552: Building smarter AI-driven products customers love – with Juanjo Duran

How product managers can build customer-centric AI products Watch on YouTube

TLDR

Juanjo Duran, Chief Product Officer & Chief Marketing Officer at Exoticca, joins Product Mastery Now to share how to create AI-powered product features customers actually love, not just features that sound impressive. Drawing on 25+ years in diverse leadership roles, Juanjo discusses leveraging customer obsession, data-driven decisions, and practical frameworks to balance innovation with execution. Learn how to embed AI across teams, structure innovation projects, and use the customer journey—from inspiration through to objection handling—as your roadmap for building differentiated products that deliver real value.

Introduction

Picture this: You’re a product leader trying to build AI features that customers actually use, not just technology that sounds impressive in board meetings. You’re scaling your product organization while maintaining innovation momentum. And you’re doing all this in an industry where the stakes for getting it wrong are high. We are discussing building smarter products that integrate AI that customers actually want. We’ll also explore practical frameworks for balancing innovation with execution in rapidly scaling organizations.

Our guest is Juanjo Duran, Chief Product Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Exoticca, a leading travel tech platform that provides multi-day travel packages. Juanjo brings a unique perspective—25+ years in consumer goods at P&G and Mars, operations leadership at easyJet, marketing at eDreams, and now product leadership at Exoticca.

Summary of Concepts Discussed for Product Managers Key Topics & Takeaways

• From FMCG to Travel Tech: The Leadership Thread
  • Juanjo describes his journey from Procter & Gamble and Mars, to travel and product leadership at Exoticca.
  • The unifying principle? Putting the customer at the center, leveraging data-driven decisions, and focusing on how brands create value.

• The Travel Customer Journey Redefined
  • In travel, the journey starts the moment a customer begins browsing for trips, not just when booking or traveling.
  • Product pages are transformed to make users fall in love with destinations, describe the experience simply, and address objections upfront.

• Structuring Innovation: Purpose-Driven Evaluation
  • Initiatives at Exoticca are filtered by their fit with company purpose: making dream trips accessible, creating extraordinary experiences, and serving customers end-to-end.
  • Innovation efforts are prioritized by value to customers, strategic fit, feasibility, and business impact.

• The AI Journey: From Efficiency to Customer Value
  • Early AI efforts focused on automating repetitive tasks for efficiency. The real shift came from asking: “How can AI deliver better value for customers?”
  • AI is embedded across every team, used in personalizing customer experiences, managing dynamic trip pricing, addressing customer queries (pre/post booking), and predicting pricing far in advance.

• Innovation Project Structure
  • Cross-functional discovery and alignment at the outset saves time later.
  • Prototyping, rapid iteration, and A/B testing form the foundation of execution.
  • Not every tool or solution needs to be built in-house—focus in-house efforts on core differentiators, and look outward for other solutions.

Useful Links

• Connect with Juanjo on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Exoticca

Innovation Quotes

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”  – attributed to Peter Drucker

“Inspiration? Of course it exists but it has to find you working.” – Pablo Picasso

Application Questions

1. How can your organization better map and influence the customer journey to enhance product experiences?
2. When thinking about adopting AI, how do you balance efficiency gains versus solving genuine customer problems?
3. What criteria should guide your decision to build versus buy AI or tech solutions?
4. How can cross-functional collaboration be improved during the innovation process in your organization?
5. Which part of your product experience could be transformed by focusing on customer emotions rather than solely on features or benefits?

Bio

Juanjo Duran is a Global Travel and FMCG Executive (CEO/CMO/CPO) passionate about how Technological transformation can improve consumers’ lives. Currently CPO and CMO of a game changing travel tech disruptor where he is exploring AI as a Value Accelerator for consumers. Juanjo was previously CEO of Deliberry, a game changing grocery business disruptor and also Venture Capital Investor and Consumer & Brand Tech Advisor.  

Juanjo is passionate about change and leadership. He was lucky to learn from the best leaders and the best companies: 20 years in P&G learning from the best about proactively and methodically driving brand’s constant growth, 7 years in Mars Inc learning from the best about leading people through values and principles and learning from the best about digital transformation in the most evolved industry, TravelTech, at easyJet and eDreams ODIGEO, still the biggest e-commmerce in Europe. 

Juanjo believes that technology has to help us to live better and wants to be an active part of that. He is now leading a very promising project that will allow people to travel more and better.

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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