Rebuilding how a travel platform saw its own customers

Business context

Sojern, the travel marketing platform, was rebuilding post-Covid and transitioning from a programmatic advertising partner into a platform business.

The decision or challenge

The hotel business was split into SMB and enterprise by spend level, a division that matched the org chart rather than the market. It blurred value, created internal conflict, and blocked the platform story.

My mandate

In-house Head of Product Marketing, leading a global team of six through the transition.

What I did

• Ran the research: market studies, conversations with customers and the hotel ownership community, and analysis of usage, revenue, and sales cycle data.
• Replaced the old split with five segments based on how hotels actually buy: chains, groups, independents, management companies, and agencies.
• Built the marketecture and segment solutions, each shaped around how that segment operates, with GTM playbooks feeding demand generation, enablement, and the product roadmap.
• Reorganized the product marketing team around the segments, and proved the approach in market with a strategic accounts test that led to a land-and-expand pivot.

What changed

The repositioning drove 30% revenue growth and 133% ICP penetration, and gave Sojern a platform narrative it could sell.

What remained after I left

The segmentation became the organizing logic for marketing, sales, and product alike, along with the marketecture, the segment playbooks, and a team structured around the market. This engagement is the shape of my flagship voice-of-customer program, run at in-house scale: research in, repositioning out.