Luxury Presence Innovation & Technology Culture

How do your teams stay ahead of emerging technologies or frameworks?

We stay ahead by encouraging and in many cases requiring experimentation across our biggest initiatives. For every major project, we go through a technical planning process we call ARM documents, which includes a dedicated phase for exploration. It’s a collaborative process and we actively encourage team members to prototype and build rather than stay theoretical. That creates regular opportunities to evaluate new approaches and challenge existing ones. Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean it’s the right way forward.

We also made a deliberate investment in Auggie Academy after recognizing that AI is fundamentally changing how work gets done. We trained our entire engineering organization on how to work with AI early, which allowed us to rethink norms around team huddles, planning and autonomy and give teams more freedom to move quickly.

On top of that, we run Hack Week twice a year, shutting down engineering, product and design so teams can experiment with any technology as long as it improves the experience for our customers. Many Hack Week projects make it into production, making it a strong mechanism for learning and adoption.

Can you share a recent example of an innovative project or tech adoption?

One of the most innovative initiatives we’ve launched is our suite of AI teammates including fully AI-driven teammates for SEO and blogging. These products represent a major shift in how we think about marketing technology and how we support customers at scale.

Internally, we’ve also adopted entirely new ways of working through Auggie Academy. We now operate with AI-first workflows where AI is embedded directly into planning, development and execution. AI acts as a development partner and a planning partner and in many cases authors significant portions of code. This is a completely new way of working for us.

We’re actively overhauling our R&D process to be AI-native so we can capture the gains AI enables from faster iteration to quicker production releases. This isn’t a surface-level adoption of tools. It’s a fundamental shift in how we build and ship software.

How does your culture support experimentation and learning?

Experimentation and learning are core parts of our culture. Programs like Auggie Academy and Hack Week give teams the time and space to learn new skills, prototype ideas and rethink how work gets done. We invest intentionally in training and exploration and we design our processes to support that.

Psychological safety is just as important. If someone tries something and it doesn’t work, that’s not held against them. We regularly ask what bets we’re making and whether they paid off and when they don’t, learning itself is considered a valuable outcome.

We also emphasize knowledge sharing. Senior engineers meet regularly to align on standards and translate those discussions into practical workflows including how we codify them into our AI-native way of working. Throughout the year, we run trainings and lunch-and-learns where engineers share what they’re building and learning. There’s a shared mindset across the organization to continuously challenge how we work and stay open to better ways of building.