ZUZU Hospitality

ZUZU Hospitality is a Singapore based hotel technology company founded in 2016. It helps independent hotels compete with the big chains through property management, revenue management and channel management software, backed by its own hospitality experts. In 2017 it raised a US$2 million seed round to expand across Asia, and today it serves thousands of independent hotels across Southeast Asia and India.

I worked on ZUZU through Eyepax IT Consulting, a software development company with its main development centre in Sri Lanka, where I grew from junior project manager and business analyst to project manager and delivery lead.

In December 2016 I was chosen to lead a brand new product, and I was told I would be the project manager as well as the business analyst. It was my first official appointment as a project manager. The team was two developers, one QA engineer and me.

I got the requirements clear, won the client's approval for an MVP, and delivered it within the strict three month timeline set around their other business commitments.

The product kept evolving, in features and in business direction, as more clients came on board. It started as an ecommerce website and a tool for selling white labelled hotel room nights. It then became an online travel agency along the lines of Expedia and Booking.com, and finally a full property management system with channel management and revenue optimisation.

I reshaped the roadmap with the co-founder through both of those changes of direction as the market responded.

I did the requirements engineering from the start and across every pivot. I stayed constantly engaged with the operational teams and interviewed hotel operators, watching their day to day work to understand how they worked and where the bottlenecks were before deciding what to build.

I wrote requirement documents, broke them down into user stories with acceptance criteria and attached wireframes. I also accepted the completed work myself before it went to the co-founder, who worked closely with me throughout.

I defined the rules engine that set the room night rate for each booking channel and each client. It weighed a hotel's usable capacity against competitor rates to maximise revenue, and it became the revenue management capability built into the property management system.

To get that inventory in front of guests, we integrated with external distribution partners and channel managers, including STAAH, through API and XML interfaces.

The budget for each quarter was fixed at around US$300,000, and my job was to get the most business value out of it. Every quarter I ran planning with the technical leadership and the executive leadership, and we planned delivery in iterations that each produced shippable, working features.

I negotiated with the teams so we did not overcommit and under deliver, then tracked progress against our commitments through the quarter, raising risks and issues early and working on them straight away. I believe living with issues is one of the biggest mistakes you can make on a project, and I made sure it did not happen on mine.

The schedule carried the same pressure. New features were often needed to take the product into new markets, and those launch dates could not slip. I negotiated scope around them and used contingency plans so we hit the dates without burning the team out.

Timely communication to the right people saved us from problems more than once.

As the product grew, so did the team. I ended up managing projects across a technology team spread over Sri Lanka, India and Singapore, and coordinating distributed operational teams in onboarding, customer success, sales, revenue management and hotel operations.

I also led the platform's migration from Rackspace to AWS as it scaled. Hotels were in the middle of their daily work and could not be disrupted, so sequencing, integration boundaries and rollback planning mattered more than the target architecture itself.

While at Eyepax I also contributed to BodyExo, a mobile application for gym goers and gym administrators, where gym goers could be rewarded for reaching their body composition goals.

• Requirements engineering from concept through two changes of business direction
• Interviews and observation with hotel operators and operational teams
• Requirement documents, user stories with acceptance criteria, and wireframes
• Accepting completed work before review by the co-founder
• Quarterly planning with technical and executive leadership against a fixed budget
• Iterative delivery of shippable, working features
• Negotiating commitments, tracking progress, and managing risks and issues early
• Negotiating scope and using contingency plans to protect market launch dates
• Defining the revenue management rules engine for channel and client rates
• Channel manager integrations, including STAAH, over API and XML
• Migrating the platform from Rackspace to AWS without disrupting hotels
• Coordinating distributed development and operational teams

• Requirements engineering
• User stories
• Acceptance criteria
• Wireframes
• Quarterly planning
• Scrum
• RAID
• Contingency planning
• Revenue management
• Channel management
• STAAH
• API and XML integration
• Rackspace
• AWS