How Visit Group powered its AI transformation and cut planning time 5X – with airfocus

Visit Group is a Nordic-based hospitality SaaS business headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden, with teams in Stockholm, Oslo, Reykjavik, Belgrade, and Skopje. Its portfolio of 13 products, overseen by 20 product teams, provides focused value across different segments of the hospitality and travel sector, and the business is converging those products into a modular, integrated platform.

To have something like an MCP on top of airfocus, on top of all of that rich data that we've got, is game-changing.

Chris Micklethwaite

Chief Product and Technology Officer – Visit Group

Scattered backlogs, misaligned roadmaps, and a "poke-on-the-shoulder" system

"Before airfocus, we had multiple product management tools. Each team was responsible for their own roadmap, but that wasn't sustainable long-term. As we've grown as a company and added more products into the portfolio, the importance of aligning that work has become much more important," explains Chris Micklethwaite, Chief Product and Technology Officer. 

Director of Product Operations Michael Kristensen joined Visit Group one year ago, and observed the same siloes: "We more or less worked as different companies in one company, and had a hard time aligning, prioritizing, and making sure that we actually spent our time right."

As they brought their portfolio of products together, the product org had three core challenges:

1. Product work disconnected from strategy: "The biggest challenge was to align our roadmaps to our single strategy and to manage the work across teams in a coordinated way," says Chris. 

2. No shared system of prioritization: "We had backlogs across different teams scattered. Some were in Excel, some were in other product planning tools. All the information was in different formats, and everybody was following a slightly different process for prioritizing and measuring value," says Chris.

3. A lack of visibility across the product org, resulting in time-consuming coordination: Monthly product planning meetings ran for two hours. Coordination defaulted to what Michael calls "the poke-on-the-shoulder” system: "The product managers and product owners were stressed. They were pushed into making quick decisions on the spot," he says. "Before starting on this journey, we tried to do everything, which actually means we didn't do anything. We didn't achieve most of the things that we wanted to do, but we didn't say no to anything."

Product operations and AI transformation – supported with the introduction of a dedicated product intelligence platform

"What attracted me most to airfocus was its flexibility," says Chris. "It seems to take a fresh perspective where other tools seem a little bit bound up in older methods of product management and backlog management – airfocus gives us much more flexibility in terms of how we want to get visibility of our roadmaps, how we want to distribute the ownership of backlogs across teams, and to connect all of that together in a really flexible way: Get the dashboards we want, get the portfolio views we want."

1. AI transformation – supported by real product context through the airfocus MCP server

AI is a strategic priority for Visit Group, and the airfocus MCP server is what plugs its AI agents into the company's real product data – initiatives, epics, OKRs, roadmaps – rather than letting them operate on generic information. 

• airfocus MCP server: "From a planning, organization, strategy, roadmap, and portfolio management point of view, to have something like an MCP on top of airfocus, on top of all of that rich data that we've got, is game-changing," says Chris. "It means that we can now build in planning, reporting agents. We have agents that produce update statuses for the organization, posting messages to Slack, so everybody is even more connected to the work happening in R&D.

• Opening data up to natural-language queries: "Anybody in the company now can, with a Slack message or using one of our AI agents, query: Why is this important? Why is this prioritized over that? How does that connect to our strategy? They can ask really simple, natural language questions without necessarily having to take time away from one of our product managers," says Chris.

• AI output that you can trust and use: "I have a great example from one of our teams. They had three epics that were related to each other, and they just asked AI: What are the next steps based on these? And it came up with some really nice input that they actually could use," says Michael.

2. Portfolio management that gives live visibility for faster, better decisions

Visit Group's five strategic themes – modernization, unification, revenue generation for customers, AI innovation, and open platform – now sit at the top of the work in airfocus, with team-level delivery rolling up to them. 

• Shared goals: "Everyone is focused on the same shared goals, which is true to our strategy as a business and true to our product strategy," says Chris. Michael adds: "We are going to work with the company OKRs, where our strategic initiatives are connected to that, and our product roadmap based on epics and features. We have the full picture in a very short time, in airfocus, going from our high strategic bets to a task being done by a developer in a team. That's awesome."

• Consistent decision-making framework: "We wanted to make sure that we were considering building in terms of RICE scoring, and good principles of how we were prioritizing," says Chris. "That's where airfocus helps. It's getting that clarity on the value and the relative prioritization, and it helps us to place our bets and to work with our roadmap in a more coherent way." 

• The power to push back: "It was a big change for our product owners to start learning how to say no, but also know from an informed foundation, looking into a tool, that will actually show you that you need to say no."

• Always-on visibility, without meetings or status decks: "The benefit for me as Chief Product Officer is it gives me a full line of sight of everything that's happening across the organization. We can see progress, the visibility is fantastic, and that's much needed for me, our senior leadership team, and the board," says Chris. "Our commercial and support teams can see what's happening in R&D, what's in the pipeline, and why we're working on the things we're working on."

3. A direct line into delivery through seamless Azure DevOps integration

• airfocus sits on top of the engineering backlogs where Visit Group's developers work. "The integration of airfocus with other tools has also been a good experience, especially with our backlog tool, Azure DevOps. The integration there is working very, very well. It's extremely easy to set up, and we don't see any complications in it," says Michael.

Faster planning, sharper decisions, and AI transformation

Visit Group has compressed its planning cadence, sharpened its decisions, and laid the data foundation for its AI transformation.

• A foundation for AI: "We are on the way to achieving our goals in terms of an AI transformation, for sure," says Chris. "At this stage, we're still experimenting a lot and learning a lot, but having the MCP capability in airfocus is a game-changer for us."

• 5x faster product planning and reporting: "A year and a half ago, our [planning and review meetings] were probably two hours. Now they're super efficient because we're looking at the same thing in airfocus. Everybody knows what they're looking at. They’re 20 minutes, 30 minutes now, for a product team of 15 people," says Chris. "We've cut down the time for planning, reviewing, and reporting probably four or five times."

• 60% reduction in sprint spillover: "I think the last time I checked, it was about a 60% decrease in our spillover from all the iterations that we are planning, which is huge," says Michael.

• Less meetings, more alignment: "Having that transparency reduces the need for all of those little ad hoc meetings about 'where are we at?' and 'how are you progressing?' and 'there's some blockers here and how can I help?'," says Chris. "Alignment because of transparency is so much easier now."