn it into a plan, turn it into an itinerary that you can look at and say, "Yep, that makes sense. That makes sense." But that's still just the trip planning part. Then what happens when actually rubber meets the road when, you know, something happens and a snowstorm happens and a flight gets canceled? Or, you know, your hotel has some problems with your reservations. How do you support that during the trip? How do you, if you have some problems after the trip and the hotel charges you incorrectly, how do you go and take care of those extra charges? How do you provide post-trip support? That is where the challenge with trip planning is.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:03:58) It's not just about the initial, "Can I get my flights to get booked?" It's the whole process of planning your trip, experiencing your trip, hope it goes without any challenges, and then being able to react to things as they happen. I think that's where the challenge is. And there are some things that the AI is really ready to take over right now, like trip planning, and you can see that in the Booking application. You can go and give it—give your conversational language. "Here is what I'm doing. Here's what I want to do. Create an itinerary," and it will do that for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:36) Today? Today?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:04:37) We have an AI trip planner that we released. We're probably one of the first ones to release an AI trip planner, and that's been there for a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:46) And is it in the app or just online?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:04:49) It is in the app, but we test it, so not everyone in the world might see it at all given times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:57) I know you guys did a partnership with OpenAI. Can I just go to them and have them build the itinerary? And how does that work?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:05:02) Yeah. So we've been working very closely with OpenAI. One of the partnerships that we have with them is in their app ecosystem model. So you can connect the Booking app in the ChatGPT interface, and then you can invoke Booking app to plan your trip and it just works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:20) So I don't have to wait for—I can just go to OpenAI and install it right now. And then what does it just give me, like, a hot link to the itinerary and then I can check out? Like, how does that work?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:05:33) It will show you some options. And if you click on anything, it will click you out into the Booking application to go finish your purchase.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:42) All right. And the reason why I'm bringing up these little details and stuff is because a lot of the listeners are, you know, executive-type people. They travel a lot. Travel is a huge component of it, and we don't talk about it a whole lot on Modern CTO. But I think this is a good—who better to talk to about it than the guy running Booking.com? So how long have you been there, by the way?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:06:03) I've been working here for three years now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:06) Okay. How's it going?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:06:08) It's going well. Yeah. I love it. I love the energy. I love our mission. Our mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. And I'm an avid traveler myself, and what a noble vision to be a part of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:25) No, it's exciting. And then so you're able to—I'm so pumped up about all the AI stuff. I'm particularly excited about the use case of rescheduling a canceled flight. I think that's going to be pretty exciting. But also a lot of conversation, you know, with the AI because they have to present new options and you have to—are you guys doing anything right now, running any experiences with getting flights rescheduled with AI?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:06:50) So trip disruption is a major topic for us. That is something that we are actively investigating. How can we support travelers through trip disruptions? Like I was explaining earlier, a trip is composed of multiple parts. You start with trip planning a trip, then you get into the actual trip where problems might happen, and we want to support you during that. And then after the trip as well, there can be problems, and we provide support during that. So we are looking at all aspects of the customer journey of how they interact with their travel experience, and then we are looking at where can friction come up. And is AI the right thing to go help fix those things, right? So we don't want to use technology for the sake of technology and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:45) Doesn't work out all the time.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:07:48) Right? And then we don't want to just use it for the sake of it and not have a real problem to solve. Our focus is always on what is an unmet customer need that we can use a particular piece of technology to go and solve. And that's how we look at Gen AI as well. It's like, what is an unmet customer need here that we can go and solve? And to give an example, let's say your flight gets delayed, and you have a car rental arranged, or a taxi arranged to pick you up. How does the taxi driver know that you're running late, or how does the car rental company know that you're running late? If you're checking into a hotel, how do they know you're running late? And I think AI is really good at being able to message those people and say, "Hey. Joel is running late, and he's going to be here at so and so time now to pick up his car or to check in into his hotel." That is something that I think AI will be solved in very, very near-term future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:51) Of all the different experiments you're running, all the things on the roadmap that you're allowed to talk about. What is the one that you're most excited about?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:09:02) I cannot give you any specific examples of experiments we are running. But I can talk about what excites me and what is fun to do in this space. I think it's looking at different parts of the traveler journey and what can go wrong in that, or where can we use AI to really help them? Just to give you some examples using already released features, for example, property Q&A. As you create an itinerary, you say, "I'm a family of four people. I'm going to—I want to do a beach vacation. We like to spend time outdoors," whatever your preferences are, and you get an itinerary from Booking.com or any other AI travel agent. You get an itinerary. Now you need to actually go and book those things. You book each of those things, which is not there yet where you can automatically book the entire itinerary. But you go to a hotel, you go to looking at a list of hotels that you might want to book. How do you know this hotel is the best for you, right? And there, we can have a way to use AI to summarize all the reviews. Booking.com has thousands of reviews for every property. We can use AI to summarize the results based on your personal request of what kind of a traveler you are, what kind of experience you're looking for. The AI can look at the thousands of reviews, filter out the things that match your criteria, and create a summary that is personalized to you that makes it easy for you to decide, is this hotel a good hotel for me to book or not, right? That's getting into nuance. Or if you have specific questions, you can, instead of looking through the thousand reviews, you can start asking questions and say, "Hey. Does this hotel allow pets? If I have a 100-pound dog, is this hotel going to let me bring my 100-pound dog into the property or not?" Now this is not something that you might find on the hotel website easily. But with AI, looking at previous reviews, all of these kinds of stuff, we can answer all of these questions very easily. Or if you reach out to the hotel for something specific, or you message the hotel about a question, we now have smart messenger or auto-reply that can immediately reply without waiting for a human to look at the question and reply to the answers. Based on a whole lot of similar questions that other travelers have asked for and how they were responded to by the hotel, we can automatically answer that for you. So there's lots of things with AI that are already getting very easy and part of your regular process of booking on Booking.com that you may not even realize are powered by Gen AI.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:58) And how did the partnership with OpenAI come about? Do you guys approach them? Do they approach you? How does that actually work?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:12:05) So I think it was mutual. I think travel has been a very important use case for all of Gen AI LLM model creators and LLM providers. And we have been users of machine learning and AI for the longest time. So when ChatGPT was announced, we were both very eager to work with each other. And I think within—we released our first AI trip planner within 14 weeks of working with ChatGPT. And since then, we have had multiple different things that we've been working with them and that we have already released, like I mentioned, the property Q&A. We've done integration with the ChatGPT app ecosystem, and that happened late last year. So we've been on this journey together with them. Even before ChatGPT came along, Booking.com has been a very advanced user of machine learning and AI. We had already built great foundations that allowed us to use machine learning algorithms and recommend hotels to people that made sense for them, that they were most likely to like. So we have a long history of using machine learning and AI. And when advances with Gen AI and LLMs came along, we were really ready to be able to adopt them and release something very quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:47) But I am curious, like, how does it actually happen? Are you guys like at a conference together and you're like, "Hey. We should do something." Do you pick up the phone and call? Like, how does it actually—I don't know. I've never been—I've done three startups. They were all under 100 people, built them and sold them. I've never been a part of like a massive enterprise level. I don't know how that stuff happens.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:14:06) Usually, the strategy teams talk to companies, get into a high-level agreement, and then the product and business teams get together and work out the details and move forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:17) Oh, that's pretty cool.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:14:18) And then there's always dialogue between the product and technology teams and the strategy teams of what's coming down the pipe, where do we think we should be looking at, where should we be having our eyes open.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:14:28) And there's a collaboration inside the company between the product and strategy teams, and that's how we do partnerships or collaboration opportunities across the industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:39) This is pretty cool. I'm learning today. I'm learning today. We're having a good day. Have you done a lot of work with enterprise AI adoption?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:14:48) Yes. Yes. So we do a lot of work with enterprise AI adoption. If you look at our AI strategy, we roughly think about two different things. One is, how are we using AI to help our customers? What are the unmet business needs that the customers have that we can solve using AI or Gen AI? And secondly, how can we improve our internal employee experience? How can we reduce the friction that our internal employees face? Or how can we make our internal employees more efficient using Gen AI? So we have a work stream now for the last three years within the company that looks at what is the latest and greatest? What tools are out there? How can we deploy AI? How can we make every employee within Booking.com more efficient using AI? How can we add value to an employee using AI? So we are constantly looking at those, and we have deployed lots of solutions, not just for engineering, which is the most common use case and that's something that people hear about a lot. Code gen tools for writing code, but also for HR teams, for finance teams, for legal teams. As an example, we collaborated with the legal team that allows us to review legal contracts much more easily. And what used to take weeks can now take minutes or hours for legal teams to review because we now have AI to help them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:21) How do you get people to use it, like, within the org? Do you have to—how do you go about doing that?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:16:27) So we have a holistic education program within Booking.com and also an evangelization program. So we do a lot of different things to, first of all, figure out what are the important problems we want to solve using AI. So we have ideas coming out of everywhere within the company. Then we kind of stack rank those ideas and see—if we have hundreds of ideas coming, we may not be able to try everything all at once.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:17:00) So which ones are the most important ones or most easy ones for us to look at first? So we categorize those ideas into a streamline, and then we go try those things out. And if it works, then we evangelize it. We share it across the community. We target groups of people that would benefit most from that solution, and then we roll it out to groups of people, and then they become evangelizers.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:17:29) If they really have fun or they have benefit using those tools, then they will go tell their colleagues, so they will talk about it to other people. And that kind of cycle continues.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:42) Have you ever had people that are resistant to adopting the technology on your team, or is everybody on your team 100%?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:17:51) Well, there's always early adopters and late adopters, right? So what we think about is how do you manage change within the organization?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:01) How do you look at

