Enabling the World’s Best Travel Experiences
El Camino Travel empowers women to travel confidently through community travel memberships and curated trips to magical destinations.
The Problem
Trip planning is a highly manual process
El Camino came to us with high aspirations - build a scalable tech platform that provides high value, quality experiences to consumers. They wanted to remove the friction between their in-country trip hosts and travelers while modernizing a very human-intensive and logistics heavy process.
We worked with El Camino to simplify their checkout flow and build out dashboards for trip leaders and participants. With pressure from investors to build an in-house team, we helped them find, hire, and onboard their new CTO.
The Solution
Streamlined Checkout and Traveler Dashboards
El Camino Project Outcomes
+ INVESTMENT PREP
The team needed to improve investor confidence in their ability to build a scalable tech platform. We helped them offboard their prior team gracefully, and modernized their approach to the product process. El Camino's team was able to take their expertise of prioritizing amazing offline experiences and turn it into an excellent framework to prioritize excellent online experiences. Their investor confidence grew that this could become a scalable tech solution, and they were able to become effective managers of a technical process.
+ DEVELOPMENT
We were aggressively focused on working iteratively to quickly launch a custom checkout flow and traveler dashboard. This process would allow El Camino to reduce external dependencies and own their traveler’s accounts and data within a custom database. Our successful achievement of these goals laid a strong foundation for positive customer experience and further development.
+ HIRING
El Camino’s investors wanted to see an in-house team, so after helping them write their 15-month roadmap, we helped them interview and hire their lead engineer. We then trained their technical team on the product process we’d put in place to ensure a smooth transition and continued growth.
Specialties
Product Manager
Tech Lead
Software Engineer
UX Designer
Project Successes
Built an investable product roadmap
Implemented a scalable product process
Launched a new checkout flow in time for their highest 48 hour sales period ever
Built a trip coordinator dashboard for improved customer experience
Timeline
7 Months
[ThinkNimble’s] clear way of communicating with non-technical founders was huge.
With our last interim CTO, it was such an opaque process with him. And I always felt like I didn't fully understand what was going on. I kept thinking, “it's just because I'm non technical, and I'm never going to really get it.”
But talking to Neil, he was just so clear. He was saying what was on my mind. “We want you to understand everything happening. We want you to be able to speak the language. We don't want anything to be a mystery, you should know what's happening.” That was huge for me.
And now, we're just moving. Technology's moving. With our interim CTO, nothing moved and everything was taking forever. We didn't even launch anything in a year.
[With ThinkNimble] we launched this new version of our checkout flow within five weeks of the discovery process. That was pretty impressive. That's been huge for us. We're moving. We're moving quite quickly.
Katalina Mayorga, CEO of El Camino Travel