If You Don't Break Inertia, You Fall Behind: A Brand Marketer's Leap into Product Development

Bang Tae-wook, a team lead, was a brand marketer just a few months ago, but now he leads MyRealTrip's Growth Team, personally building features and deploying them to production servers.

The starting point was a 'lonely palm tree' that showed up blankly for users with no planned trips. The problem awareness of wanting to change this empty screen that couldn't suggest any products led to TripSignal, which recommends travel destinations that fit users' budgets and itineraries.

The first step was LuckyGlide. While building a prototype that showed the lowest airfares by city and schedule, he learned the structure of flight APIs and how to analyze lowest prices, and by digging into accommodation price APIs as well, he fleshed out a new idea combining flights and lodging.

During development, he used the team's internal frontend AI assistant repo. When he explained the desired features and a PRD, it helped install dependencies, prepare folders, and implement code together, and quality improved through code reviews from teammates.

The biggest barrier wasn't technology but fear of deployment. Pushing directly to the monorepo and production servers was daunting, but when the CTO and platform lead backed him up saying "if it doesn't work, we can just roll back," he saw the deployment through to completion.

TripSignal analyzes 39 cities to recommend travel destinations that fit budgets and itineraries, and is now running in MyRealTrip's 'My Trip' tab. Afterward, a mood of "maybe I should try this too" spread within the team, leading to attempts to deploy directly to marketing partner pages and internal ad servers as well.

What Team Lead Tae-wook repeatedly emphasized was inertia. He said that if you stay stuck in familiar tasks like copying and pasting spreadsheets every morning or using VLOOKUP, you don't feel the need for automation, and end up just consuming work hours.

As soon as he got access to Claude Max, he loaded a year's worth of Slack and wiki data to organize context, and documented the team's tacit knowledge. He said that being intoxicated by the feeling of being busy causes you to miss impactful work, and now they're shifting to a way of working where each person reviews their achievements with Claude and meetings focus only on discussing action plans.

The core message is clear: the moment you stay stuck in familiar ways, falling behind begins, and it's the people who break inertia who create new roles.