(Vipul Hingne at 00:18:03) what is it that we want to change within the organization or adoption of a tool or adoption of a technology? Who are the most likely people to adopt it first? Who are the champions who would do it? How do we get them excited? How do we get them to start using it? And then how do we get them to evangelize? And then there's always a curve of some people start first, some people come to it later.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:18:36) So there's a normal adoption curve for most things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:40) So what are you doing over in the platform modernization area?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:18:44) From platform modernization, again, it goes back to we are a tech company. We are a technology company that focuses on travel. And we think of the scale and complexity at which we operate, we have really strong technical foundations that have helped us to achieve that scale and complexity. So since the beginning of Booking.com, we have built massively complex technical platforms that helped us achieve the scale and get to where we are today. In the last few years, a lot has changed.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:19:23) The landscape is changing. The kinds of experiences that we envision will help our partners continue in the future, continue to have great travel experiences in the future, continue to reduce friction in travel, require us to operate at a different kind of scale and complexity. When we think about our technology platform, it needs to provide two key things. It needs to provide us with speed and it needs to provide us with control. In order to continue to develop great experiences at the scale and complexity, we need to be able to move with speed.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:20:04) At the same time, we need to maintain control to make sure that we're not breaking anything while we are moving with speed. So as the scale and complexity matures, as we are trying to incorporate new experiences, we have to continue to modernize our platform so that we can continue to operate at that scale and complexity and provide the speed and control for the organization necessary to move forward. So that kind of underlies, that decides what we modernize on. So since the beginning, we've built an amazing platform, but now we need to continue to move away from some of that legacy infrastructure into more modern microservices-based architecture, distributed services architecture that will continue to help us in the coming years as we continue to bring more connected experience to travel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:09) Before I ask you a bunch of questions about leading teams and all that good stuff, can you just give me the 30-second overview of your career, how you got into technology, where you've, about what you've done, and then how you've made it all the way

