Spending three times the resources to increase the quality of an outcome by 10% sounds silly. That’s because it is.
Yet, it still requires chutzpah to knowingly publish less-than-perfect work in the interest of the greater good, i.e. what else those three days could have been spent building, testing and learning.
OVERCOMING EGOS + PUBLISHING NOT-SO-PERFECT WORK
Sabre Labs struggles with this as a team already, mainly because we are used to the expectation of excellence our core businesses rightfully demand in all they do for our customers. 99.9% uptime is no joke.
But our charter is very different, one measured by the quality & quantity of what we can learn and teach others. That requires a commitment to shedding our egos for the sake of realizing exponentially greater progress & learning from the outcome that anything other than perfection offers.
As the Director of Sabre Labs, there is no doubt I have the coolest job in all of travel. But being quite the perfectionist, it’s a daily struggle. The rest of Labs is also made up of a few closet perfectionists who are just as diseased as I am.
And yet, our job is to pursue anything but perfection.
WE BREAK STUFF FOR A LIVING.
More importantly than it is to build things, our job is to break things. Fast. To make stuff. To screw up big time. And to get right back up and knock it out of the park immediately after.
We push ourselves and our global company of 10,000+ employees to be comfortable with failure through rapid prototyping & aggressive pursuit of what our optimal future as a company holds, because therein most assuredly lies the magic. Therein lie the small misteps as well as the train wreck disasters from which our company most quickly & most effectively will learn.
80/20 IS NOT JUST GOOD ENOUGH, IT’S IDEAL.
But instead, I’m trading discomfort in exchange for the glorious train wreck of 80/20 work that will result.
Sometimes the outcomes of Sabre Labs experiments will be abysmal failures, others will hit the travel tech jackpot… but all will overflow with rich insight that it is our team’s job to not just share, but overshare.
We are showing how low-risk, low-cost experiments bring value to a big company. And through those we teach what not to do tomorrow. How that thing we thought was going to be so awesome, in fact turned into a swift kick in the shorts. And every once in awhile, we remind eachother what it looks like to outpunt the heck out of our coverage.
Ultimately, our team is committed to supporting the core businesses of Sabre Holdings in continuing to be awesome at what they do, while leaving one heck of a legacy to behold in its wake.
The decisions & investments our work will help inform today will impact how travelers connect tomorrow, and that demands nothing less than glorious, glorious train wrecks to learn from and share.