Leading Hilton’s UX Experimentation at Scale:
$461M in Incremental Revenue
Case Study
Project Overview
Company: Hilton
Role: Senior Manager, UX Design
Impact: $461.48M in quarterly incremental revenue
Duration: 2.5 years (2023-2025)
Team Size: 8 UX designers across 6 digital products
Key Partners: User Research, Experimentation, Product Management, and Software Engineering teams
The Challenge
The scope encompassed six critical digital products:
Brand
Brand homepages and microsites driving awareness and guiding travelers into booking across 24 brands.
Property
Individual hotel websites showcasing unique features and providing direct booking paths for each property.
Honors
Loyalty program enabling 226M+ members to earn points, manage accounts, and access exclusive benefits.
Shop
Hotel search and discovery helping travelers find properties through filtering, browsing, and map exploration.
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Book
Complete booking experience from room selection through checkout with customization and confidence.
Inventory
Merchandising experiences for rooms, add-ons, and upgrades that personalize stays and drive revenue.
My Leadership Approach
Team Structure & Empowerment
I matched each designer on my team with specific digital products based on their strengths and growth opportunities. Rather than micromanaging, I empowered designers to run the UX practice on their assigned products independently while providing strategic guidance and support when needed.
Fostering Collaboration
I established UX Syncs, collaborative sessions that brought together designers, product managers, engineers, and other specialists. These sessions served as hubs for maintaining visibility, alignment, and momentum throughout the design process. After piloting this approach on one product team, I partnered with my designers to expand it across all teams I oversaw.
Cross-Functional Leadership
I partnered closely with User Research and Experimentation leaders to establish our testing framework and ensure statistical rigor across all experiments. This collaboration was essential for scaling our efforts while maintaining quality and reliability of results.
My team and I also worked alongside Product Managers to align our experimentation roadmap with business priorities and ensure seamless integration of successful tests into the product development cycle.
Individual Growth & Development
Through weekly 1:1 meetings with each designer, I monitored progress, provided feedback, removed blockers, and mentored them to uncover unique opportunities within their assigned products while understanding team dynamics.
The Experimentation Framework
I led my team through a systematic five-phase process that ensured both user-centered design and measurable business impact:
Phase 1: Hypothesis Formation
Leveraging research insights and analytics data to identify specific opportunities across each product’s customer journey. We prioritized based on estimated user experience impact and revenue potential.
Phase 2: Collaborative Ideation
Cross-functional brainstorming sessions brought together designers, product managers, engineers, and specialists to generate solution concepts. This collaborative approach ensured diverse perspectives and built team ownership of the solutions.
Phase 3: Design & Prototyping
Creating testable design solutions ranging from micro-interactions to complete feature redesigns. We collaborated with engineering teams to ensure technical feasibility while maintaining design quality and accessibility standards.
Phase 4: Qualitative Validation
De-risking solutions through user research before development investment. My designers partnered with User Research specialists to conduct moderated and unmoderated studies, ensuring we validated assumptions with real users before committing engineering resources.
Phase 5: Conduct Testing
Working with Experimentation specialists to execute robust A/B and multi-variant tests with proper statistical validity. We analyzed results collaboratively with Product Managers to make data-driven decisions about implementation and iteration.
Results & Impact
Revenue Generation
Over 2.5 years, we ran 280 experiments that generated $461.48M in incremental revenue per quarter:
- 2023: 66 experiments → $69.28M per quarter
- 2024: 129 experiments → $231M per quarter
- First half 2025: 85 experiments → $161.2M per quarter
- On pace for 170 experiments and $322.4M in quarterly revenue for 2025 (our best year yet)
Cost Avoidance
We also saved the company $291.65M per quarter by not implementing changes that proved harmful to performance, demonstrating the value of testing before full rollout.
Team & Process Evolution
- Enhanced team capabilities: Designers became more confident leaders, curious about users and business outcomes, and collaborative in their approach
- Established scalable processes: The UX Sync framework became a model for cross-functional collaboration
- Improved success rate: By 2025, we were running more successful tests than unsuccessful ones, credited to better use of user research to de-risk ideas
Key Learnings
1. Empowerment Drives Results
Giving designers ownership of their products while providing strategic support led to more innovative solutions and stronger business outcomes.
2. Research Reduces Risk
Investing in qualitative research before high-effort experiments significantly improved our success rate and reduced wasted resources.
3. Collaboration Multiplies Impact
The UX Sync framework created alignment across disciplines and maintained momentum throughout complex design processes.
4. Culture Matters
Fostering curiosity about users and business outcomes transformed individual contributors into strategic design leaders.
5. Scalable Frameworks Enable Growth
Building systematic processes and frameworks allowed our team to nearly triple experiment velocity (66 → 170 projected) while improving success rate. Sustainability came from systems, not heroics.
What’s Next
Let’s Work Together
Ready to discuss how I can bring this approach to your organization? Let’s connect.