Maud Larpent is currently the CPO of Treatwell, Europe’s leading booking platform in the beauty treatment space, processing over 5 million bookings per day.
Prior to joining Treatwell in 2023, Maud was at Expedia for 4 years, working for both the Vrbo brand and for the Trips vertical, in both instances leading teams of over 25 product managers. She joined Expedia from Tripadvisor, where she first transitioned into a product management role.
Maud has a wealth of experience in data rich, high volume marketplaces. She’s solved complex technical challenges, and worked across large teams of different types. She talks to us about:
- Being clear in your must haves when looking for roles
- Transitioning into product, and how she was helped to bridge that divide
- The importance of data in everything she does
- Being laser focused on your ideal customer persona and needs
- Her techniques for people management, covering
- Setting goals and defining competencies and levels
- The criticality of single sources of truth and clear success metrics
- The importance of cross functional partnerships to achieve results
- Her product operating model
Could you introduce yourself?
Sounds good. So my name is Maud Larpent. I am currently Chief Product Officer at Treatwell. I’ve been here about 10 months.
Before that, I was VP of Product at Expedia, doing a couple of different roles there. I initially started on the Vrbo brand, which is their vacation rental brand. And before that, I was at Tripadvisor for about 10 years.
Personally, I live in London. I am originally French, but I have been in London for about 17 years now and call London home.
I moved to London straight out of uni. Actually, I did an internship in London when I was still at uni. I just found it a very cosmopolitan place. There’s people from everywhere, from all sorts of backgrounds. It’s a very interesting city where you meet lots of interesting people.
Maud Larpent
Decision to move from travel businesses to beauty
You have a lot of travel experience so what made you move into the beauty space?
When I left Expedia, I really wanted not to just jump into the next role straight away. I took the time to think about what were my must haves and what were my like more nice to have and negotiable criteria. Treatwell and Beauty just ticked all of the boxes really.
I wanted to be in a UK headquartered company. I’d been working for American companies for most of my career. Although I really enjoyed that for the time I did it, I felt that in my next role, I was very likely to be the most senior product person in the company. I wanted to be in the same office as the rest of the exec team, because I felt like it would give me the best chance to be successful in my role. So London headquarters was a criteria.
I also wanted a role that wasn’t purely SaaS. I’ve got a lot of marketplace experience. I was looking at a role that was bringing B2B and B2C together, where I could bring some of my leverage, some of my marketplace experience.
My third was that the role should not be in travel because I’d spent the last 15 years in travel and I wanted to spread my wings and discover a new industry. Although I love travel, as you can see from the travel books behind me. And who knows, I might boomerang back to travel.
Check out the Hustle Badger Guide to Career Development Planning
What is it you like so much about marketplaces?
I wanted to be in a company that was either data driven and product led, or had the ambition to become data driven and product led. I wanted to be able to create an environment where teams are empowered, and you’re letting the teams that are the expert in their space bring the ideas to the roadmap because they’re the closest to the customers and the problem space, and also understand the business impact that they can drive.
Having some B2C element to the role helps you have access to a bigger data set and gives you more tools to make a data driven decision than in some B2B SaaS businesses where it can be more difficult to get the data. There as well stakeholder management is a little bit more difficult. You’ve got a lot of people with a lot of opinions and less data.
It might also be to do with how I was formed as a product leader. Tripadvisor is where I made the transition into a formal product role. At Tripadvisor Steve Kaufer, the founder and CEO throughout the time I was there, had a motto, which was, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth measuring. If you’re not able to measure something, then why are you really doing it? was what he was getting at.
At Tripadvisor the access to data, the data literacy of everyone in the business, was probably the best I’ve seen in my entire career. That probably shaped my approach to product and sharpened my instincts and set the bar for me in terms of what good looks like when it comes to leveraging data rather than gut or instinct.
There’s space for instinct and gut. But I think instinct and gut are formed on a lot of observations, over time, which is really data.
Data democratization creates room for everyone in the business to be aligned on what a good decision is for the business without the person with the gut or the instinct needing to be in the room to make that decision. It allows the entire business to move faster in the right direction.
Transitioning into product from a non product background
How it came about
How did you shift into product at Tripadvisor? Why did you want to do it in the first place?
I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it in the first place. I joined Tripadvisor on the commercial side, in partnerships, a business development type role.
