Booking.com is the global poster child for agile design and development and their website is a perfect example of design by committee. Each UX designer is able to dream up an experiment, and is given complete autonomy to change the entire interface at their own discretion. They are paired with an engineer who helps implement the design, and then they run an experiment for a couple of minutes. Globally. They literally A/B test planet Earth. Millions of users see the experiment. And millions don’t. After a few minutes, if conversion goes up by a fraction, Booking.com keeps the change. If conversion goes down, they pull it and rollback. The engineering behind this machine is amazingly efficient, incredible even. And while it’s impressive, it causes a problem that I believe will ultimately be their undoing: their product is ugly, difficult to use, and inconsistent.