Sykes Holiday Cottages · Lead UX Designer · 2017 — 2018
Turning property owners into the primary growth channel
Post private-equity investment, Sykes needed to scale owner acquisition as aggressively as guest bookings. That meant a new UX team and a two-week experiment cadence.
Shortly after private equity investment, Sykes needed to scale as aggressively on the supply side — recruiting holiday-property owners — as it did on the guest-booking side. There was no dedicated UX team, and owner acquisition sat outside the optimisation discipline already applied to guest-facing pages.
- Set up Sykes’ first dedicated UX and UI team, and introduced a two-week experiment cadence to match the pace the business needed.
- Ran cross-functional workshops spanning CRM, SEO, data & insight, the call centre, property recruitment and the design studio to align on where owner acquisition was actually breaking down.
- Proposed structural changes to how the company approached prospective owners, and to how guests discovered the right property for their trip — treating both as connected growth levers.
- Established a shared process so experiments launched consistently across teams rather than each running its own local test.
Sykes gained a dedicated UX function and a repeatable two-week experiment cycle, with company-wide workshops setting a new, more collaborative standard for how growth changes got proposed and agreed.
This write-up is illustrative — built to reflect the real scope and constraints of the role, with specifics anonymised or generalised. Get in touch for the detailed version.