(Vipul Hingne at 00:21:27) to where you are today? Sure. So I grew up in India. I came to US for my master's in computer science. From there, I joined Microsoft in Xbox.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:21:39) I worked in Xbox for nine years, and then I moved to India for a couple of years leading Bing Finance. Then I moved back to US, and I joined PlayStation as Director of Engineering, leading, working in the PlayStation team. And I worked there for another nine years in the gaming industry, helping launch PlayStation 5 and a whole bunch of other media and entertainment applications on PlayStation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:15) Alright, so you were at Xbox, and then you were there for almost a decade. Then you went to Bing. Is that correct? Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:22) So you were staying in the Microsoft ecosystem. And then you're going over to the dark side over at PlayStation. You go to PlayStation, right? Because they're the competitors. Xbox and PlayStation. And then you helped launch the PlayStation 5? Yes. Today, if you had to choose one, if it had to be PlayStation or Xbox, what are you going to choose as your primary console?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:22:43) PlayStation, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:46) Oh, no. We can't be friends now. You would love my brother, though. Well, my brother, I'm Apple, I'm Xbox. He's Android and PlayStation. We are complete opposites when it comes to technology consumption, but we still love you anyways. PlayStation's still got some pretty cool stuff going. They're both actually, compared to the games you and I had growing up, anything a modern Xbox or PlayStation could do is like alien technology, you know?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:23:14) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:16) Yeah. That is so cool. So why jump out of gaming? You seem like you had almost 20. Did you feel like you've done everything you could do in gaming?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:23:24) I really enjoyed working in gaming for 20 years, but I was never really a hardcore gamer. And I always wanted to, I enjoy travel a lot. I always wanted to work in the travel space, and it was really a coincidence. I visited Amsterdam for a vacation, and I really enjoyed Netherlands and being in this part of the world, living in Europe. And I went back to US, and the next week, I received a call from Booking.com.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:23:58) It's like, "Hey, we have a position. Are you interested?" And I was like, "Oh, I like travel. I really enjoyed Netherlands, and I'm kind of ready for a change at this point."