But Tripadvisor was very, very product led as a business. Even in the commercial roles, you worked as one team with product and tech. So I was exposed very early on in my career to product managers and what product looks like. That helped me build some of the product skill set by observing and being part of that team as well.
I did a couple of roles within the business. I was there in total for 10 years. One of the roles I took on was looking at launching a new line of business for Tripadvisor.
Up till then in order to get real time rates and availability for the price comparison module on Tripadvisor, we built APIs with the Booking.coms, the Expedias, the Hiltons, the big travel players. And each of those APIs was custom to that partner’s API. Which means that if you think about the long tail, the independent hotels and the smaller chains, they weren’t bringing enough scale of inventory for us to justify building a custom API.
The upshot was that if you were a smaller hotel chain or an independent hotel, you couldn’t participate in the price comparison module on Tripadvisor, which in turn meant we weren’t able to give users a true hotel price price comparison within their chosen area. The idea was, Can we find a solution to capture the long tail, to allow the long tail to play in the auction on Tripadvisor?
As part of that role I had to figure out the how, including the product and the tech aspects of it, but also the go-to market and the product marketing. It was a little GM role within the business for an established business, like extending an existing line of business, but figuring out product, tech, B2B marketing for this new segment.
As part of that I became product manager for this line of business. I had a product under me for the first time. And when that line of business scaled and took off and it was time to bring it within the fold of the Product and Tech teams, they made me an offer to join and bring my team with me, but also take up an open role on the product team. And merge the two roles into one, officially joining the product team.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that at first, but I’m always someone who’s thinking about What am I going to learn in this role? And it felt like there was a lot I could learn in this role.
But I must say that as part of it, I was inheriting a whole team of product managers due to the role merger. I hadn’t been a product manager myself and that I would have to coach and manage people managers with more product people below them. So I didn’t feel very confident that it would be a walk in the park for me, a bit of imposter syndrome kicking in, having to manage product managers when I hadn’t been a product manager myself and didn’t have that earned authority.
It was a bit of a leap of faith for my manager at the time as well, but we both went for it.
We were both really transparent about the fact that we were both taking a chance. We’re both going to commit to ways of working, like having a lot of hands-on coaching opportunities. I also had an external coach that was paid for by Tripadvisor at the time.
And that worked out great. Never looked back.
There are four common routes into product management
Check out the Hustle Badger Guide to How to Become a Product Manager
Knowing you had made the right decision
When did you feel you had made the right decision?
I think pretty quickly. I just enjoyed the role pretty quickly, I think.
But I don’t think I’ve ever thought, Why did I do this? And why did I feel that way? I guess what do I like about product management is the question there, right?
I think I really enjoy being able to use data to gather insights about customers, about our products and about their fit with each other.
And I also enjoy the fact that you’re constantly learning, everything you’re doing in product management is about learning about your customer, about the market, about your product market fit and what’s going to drive the business. It’s kind of a constant quest.
I felt that matched my own affinities and this role was the right role in the right company.
I don’t think I would have thrived as a product manager in any company. Tripadvisor was a great place to make that transition because I was coming with a lot of understanding already of what drives the business. I was bringing a great understanding of.our customers, from a lot of time with hotels, hotel chains, partners, the OTAs [Online Travel Agencies]. I already had customer empathy built in.
All of that was setting me up for success. Then I think a lot of the time people management was also common sense. The more formal frameworks or artifacts, that’s where my manager at the time coached me into it and helped me ramp up really quickly and helped me become a coach myself for the PMs.
How Maud approaches product strategy
That’s a neat segue into asking you about strategy in the product context and what it means to you and what you try to deliver.
For me, a product strategy is when you have really clear business outcomes that you’re driving for and you know what are the key business levers that are going to be impactful.
We’re not talking about 12 of them, because if you’ve got 12 priorities, you really have none.
You’ve got really clear business outcomes that you’re driving for, and you’ve got a great understanding of your customer problems, and you’re able to bring the two together and make magic happen. I think that’s what a product strategy is, is finding a way to solve customer problems in a way that will deliver business outcomes.
But starting by having very clear business outcomes and very clear customer problems, which sounds a lot easier than it actually is.
Customer needs
What’s your technique for discovering your customer feature needs as well as their existing problems? How do you go about that process?
