Suzanne Stevenson on “mastering your own destiny” in the Technology Team
May 09
We’re excited to introduce you to some of the incredible people working behind the scenes at Travix. Each Travix employee, in every position, plays a key role in getting traveling customers to where they need to go! We inspire and guide our customers through their entire travel journey offering the best travel deals possible and smooth booking through our user-friendly platforms. Travix is the company behind the internationally recognized brands: CheapTickets, Vliegwinkel, Vayama, BudgetAir and Flugladen.
Learn more about what it’s like to work at Travix in Suzanne Stevenson’s latest blog.
Hello from Travix in London! I’m Suzanne Stevenson, and I’m the Director of Software Engineering at Travix. I’ve been working in this role at Travix for the last two years—I manage a number of development teams in the Amsterdam and London offices, who are responsible for crafting the shopping and booking functionalities available on all of our websites. I’m also responsible for our development center in London, which is currently home to some Product & Technology team members.
Of course, there’s never a dull moment. There are always many challenges and issues to work through, which we do together as a team. We use scrum to organize our projects and to try to minimize the number of meetings we all need to have, so the developers get the time to do what they do best! We encourage developers to collaborate in pairs when programming, and dedicate one full sprint in a cycle (each sprint is 2 weeks long) to resolving technical issues (i.e. refactoring, applying upgrades, undertaking POC’s (proof of concepts) and research & development, etc.). The developers value this setup because they get to work on technical issues, which they don’t get to spend as much time on during the other sprints where we focus on feature development.
Hello from Travix in London! I’m Suzanne Stevenson, and I’m the Director of Software Engineering at Travix. I’ve been working in this role at Travix for the last two years—I manage a number of development teams in the Amsterdam and London offices, who are responsible for crafting the shopping and booking functionalities available on all of our websites. I’m also responsible for our development center in London, which is currently home to some Product & Technology team members.
What we’re up to these days
We are currently very much focused on adding more supply to our product offering, so that we can provide our customers with the best, and most comprehensive options possible to make travel planning even easier. We are in the process of adding low-cost air travel options and non-air items (i.e. insurance, rail travel, hotel and car bookings, etc.), so that customers have everything they need for smooth door-to-door journeys at their fingertips. We now offer a number of relevant insurance packages to customers so they are better protected in case of flight delays and cancellations, including if a customer has to cancel his or her own flight. Currently, we cross-sell these non-air products with our air travel options. We will be taking this to the next level by investigating ways, during H2, to offer a dynamic packaging capability for specific traveller types. There’s a lot happening to say the least, and the Product & Technology teams are responsible for making these offering ideas into use-friendly capabilities.Embracing new technologies and teamwork
I truly take pleasure in working at Travix because it is a company which embraces new things, which—for a developer working in a technology environment—is very exciting. I would say the adoption of Google Cloud technologies has really enabled us as a business to scale depending on the demands of the customer, which gives us real flexibility in respect to scaling up and down, as the demand requires, as well as helping us to manage overall costs.
Of course, there’s never a dull moment. There are always many challenges and issues to work through, which we do together as a team. We use scrum to organize our projects and to try to minimize the number of meetings we all need to have, so the developers get the time to do what they do best! We encourage developers to collaborate in pairs when programming, and dedicate one full sprint in a cycle (each sprint is 2 weeks long) to resolving technical issues (i.e. refactoring, applying upgrades, undertaking POC’s (proof of concepts) and research & development, etc.). The developers value this setup because they get to work on technical issues, which they don’t get to spend as much time on during the other sprints where we focus on feature development.