(Vipul Hingne at 00:24:10) And this was the perfect storm of things that happened, and my family had also considered living and working in Europe. So we all made a decision. It's like, "Hey, now's the time. Let's go explore this opportunity," and it worked out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:28) I love the PlayStation and the Xbox stuff. So that's the arc of your career and how you ended up getting to Booking.com. Now throughout your experience of becoming, you know, individual contributor through managing people, I want to talk about that right there. When was the first time that you thought, "Okay, I want to be more than individual contributor on this tech team"?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:24:51) So I think it started at Xbox, and I could see that I could only do so much as an individual in terms of delivering tech, and there was so much more I could do if I could leverage a team of people. And I could have a much bigger impact if I could leverage a team of people to deliver. And that's when I kind of discussed with my management that, "Hey, this is something that I would like to try on," and they were very supportive and provided me with opportunities. And that kind of started the journey of leadership and getting into management.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:30) Oh, that's cool. And then were you hooked now that you had the ability to organize a group of people to achieve a greater outcome than you could as an individual? Were you like, "This is what I love"?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:25:40) Absolutely. Yeah. This is absolutely my passion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:44) That is so cool. And then how did you go to the next step? So now let's say you're managing a team. How did you then take that step from managing a single team or maybe one or two teams to more of a VP level where you're managing multiple teams of people?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:25:58) It's a journey of multiple years where you go from managing a single team to managing multiple teams and then teams of teams and then teams of teams of teams. And again, I think it was not a planned thing. I was always looking at what can I do to continue to improve my impact? And I would always think about how can I get myself out of a job? How can I delegate or create an organization where I'm not necessary, where whatever I do, I've translated it into systems and processes that can run with or without me?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:26:40) And when I would do that, then I would be ready to take on more responsibility. And that kind of helped me continue to grow as I progressed through my career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:51) Have you ever done the entrepreneur? I didn't see anything in your history about the entrepreneurial thing. Have you ever done that?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:26:56) Well, a lot of the teams that I've worked in were very entrepreneurial in nature,

