LodgeLink celebrates its 2nd birthday

Patrick M: Back in late 2014, after returning from a trip to Australia, Trevor (our CEO) caught me in the hallways and told me about a basic online camp booking web site that simply captured contact information from an interested party. It would then create an email for the booking company to follow-up on. The booking company would manually call, research, and reserve rooms which was a time consuming process and extremely inefficient. We talked about “wouldn’t it be nice if…” and right there the original seed for what would become LodgeLink was planted. 

Rob N: So this is not exactly a first memory of LodgeLink, but a memory of the possibility of LodgeLink. I recall Patrick telling me in my interview for my first position at Black Diamond back in late 2014, wouldn’t it be cool if we built an “Expedia for Camps” one day? The vision was already there! 

Sneha S: When I joined LodgeLink, the team was growing (we are still growing) and I was one of the new hires. I got an opportunity to setup our Quality Assurance (QA) process and strategy and an Automation Test Environment from scratch. Rob and Patrick were always there for support and to help decide the best outcome. Everyone was (and is to this day) welcoming and very helpful. Everyone tried to make me feel comfortable with the team and work. I would say it’s not just a team but LodgeLink family. 
 

Patrick M:  Early on, June 2016, working towards the initial launch of LodgeLink 1.0, our parent company, Black Diamond, and its IT team sourced and installed a software in the cloud and customized it. The overall investment of 1.0 was minimal and we were pleasantly surprised by the top line revenue we were able to generate in our first full quarter. This showed that our solution really resonated with both prospective customers as well as property owners so we thought ‘this is going to fly!’. 

Kola A: When I joined in April 2019, a typical day was mostly Rob, Jason and I having scrum sessions with our external vendors and working towards a successful launch of the 2.0 platform. Today, we have a strong in-house team that spends the day collaborating on various projects towards building out our ecosystem and becoming number one in workforce and crew accommodations. 

Sneha S: We used to do manual testing, which was time consuming to cover the whole application flow in each release, but now we have a proper test automation framework which helps to do regression testing with the click of a button. 
 
Rob N: In the early days we were doing everything. A good example is Jason, although hired as a Business Analyst, was gathering business requirements, doing QA, running SQL scripts, trouble-shooting production issues, running UAT. We were also designing solutions, architecting the platform, creating and maintaining PowerBI reports, and monitoring production. Now we have many more specialized roles to handle all those different challenges.  Developers are developing, QA is managing testing and UAT, DevOps is managing our dev pipeline and environments, architects are solutioning, etc. We’re not quite there yet, but much closer to a fully baked product team. 
 
Jason L: I remember when Rob walked me around on my first day with LodgeLink and introduced me to the product team.  You could count on one finger the number of us and look at where we are today, 14 and growing.