Kellogg's purpose is to educate, equip & inspire brave leaders who create lasting value. Tell us about a time you have demonstrated leadership and created lasting value. What challenges did you face, and what did you learn?

I had just been promoted to Product Manager, and was taking on my first big initiative: increasing hotel bookings on our mobile app by 5%. This was the first year that my team had focused on app booking growth, and we had no historical test results to guide us. It was up to me, and my team of designers and engineers, to understand why app users weren’t booking hotels and how we could build a better experience for them.

During a brainstorming session, one developer noted that users had to scroll quite far down the checkout form before they could start entering their personal information. Inspired by this observation, I worked with a designer to create different prototypes of the form that allowed users to input their information more easily. We gathered customer feedback on the prototypes, and the developers were tasked with building the preferred version. Initially the development team struggled with communication: the technical lead disliked meetings, and the other engineers worked remotely. To address these challenges, I scheduled weekly video conferences and frequent instant message check-ins that kept development on track.

As the team moved forward, I began receiving pushback on our plans. Members of product leadership believed that the key to winning on mobile apps was taking advantage of the phone’s unique capabilities, like allowing users to pay with Apple Pay or a photo of their credit card. Those projects were on our roadmap, but lower in priority. Armed with qualitative data from user-testing our prototypes and quantitative data showing the projected impact of various potential tests, I convinced the leadership team that we were headed in the right direction.

After reaching consensus on our test priorities, we started building the new checkout form. It took two months of development and testing, but the final verdict was clear: app users were much more likely to book a hotel with the updated form. Bookings were up by 7% and revenue was up by 9%; we’d surpassed our first quarterly app bookings goal.

The checkout form redesign project led to almost $3 million in annual revenue and created a standard for using prototypes to test ideas that saved development time and was adopted across teams. In addition to making a lasting impact on the business, I also developed my own professional skills. I learned how to manage a cross-functional team, validate ideas with data, and get buy-in from reluctant stakeholders. As the product lead of a new team this quarter, my meetings with the technical lead are smoother, my projects are informed by user research, and, when I anticipate pushback, I’m proactive about establishing a sound rationale and circulating it to the right people.