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:00) but I've never done a startup myself.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:27:06) But when I started at Xbox, it was a very small team. We were a 30-person team that were building Xbox. At PlayStation, I started different product lines from scratch, working from taking a project from R&D to launch. So I've worked in entrepreneurial projects in big enterprises, but not being an entrepreneur myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:31) Yeah. You got that entrepreneurial behavior. You'd be surprised at how rare it is to hear an employee describe how you describe the role, because that's what every entrepreneur wants the teams to do, but it's so hard to sit there and get an employee to say, "Hey look, I want you to automate yourself out of existence so that I can give you something new." They see it as, "This is my thing, and I need to be critical here." And so, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:56) "I need to be irreplaceable here." And it's almost like the two energies are at odds. And so to find team members that you can join forces with that are all on the same page, like, "Hey, let's just automate this and make ourselves useless so that we can find the next big profitable problem to solve." That is the foundation of those teams that have a lot of success.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:28:18) Yeah. And I've been very privileged to be able to have those opportunities where I was part of organizations that were growing constantly, that always had a need to do a lot more. And that provided me with these kinds of opportunities to not just automate myself out, but then have more opportunities. That's not always true as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:41) What's your favorite game? I gotta ask that. I can't do this interview without asking you your favorite game.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:28:47) These days, I don't game a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:52) Do you have kids now?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:28:54) My kids do game a lot. I can tell you my kids' favorite games. When I used to game, I used to enjoy playing Forza on Xbox a lot. That was my favorite. Racing games were my favorite genre.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:07) Did you have the whole rig set up with the actual steering wheel and everything, or you just controller?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:29:12) In my office, I had the whole, well, we had all the different kinds of accessories that were available. So, yeah, we definitely had fun playing on those rigs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:22) That is cool. What games are your kids playing now?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:29:25) Well, Minecraft is really popular with my younger kid, and then Elden Ring with my older one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:32) Okay. I have a leadership question for you. So I'm always interested. You've had this career, 20 years in gaming. Now you're running Booking.com. There's all this great leadership advice that you get to experience and try out and put into practice. You know, everybody says stuff. You see social clips. You read books. You learn stuff from your managers. I'm looking for one piece of advice. And the constraints are something that you learned, somebody told you, you learned, you read. You put into practice, and then it worked really well, and you've kept it all these years. What's that piece of leadership advice?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:30:12) A really good question again. So I clearly remember I was working at Xbox, and I was a very new manager at that time. And I was walking up the stairs with my manager, and one of my peers from another team was walking down the stairs, and I made a, I teased him about something. I can't remember exactly what, but I teased him about something. And we were good friends. It was all in good humor. And then my manager, he was very sarcastic and very short, and he said, "That's a great way to build a relationship." And it kind of stuck with me. It's like, "Hey, he's right."

(Vipul Hingne at 00:31:00) In a corporate environment, in the enterprise, you have to collaborate with people. And you have to, in order to collaborate with people, you need to build positive relationships with people. And it is extremely important how you show up, what signals you send when you are teasing someone in the hallway, what signal it sends to somebody else who might be around, and what impact that can have. But the core thing that I learned was building and maintaining positive relationships with your peers is going to help you achieve a lot more than you can do without it. And that has stuck with me and has really helped. That's something that I always am very conscious of and always looking at how to collaborate better with my colleagues so that, you know, together, we can have a much bigger impact than each of us could ever individually have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:07) So you stop making fun of people? I get it. I get it. There's a time and a place, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:14) Actually, knowing when to use humor at work is a very hard thing to learn. You make a lot of mistakes, you know. And it's because it's not like people are the same. Everybody's very different. What might be incredibly funny to one person is like a personal attack to another.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:32:32) Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, of course, there might be some people who might be witnessing it, not knowing the relationship the two of you have. And even if the other person didn't take any offense, someone else might feel irritated or take it the wrong way, and that's not cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:54) That is true. Yeah. I've got some interesting friend groups and the way that we joke with each other. If you're an outside person, if you're in the coffee shop and you're watching it, you might be like, "What is going on over there?" Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:06) Oh, we're having a good time, though. What is one question as a leader that you wish that you got asked more often?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:33:17) Yeah. I think the

