Co-Founding a Hotel Operations Platform with Marriott
Company: Roger
Primary Role: Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer
Time Frame: 2020-2022
Summary: I led the product vision, strategy, design, and development of a task management and collaboration platform for hotel operations teams.
After raising $300k and securing a private beta with Marriott, I worked closely with the executive team to synthesize and productize their operational model, workflow, culture and goals to drive innovation in an industry untouched in a century.
Over months, we worked on-site with the housekeeping, maintenance, front desk, and food & beverage teams to iterate on an MVP, providing rich operational health data to executives for the first time. From there, I hired and led a design and development team to build an end-to-end product suite across web and mobile.
Overview
The Future of Modern Hotel Operations
For over a century, the full-service hotel industry remained virtually unchanged. On the operations side, guest requests and maintenance issues were scribbled on paper, relayed over walkie-talkie, or handled face-to-face. If a digital record existed at all, it was entered into outdated software – more of a corporate formality than a functional tool – and in aggregate offered a fragmented, incomplete view of hotel performance.
And for guests? They were still fumbling with a 1980s bedside phone just to ask for an extra pillow.
These antiquated legacy systems permeated every level of hotel ops, from frontline staff to conscientious managers alike. Bureaucratic inertia – layers removed from the day-to-day – stifled innovation, creating operational “blind spots” for hotel teams that trickled down into the guest experience. How could hotel managers expect to maintain and maximize operational health in any meaningful way?
The fact that this was largely unexamined white space was staggering. If hotel corporations embraced modern tools, operational and guest data would become a real-time strategic asset — breaking down silos and flowing seamlessly across teams, empowering managers with full visibility and actionable insights, and enabling direct, frictionless communication between guests and staff. With this modernized foundation, entirely new opportunities to elevate the guest experience would emerge, transforming every touch point from booking to departure.
And so we built Roger with a vision to power the future of modern hotel operations. We believed that by equipping hotels with the right tools, we could drive a happier, more empowered, and more engaged workforce, stronger customer loyalty and public testimonials, and ultimately, higher revenue.
Case Study in progress — avail Q1 2025