I’ve not done the zero to one myself in terms of my experience. So when I’ve started every role there was always some element of understanding of customer problems. They probably hadn’t been crystallized or maybe there were too many of them.
The first thing I do is immerse myself in, What do we know? What do we already know about our customers and their problems? Then identifying What gaps do we have in our understanding?
For example, at the moment at Treatwell, I think we had a bit of a blind spot in understanding our B2C customers. We’ve done some generative research to go deep with some customers that had used the platform before, and then with some customers that had never used our platform to book treatments. It’s really helped us understand what are the key things that will prevent customers from making a booking on Treatwell or other platforms?
There’s so many brilliant nuggets of information that you can then distill into some clusters of customer problems. So in this case at Treatwell, we were lacking a little bit on the generative research.
I’ve been in other places where we have too much of it and we’re just so swimming in all of those observations that you have to take the time to group them and prioritize them as well. Sometimes to do that, you have to first define who your customer is.
That’s sometimes the really tricky thing to do because different segments of customers have different problems. If you’re trying to be everything to everyone, you’re just going to peanut butter spread yourself across too many problems and not really have an impact anywhere.
That’s something we did really well at Vrbo, one of the Expedia brands that I worked on. We really invested in understanding who was our headpin customer. That was cross functional with marketing and brand and product all part of it. Although the exercise was defining the B2C customer segment that we wanted to target, even the B2B side was part of that as well. That became really, really powerful for us at Vrbo.
There were two really powerful things that we did there.
A lot of the stars were aligned in the sense that we had a new CEO coming in to lead Vrbo and he had a very, very clear view on the 18 months, 2 year strategy for the business. Having just a few things we needed to focus on and not 12 was part of that. He said that there were 3 business outcomes that the entire business needed to drive for. Just having that clarity across the entire business is very, very powerful to help everyone make decisions and make them fast. That was one really pivotal element.
The second one was the exercise I mentioned around defining the headpin customer. I don’t know if headpin customer is a common concept or do you want me to explain what I mean by headpin customer?
So I think it comes from bowling. If you think about bowling and there’s like your bowling pins and if you hit the front pin, the other ones fall with it and you’ve got a strike. So what we’re saying is if you’ve got your head pin customer defined fairly narrowly, but in a way that allows you to focus, then you don’t need to worry about the other customers, the pins in the back. Because if you get it right for that customer, you’ll get it right enough for the other customer’s requirements that they will fall with it.
The example specifically for Vrbo is that vacation rentals are great for larger groups of people.
Are we talking about groups of friends? Are we talking about family? Are we talking about, you know, there’s a lot of ways you can slice it and dice it. Is it more about city or beach destinations? Is it the big summer holiday? Is it the weekend breaks?
There’s so many use cases that it can work for, but we needed to try and not solve for all of them at the same time because we weren’t really making meaningful progress on any of them because we were trying to do too much at once.
So the way we defined the headpin customer was saying it’s the family with at least 3 adults. The exact definition was ‘Families with kids (that need 2+ bedrooms) who value staying together” so a total guest count of 5-8 with at least 3 adults and 2 children in the group.
Like you’re going away with your kids and your sister and their kids type of thing or with your in -laws and the cousins. It’s that type of big intergenerational holiday.
Just being focused on that rather than trying to be that and the group of friends and all of those use cases, it really helped us when a new idea comes up from one of the internal stakeholders or external stakeholders, we could say It’s a great idea, but it’s not a key pain point for this specific head pin customer. So we’re not going to prioritize it right now because there’s those 5 other things that we all agreed that we were going to focus on for this head pin customer. For them, these things matter more than this thing.
So if I can give you an example:
The Wi -Fi quality in a vacation rental is really important if you’re trying to do a podcast or work remotely, if you’re getting a vacation rental because you’re working from Barbados for a month. Well, that sounds lovely. And Wi -Fi will be very important for you.
But your use case is not really a top head pin customer use case if you’ve defined your head pin as the family that goes away with the grandparents and the kids. You’re probably not working on that holiday and the Wi-Fi is less important than the moments that you’re spending together. So it’s more about, What’s the kitchen like? What are the spaces like because we want to spend time together?
And it’s more about being able to see photos of all the spaces, because you’re having to figure out the sleeping arrangements, how many beds in how many rooms and all of that type of thing is more important than the Wi -Fi speed.
