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Jorge de Lima Jorge de Lima

Case study 03 · Booking.com for Business

Team management & budget governance

Two projects extending the B4B growth thesis past onboarding — scaling teams, then governing the spend that comes with them.

Ledger · Part 1

Team management

Hypothesis

Reducing friction and confusion in admin workflows will increase active users and booking volume per account.

Testing for

  • Invite flow completion rate
  • Active users per account, post-invite

Status

Release 1 shipped — R2 in progress

Engagement uplift measured across every tracked admin action. The outcome metric in the hypothesis was never traced to a number.

Ledger · Part 2

Budget governance

Hypothesis

Framing budget tools as guidance rather than policing will increase adoption and reduce confusion.

Testing for

  • Adoption of budget-setting features
  • Reduction in policy-related support requests

Status

Shipped — metrics unavailable

Fully live. I left the team before usage data could be collected, so adoption is reported qualitatively only.

Context & challenge

The same growth data that shaped the registration redesign extended further: accounts with 100+ users generated 156 bookings a month against 2.7 for single-user accounts. Registration got people in the door. Two further questions followed from that same thesis — could admins actually grow their teams once inside, and could they trust the tools that governed spend as those teams scaled.

Accounts with 100+ users

156

bookings per month

Single-user accounts

2.7

bookings per month

Role & contribution

Senior Product Designer across both projects, working with Jacqui (Product Manager), James (Product Owner), Lucas (Senior Software Engineer), Chris (Lead Software Engineer), Scott (Lead Researcher), and Keryn (Senior Researcher).

Product

Jacqui, James

Research

Scott, Keryn

Engineering

Lucas, Chris

Part 1 — Team management

Research & insights

Value hypothesis: if we reduce friction and confusion in admin workflows, admins will successfully invite and manage more colleagues, increasing active users and booking volume per account. Analysis of usage patterns and error logs, plus qualitative sessions with real admin users, surfaced four concrete pain points.

  1. 01Inefficient workflows for routine admin tasks.
  2. 02Unexplained errors, with no route to resolution.
  3. 03No guidance on the more complex functions.
  4. 04UI inconsistencies that eroded trust in the platform.
Legacy admin navigation, deep nested menus
BeforeLegacy admin navigation
Release 1 navigation variants explored
AfterRelease 1 variants — restructured navigation

Design strategy & approach

Delivery was phased to manage engineering risk. Release 1 restructured navigation, removed redundant functions, and established a clearer hierarchy — reducing cognitive load before introducing new interactions.

Release 2 redesigns the team and guest management flows themselves: clearer invite flows, better search and filter tools, consistent state and error messaging, aligned with the broader Eos platform system. Interactive prototypes validated micro-interactions before development at each stage.

Results & impact

Release 1 is shipped and live. Post-launch engagement shows uplift across every tracked action.

Admin action Change
Invite colleaguesplus 805%
Payment sectionplus 189%
Manage team actionsplus 166%
Company details accessplus 161%
RUC / registration sectionplus 142%
General settings useplus 139%

Worth being precise about what this does and doesn't prove: these are engagement uplifts — a leading indicator that the redesigned navigation is working, not the outcome metric the original hypothesis was built on (active users and booking volume per account). That connection wasn't tracked through to a number.

Page selections from the Administration menu, monthly, January to July 2024
ResultsPage selections from the Administration menu, monthly · Jan–Jul 2024
Part 2 — Budget governance

Research & insights

Admins struggled to visualise budget hierarchy. Policy enforcement felt punitive rather than preventive. A lack of real-time feedback reduced trust in the system.

The insight that reframed the brief: budget tools need to feel like guidance systems, not policing systems.

Strategy & solution

Shifted from list-based configuration to a structured hierarchy visualisation, built on three pillars: transparency, predictability, and real-time contextual feedback.

Legacy hotel budgets screen, flat country list
BeforeList-based budget configuration
Redesigned hotel budgets screen with per-country hierarchy and currency conversion
AfterStructured hierarchy visualisation
  • Redesigned the budget overview dashboard
  • Clarified allocation structures and hierarchies
  • Introduced visual indicators for policy constraints
  • Improved the interaction patterns for editing and reviewing budgets
Adding a hotel budget for a new country: choosing the location, then the budget field switching to that country's local currency
InteractionAdding a budget abroad — currency follows the chosen location
Budget overview dashboard with per-city budgets and row-level actions
Final UIBudget overview — country, city and per-row actions

Reflection & learnings

Together these extend the B4B story past a single flow: onboarding got people in, team management got them inviting colleagues, budget governance made that growth something admins could trust rather than fight. The budget governance insight — guidance over policing — went on to influence how governance features were introduced elsewhere in the ecosystem.

That said, the evidence trail is uneven and worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over: real numbers for Team Management Release 1, none yet for Budget Governance.

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