In the green room at Phocuswright Europe with... Thijs van As

Thijs van As, lead product manager, Google Flights

As lead product manager for Google Flights, Thijs van As will share how Google thinks about solving pain points and friction across the travel journey during Tech Talk: Google at Phocuswright Europe 2019.

In a series of interviews with executives participating at the event in Amsterdam in May, PhocusWire finds out what makes them tick...

What assumption about travelers have you found not to be true?

I think we need to be very careful when making assumptions about travelers. There are different reasons why people travel, and there are big differences in traveler behavior across markets and cultures. It may be easy to generalize, but you should be careful making assumptions when building products for travelers globally.

Do you agree with the often-used phrase, "travel planning is broken"?

I don’t think you can say that travel planning is broken; however, I strongly believe that the experience can be so much better than what it is today.

Travel planning is complicated. People often need to deal with budget and date constraints, and that can be quite stressful. I see a huge opportunity to help make travel planning fast and effortless. This is exactly what we’re trying to do with Google Flights.

Does the industry or do travelers drive change?

I believe that change is driven by both sides. For example, the global adoption of smartphones and mobile internet has caused significant changes in the way people travel.

With apps for door-to-door navigation, ride-sharing, social sharing and more, we travel in a very different way than we have in the past. The industry is adapting to these changes, and in turn introducing new value propositions for travelers.

Who uses your product in ways that you never expected?

One thing that really wows me are Google Flights power users. There are whole communities of people who spend hours each day on Google Flights hunting for flight deals, and it’s amazing to see how they’re using every single feature of the product.

Tell us something you dislike about your role in the company.

I can’t think of something that I really dislike about my role; however, the best thing is being able to build delightful features with real value for people at a global scale.

There are whole communities of people who spend hours each day on Google Flights hunting for flight deals, and it’s amazing to see how they’re using every single feature of the product.

Thijs van As - Google Flights

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For example, we were seeing that travelers had two fundamental problems when travel planning: They didn’t know what a good price was for a flight, and they didn’t know when to book. We knew that there was an opportunity to put Google’s comprehensiveness and compute infrastructure to work and make our users’ lives easier, so we introduced a new price insights tool to Google Flights.

This feature helps travelers understand whether flight prices for their trip are currently low, typical or high compared to what we've observed in the past. It's been very energizing to hear how this feature has helped people plan their trips.

What do you consider to be the best important invention in the digital world in the last 20 years?

The advent of 3G wireless communications. This standard and its evolutions have been gaining significant global adoption over the course of a decade, and it was a major step towards broadband internet on mobile phones.

I see the global connectivity this introduced as the cornerstone of most of today’s innovations. What enables life as we live it today is not just the fact that we're all carrying a computer (smartphone) in our pocket, but that all of them are connected.

What's one thing you're better at (professionally or otherwise) than anyone else?

I’m quite good at revealing my Dutch accent!

What devices do you use on a daily basis?

Our team is based in multiple offices across the globe, so the devices I rely on most are our video conferencing systems in meeting rooms.

Beyond that, I rely heavily on my phone to triage emails, review and edit documents.

If you woke up and had 2,000 unread emails and could only answer 300 of them, how would you choose which ones to answer?

I worked as a product manager on Gmail for years, so I have a particular soft spot for this topic. One of my favorite features is Gmail's Priority Inbox, which helps me sort through the clutter.

I’m quite on top of my inbox, but don’t let it dictate my priorities too much. I know what I want to get done in a day, and align my time accordingly. Everything else is on a best-effort basis. In practice, this means that I’m aggressively scanning subject lines and archiving emails.

Aisle, middle or window seat?

Aisle. I'm 6’4", so I like the bit of extra legroom.

What are you reading right now?

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s about how random events, chance and luck influence our lives and how we often fail to recognize this because of biases. It’s interesting and thought-provoking.