I can’t remember if I’ve just made up that use case about the Wi -Fi speed but it’s to illustrate the point that it helps to say no when someone’s like, You know, I really care about the Wi-Fi speed when I make a vacation rental booking decision. Yes, but you are not the customer.
Defining your ICP
You mentioned that there was a partnership with your brand team and your market research team to define that customer group. Could you give a bit of detail on how you guys actually managed to narrow it down or define it?
The methodology was primarily driven by the market research team, but we had a lot of working sessions to refine the methodology together. However they were really to talk to about What do we want to get out of this exercise? Because what will be actionable for brand might not be actionable for product and vice versa.
For us on the product side, because we were, again, very data -driven as a team and as a business, we wanted to be able to recognize that headpin customer when they start a session on our app or our site. It needed to be quite quantitative in how the head pin was defined so that we could measure it and set goals: For the head pin customer, we want to increase conversion by X.
If we can’t recognize you because the way we’ve defined a head pin customer is very qualitative, like, you know, a thrill seeker or a luxury holiday person, then, you know, there’s no way for me to know whether you are that person. There’s no way for me to set targets around improving the experience for you.
So we had a lot of those working sessions to make sure of what we were trying to gather from the market research, starting with, What is the total addressable market? What segments are we already serving? so that we’re not starting from scratch.
Once we have that, we then go one level deeper: What is the head pin within that segment? When we went that level deeper, that’s where we worked really closely together to make sure that we weren’t coming up with personas that product couldn’t use or with a quantitative definition that wasn’t useful for brand and marketing.
In the end it really came together. It was a qualitative persona because it was about families who want to spend time together. That’s something that you can use in your tone of voice, in your creative, on the brand side. But we can also recognize you as a user when you show up on the app and we can measure success around that.
It was so powerful once we had it in place. It takes a lot of work. It took us a really long time to get it right. But once we got it right, my God, we were flying. That synergy between brand marketing and product, that was really, really cool to see.
And it showed up in the data, the business was doing very well. Every penny we were spending on marketing was working so much harder for us because we were all speaking with one voice knowing the customer we were targeting. At the same time we were also building the product for them and it was all coming together very nicely.
People management
Setting team goals
Can you talk to me about how you then set up your teams to start delivering against things like that? What characteristics and skills do they have to have? And how do you start measuring success?
There’s two dimensions in how I assess PMs and product performance. There’s the what and there’s the how.
On the what, that’s getting to the stage where you’ve got your product strategy and your pillars of that strategy in an ideal world. You’ve got clear business outcomes, maybe three or four, and then you’ve got really clear customer problems.
When I say business outcomes, it is things like, Reduce reliance on paid channels or Increase repeats through free channels. But that’s the level of precision that I’m thinking about when I talk about business outcomes.
So you’ve got your business outcomes really clear and you’ve got your customer problems equally clear. Again, not fifteen customer problems. We’re talking about, you know, maybe like four big buckets of customer problems. And you’re able to marry those two together.
Maybe I’ve been lucky, but so far every time I’ve been able to define a pillar for the product strategy, which is around a customer problem, but also has a very clear business outcome. So you have one of each [customer problem + business outcome] and that’s one product pillar.
Then I would ask one of my product leaders to drive the product thinking for that pillar in partnership with a design leader and an engineering leader at minimum. Ideally also an analytics person would be part of that four in a box. In the end each of my product leaders would be aligned to one set of customer problems and one key metric or key business outcome that they’re driving.
Then what they are measured on is how well they’re driving those metrics for the business. But in a way that you can isolate their impact. For example, if we’re talking about a situation where this PM or Head of Product’s role is to improve repeats through free channels, there’s a lot of things that go into that that may not be directly impacted by product or that may drive the metric one way or another in spite of product.
Isolating the metric to what we can measure as a product team is important. So what increase in repeat customers through three channels have you been able to measure through your tests? That might be one of the targets or goals that I would set with this particular individual. So to wrap up, that’s how I conceive of and measure the what.
Check out the Hustle Badger Guide to Building Your Product Operating Model
Defining levels and competencies
On the how I have a competency matrix for product management that I’ve taken with me to every role I go to. I’ve been tweaking and adjusting it for each business that I joined, depending on the size of the teams, the different levels and all of that.
For each level, it includes the product competency expectations in terms of everything from, stakeholder management, data fluency, product delivery, voice of the customer, business outcome ownership, product vision and road mapping.
