Pierric Descamps
Summary
With an initial IT education, I have developed a versatile profile in the areas of product management and product strategy, with over 15 years of experience in the travel industry in both B2B and B2C.
With increasing seniority in product management, my interest has progressively been shifting from the optimisation of execution to that of strategy: where to apply relentless focus, how to organise around it, and how to link company objectives to product team goals and metrics.
I'm also passionate about data, and love extracting insights from data warehouses and simulating the possible outcomes of a potential scenario through Monte Carlo simulations.
I have experience in line management of other product managers and have a clear interest in continuing in that direction, orchestrating and supporting the work of a team of product managers and designers and owning the product vision that ties everything together.
I'm always eager to learn new skills and like working with people from various backgrounds. I have been working fully remote for over 5 years now.
Outside of work, my main areas of interest are technology (I spend a lot of time on my homelab), photography, nature, modern history and political philosophy.
Spoken languages
Native: FrenchFluent: English, Spanish, Catalan, German
Basic: Italian, Mandarin, Russian
Education
Institut national des Sciences appliquées de Lyon
Ingénieur en informatique · (2000 - 2005)
Universidad Nacional de La Plata
Student exchange, computer science · (2004 - 2005)
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Vordiplom, Computer science · (2000 - 2002)
Experience
I have been leading the team responsible for B2B customer interfaces (APIs and web interfaces) and am now in charge of the core platform processing test results received from labs and making them available throughout the platform.
I have also been the line manager of an associate product manager, who has successfully become a full-fledged product manager in a short time.
I was mainly in charge of the dynamic packaging of flights and hotels. One of my main achievements in this area was the end-to-end revamp of the dynamic packaging flow, including back-end considerations around sourcing and scalability, and the front-end experience, for which a rigorous discovery and validation effort was done.
This was also a very data-enabled time, and I was able to participate in the extraction of insights for the product team by building powerful queries and simulations using data from our data warehouse. This then led me to spend some time working as product manager for the data science team in charge of recommendation algorithms, dipping my toes into machine learning and impacting key conversion metrics beyond my area of dynamic packaging.
In charge of connectivity to providers of flight content (flight search results, airline ancillary products, etc.), be that GDS, other aggregators or ad hoc APIs. I learned a lot about truly agile delivery in this role, effectively managing the day-to-day of a team of 10 while applying Kanban principles.
I was a privileged point of contact for our main provider and was closely collaborating internally with the owners of the GDS and airline relationships. One key project that I led end to end was the creation of the provider-agnostic seat selection flow.
Co-ownership of a multi-million-euro initiative around mobile, crafting a vision and managing relationships with providers and customers.
Participation in transversal strategic studies ranging from mid-term plans to diversification opportunities, working with senior strategy consultants. Those studies supported the more execution-driven product management arm of the company with the research, modeling and insights they needed.
Customer relationship and roadmap ownership in a dual business model area: a community product and custom development for large customers.