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:18) one thing that I keep getting asked a

(Vipul Hingne at 00:33:21) lot is what keeps you up at night. I wish people ask me, what are you most excited about?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:29) Well, I did, but then your roadmap was private, so I couldn't talk about that. So, internally, you wish people ask what you are more excited about. Okay. They really do. They ask you what keeps you up at night.

(Vipul Hingne at 00:33:41) Yeah. That's

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:42) Yeah. Yeah. Well, now I want to know what keeps you up

(Vipul Hingne at 00:33:45) at night.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:48) You're like, Mikey, explain Minecraft. Yeah. Jet lag and Minecraft. Those things keep me up at night. When you have, you've got some direct reports right now. And I'm always curious to know what's one behavior, something that they're doing that when you see this actually in practice, you see this behavior playing out, you think to yourself, "Yeah. I want to invest in that person. I think they're meant for something more. I think they're able to play a larger role here long term." What behavior is that? What are they doing?

(Vipul Hingne at 00:34:20) So I'll probably say two things. One is learner's mindset. If I see someone get curious when someone expresses a view that maybe they don't agree with or that is different than how they would think, instead of

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:40) trying to say, "Hey, I don't agree with that" or "That's not how

(Vipul Hingne at 00:34:45) I see it," they get curious and try to understand why is that person thinking about it that way. And a lot of times, it opens your eyes and helps you get ready for new things or things that you had never thought about. It opens your world. And that learner's mindset is something that I value a lot because that means that the person can continue growing.

(Vipul Hainey at 00:35:10) They can continue to learn. They can continue to get better each day and expand their scope. So that's a person that I really love to invest in. The second thing I would say is when I see someone who suffers a setback with something and they look at what could I have done differently or what role did I play in this challenge? What could I have done differently?

(Vipul Hainey at 00:35:39) What can I do differently so that I don't get the same outcome again? So instead of thinking about all the things that happened because of which I'm in the situation, they think about what can I do? What is in my control? How can I have a more protagonist mindset to say, I am the hero in the story? I decide what the outcome is.

(Vipul Hainey at 00:36:00) It is incumbent on me to be able to change the direction or change the trajectory.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:08) And when I see that, I

(Vipul Hainey at 00:36:11) was like, I want to invest in this person because this is the kind of culture that we like to have at Booking.com, and that's what I would like to see in my teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:22) How do you get that out of them in interviews? If you're bringing on someone new from the outside, how do you design an interview that allows you to pick up on that?

(Vipul Hainey at 00:36:32) There's a number of questions that you can ask. I always try to ask people about, describe a situation when such and such a thing happened. What did you do? What was your reaction? Or describe a time when someone had an idea that was very different than how you think. How did you respond?

(Vipul Hainey at 00:36:50) How did you react? Those are the kinds of questions that I ask.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:54) All right. Well, we're a little bit over time here. We're gonna go ahead and wrap it up. What's one thing that you wish you could share with all the technology leaders listening out there today?

(Vipul Hainey at 00:37:05) Well, I would say don't do tech for tech. Technology is in service of your customers, whoever your customers are. What is the unmet customer need that you're trying to solve for, and how can any technology help you in meeting that unmet customer need? That's how technology leaders need to be thinking about and not just thinking about tech for tech's sake.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:32) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.