Spotlight on Sebastien Goddijn: Solving multifaceted problems across travel

Expanding your thinking around who you build for and serve is the key to powering the world’s best traveler experiences.

Director of Product Management Sebastien Goddijn leads product management at Spotnana for our Air, Hotel, Car, Rail, Corporate, Data & AI, Event, and Front End Infrastructure teams. He is passionate about building a collaborative and forward-thinking environment for Spotnana’s world-class Product team.

Seb began his career with stints in venture capital and engineering after graduating with a Computer Science degree from Stanford University. After leading Spotnana’s seed round at 8VC, he eventually joined our quest to modernize the infrastructure of the trillion-dollar travel industry.

Fueling growth for a young startup

Director of Product Management Sebastien Goddijn

Seb’s start at Spotnana was a career change from venture capital to product. He quickly adjusted to life at the young company by diving into his new responsibilities.

“It was all hands on deck when I started, and I helped with anything that could be done at a certain point,” said Seb. “At the time, there were only two product managers at the company. I built the mobile app, different bits and pieces of the tool, travel management company settings, and more.”

Over time, he took on more formalized areas of ownership, becoming the default owner of the air vertical and product. After two years, he was promoted to Director and oversaw many of the projects that he had worked on in the past. His domain at the moment includes different content channels, corporate policy, and the corporate user experience.

The Product team continues to gather momentum by adding visionary leaders to new roles to assist development efforts.

“Sarosh stepped in as Chief Product Officer, Vikram Bhambri joined as Senior Vice President of Product, and we have more new hires coming in,” said Seb. “We have people who have worked at large companies, all figuring out what they need to do and getting the job done.”

Building innovation for everyone in the travel industry

For Seb, one of Spotnana’s most interesting objectives is to offer an integrated platform that all parts of the travel ecosystem can use to improve their business and the customer experience they provide.

“One of the angles we explore here is how to provide a flight content API, while traditionally you might be thinking of how to build a flight search experience,” said Seb. This requires normalizing results from a number of different content sources, providing robust and complete functionality across those different sources. Part of this process involves finding indications of where there may be exceptions and handling them effectively.

The holistic solution we’re building for the travel industry involves intentionally accounting for many different potential end customers and use cases.

“You really have to look at the problem in several different ways because you’re not just building an end product,” said Seb. “You’re really building the tools with which someone else can create their own version of an experience. When we build a feature, we make it as configurable and extensible as possible, as well as easy to use.” 

Spotnana’s microservices-based architecture simplifies complicated workflows that enable rapid innovation. Recently, Seb and the Product team quickly delivered a new feature to help companies save on travel and travelers enjoy better journey experiences.

“We improved lowest logical fare with baked-in flight suggestions at the time of search,” said Seb. “The data we now provide to companies is so much more useful because they know that the traveler was presented with alternative flights they decided not to choose.”

Uniting around our “why”

Seb appreciates his Product colleagues’ persistent focus on solving the deep-set issues impacting global traveler experiences.

“I think it’s easy in a startup environment to say, ‘that’s not my job’ or ‘that’s not my core competency,’” said Seb. “Instead, our team unifies around clear outcomes and what we need to do to reach them.”

For Seb and the Product team, there are massive opportunities for personal and team growth at Spotnana.

“It creates quite a strong culture within a group where everyone is aligned on why they’re there and can share the wins and challenges together,” said Seb. “It’s fun to be a part of a group that acts and thinks in that way when facing challenges.”

Seb is optimistic that Spotnana will continue to rise to new heights in the coming months and years with the people who make our success possible each day.

“Our culture will only get stronger and more creative, and we’ll be able to work on bigger things over time,” said Seb. “I’ve been genuinely impressed at how the team has been able to reach significant milestones and accomplish as much as it has with its current size and amount of resources.

“I’m a big fan of the team that we’ve put together.”