All in all it’s about 15 competencies and then for each level, it details what the expectations are for that level in this competency.
It requires a little bit of tweaking every place I go, but it’s been useful in creating complete alignment between each level of the product team about the differences in what is expected of that person between a product people manager and a product IC, individual contributor.
Nothing’s lost in translation. It’s all written down. We all know what it looks like, and then we can have very clear conversations about, Were you able to demonstrate that competency in the last quarter? And What are your development opportunities and how are we gonna help you close the gap in the areas where you’re not meeting expectations?
It also helps to be very clear on OK, you’re already meeting expectations or exceeding expectations for these competencies. You’re already exhibiting those competencies at the next level in the matrix. That gives us a sense of, Is this person ready for a promotion?
There’s no hidden expectations. It removes all of that. So that’s the how.
Clear success metrics and single sources of truth
To have empowered teams, you need teams to be able to make decisions on what to put on the roadmap and what should go first and why.
Once you’ve got that clarity on business outcomes you have to then be able to say there’s an idea that is being brought up either by the team from what they’re hearing in research or from seeing competitors do or from a stakeholder bringing a new opportunity to the table. We need to have an idea of the size of the impact on the business of those different ideas and whether they align to the business outcomes.
If you have your different business outcomes and each of them is measured in a different currency or a different metric you need to find a way to normalize and align them. Like one metric is traffic and one is conversion and one is EBITDA. Then you need to be able to bring it all back to one currency so that you can compare apples with apples.
That’s a place where you don’t want your teams to be spending time, trying to figure out what the baselines were, What was traffic last year so that we can say, if we increase traffic by X, then it will mean this much for the business, or What were the conversion numbers last year on iOS so that I know that if I improve them it will mean this much for the business.
I want them to be thinking about What data points, what observations do you have? What previous tests have you run that can tell you the possible increase is between 1% and 2% or between 5% and 7%. I want them to be spending all their time thinking about that, not trying to dig out the baselines that they’re applying their increase to.
So having a really solid model that everybody’s using, that the PMs just have to put their hypothesis into, and then they can get the output at the other end, means that they can spend all their time on where they’re actually adding value, which is making their hypothesis as strong as possible and figuring out what they need to do to increase their confidence in that hypothesis or in that assumption.
That’s something that I’ve done in the past. The only way it works is if you’ve got a really strong partnership with finance and analytics to operationalize all of that.
Correlating input metrics to business metric outputs
Check out the Hustle Badger Guide to Success Metrics
Importance of cross functional partnerships
How the cross-functional teams work together is also important, so how product work with engineering and design. It starts at the top. You have got to have a good relationship with your engineering partner at every level. It should be everywhere. We can’t deliver anything without design or engineering.
We have to have the same goals in order for us to be able to deliver something. For me, it’s being super clear when we’re defining our product strategy, that we’re defining it together with design and engineering. Then when we’re breaking it down into the product pillars and sub work streams, that there’s not just product leaders assigned to those, but also engineering and design leaders.
It’s a collective, it’s a team that owns that OKR or that product subspace strategy. You then hold them accountable equally. They contribute to the delivery of the roadmap in different ways, obviously, but they are all accountable and have the same impact at the end of the day.
I think it’s about setting clear expectations and then holding teams accountable together. That’s what I would say.
Keeping tabs on progress
What’s your delivery cadence for holding people accountable to you?
We set the OKRs quarterly and then review them on a monthly basis. But we also have weekly status updates where we check on any risks emerging, any new dependencies identified and any new trade offs we have to consider.
So it’s almost continuous planning, is the way we do it, like your quarterly planning. Like being a snapshot of that continuous planning at that point in time, but you have to remain flexible throughout and constantly evaluate, are you putting your resources on the most important thing?
So yes, quarterly with monthly check-ins gives enough time to see movement on the metrics but also not too much time that you finish the quarter and you’re like, What happened there?
Hustle Badger Resources
[Articles]
[Interviews]
[Courses]
Other Resources
FAQs
Who is Maud Larpent?
Maud Larpent is currently the CPO of Treatwell, Europe’s largest beauty booking platform. She’s an experienced product leader, with a strong expertise in marketplace businesses. Prior to joining Treatwell, she worked in senior product roles within Expedia and Tripadvisor.
