Most companies know their managers need more support. The harder challenge is to build a development program that managers will complete and that changes what they do when they return to work.

Tripadvisor found a practical path. It evolved its approach through a personalized manager development journey built around the company’s identity, an employee’s workload and the skills leaders said they needed most.

The new approach drove strong results. In its first year, the program saw completions reach record highs year-over-year. Their learners said they gained leadership skills they could apply immediately.

Tripadvisor focused on creating a clearer path, making the experience relevant to each participant and removing as much friction as possible.

Here’s how they did it:

Start With the Opportunity

Tripadvisor has always treated leadership development as important. As the team looked to evolve its approach, it saw an opportunity to make development even more relevant and engaging. Before developing the program, the learning and development (L&D) team went directly to leaders across the company. They asked what skills the organization needed to strengthen and heard consistent themes, such as performance management, delegation, resilience and a clearer understanding of what good leadership looks like at each level.

That input shaped the program from the beginning. Instead of starting with available content and assembling it into a curriculum, the team started with the outcomes the business and its leaders wanted.

Too many learning programs are designed around what is easy to deliver.  By starting with desired outcomes, Tripadvisor designed the program around the capabilities leaders identified as priorities.

Build for the Human

“Aspiring manager” is not a single persona.

Some participants were individual contributors exploring people leadership for the first time. Others had already been leading projects or influencing teams informally and wanted to formalize skills developed on the job. New managers had a different set of needs. Experienced leaders and managers of managers needed something different again.

Tripadvisor responded with a three-level program, serving:

• Individual contributors interested in management
• New and recently promoted people managers
• Directors, managers of managers and experienced leaders seeking continued development

The experience combined self-paced learning, internally created content, live training and group coaching, with the mix changing by tier. The result was a structured program without forcing every participant through the same path.

For Tripadvisor, personalization meant creating a development experience that understands where someone is starting, where they are trying to go, and what will help them make that move.

Make It Feel Like Home

The team also wanted the experience to feel distinctly like Tripadvisor.

Tripadvisor helps people explore the world, so its manager development experience is designed around exploration and progression. Participants begin at “Basecamp” and move toward “the Summit,” with each stage of the climb corresponding to a real step in their leadership journey.

The metaphor gives participants a simple way to understand where they were, what they had completed, and what came next. The experience is also fully branded so it feels connected to the organization.

That sense of identity matters — learning should not feel like a separate place employees are sent to check boxes. It should feel like part of the company’s broader culture and the way it supports employee development and growth.

Respect Managers’ Reality

Manager development competes with everything else participants are expected to do. If the program ignores that fact, even motivated learners will struggle to finish.

Tripadvisor designed the core experience to take roughly 3-6 months depending on the tier, with an average commitment of no more than 10 hours. Learners could also go deeper through an “Explore” catalog that included supplemental development and one-to-one leadership coaching.

What they created was a balance, with enough structure to keep people moving, enough flexibility to remain relevant and enough restraint to make completion realistic.

The team also used Docebo to automate notifications, reporting, surveys and other administrative work where possible. This automation also helped the L&D team streamline administration as the program expanded.

That is another useful lesson: Program and operational design go hand in hand. Creating an engaging learner experience also means considering how the program can operate efficiently as it scales.

Measure Whether Learning Changed Anything

Completion is useful, but it is not the finish line.

Tripadvisor measured immediate engagement, practical utility and skills acquisition. It then followed up six months later to ask whether participants had been able to use those skills in their roles.

Participants reported having the opportunity to apply their new skills on the job and agreed the training enhanced their performance as a leader  Those outcomes suggest the program solved two problems at once. It made development easier to complete, and it made the learning more useful once completed.

These results point to the value of treating learning as a product: understand the audience, solve a real need, remove friction, measure behavior and business impact and keep improving the experience.

The Real Lesson From Basecamp

Tripadvisor did not create demand for leadership development. The demand was already there. They created a clearer path to the summit.

The team listened to leaders, designed for distinct career stages, connected the experience to Tripadvisor’s identity, respected participants’ time and created room for people to focus on the skills most relevant to them.

The platform mattered because it helped support that model — a branded experience, differentiated journeys, blended learning, automation and reporting in one place. But the technology worked because it supported a clear program strategy, not the other way around.

For organizations looking to strengthen completion and engagement, the lesson is not simply to ask how to move more people through a course. It’s to focus on creating an experience that feels relevant, practical and valuable enough that participants want to show up. Tripadvisor built one that did.