Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Skyscanner: Abandoning conventional wisdom for hypergrowth
Similar to Skyscanner: Abandoning conventional wisdom for hypergrowth (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Skyscanner: Abandoning conventional wisdom for hypergrowth
- 2. Some Context
- 3. How do you perform marketing when your product changes 10,000 times a day?* *Number created for dramatic effect, but it’s a lot.
- 5. We are a Tech Business
- 6. 1. People
- 8. https://medium.com/@Skyscanner/the-culture-of-growth-squads-in-skyscanner-26653e3590c4#.sdryrwowi
- 9. We organized ourselves into central & regional growth tribes Central GrowthTribe EMEA Regional GrowthTribe AMER Regional GrowthTribe APAC Regional GrowthTribe https://medium.com/@Skyscanner/our-tribes-central-growth-and-regional-growth-9a28c41532f1#.ri13oz319
- 10. ~8 people or less Cross Functional Squads
- 11. Roles within Growth Teams Product Manager Experiment Roadmap Growth Engineer Implementation of features & products Growth Marketer Own acquisition of channel Growth Analyst Draw insights from data Growth Designer Creative or user experience design and implementation
- 17. 2. Lean startup principles
- 20. What does this look like in practice Idea to MVP in 4 hours. 12x iterations in 2 weeks. Squad entirely self sufficient.
- 22. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. http://agilemanifesto.org/ Manifesto for agile software development
- 23. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software Welcome changing requirements, even in late development Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months) Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co- location) http://agilemanifesto.org/ Agile principles
- 24. Working software is the principal measure of progress Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self- organizing teams Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly http://agilemanifesto.org/ Agile principles
- 25. Validated learning over opinions and conventions Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns The process of customer discovery over static prediction Flexible vs. rigid planning Responding to change over following a plan Many small experiments over a few large bets http://agilemarketingmanifesto.org/ Agile marketing manifesto
- 26. 4. From marketers to growth hackers
- 27. Growth Hacker A hacker whose sole objective is to grow the number of users of a specific product, and make every strategic and tactical decision based on growth Unit 1: What is Growth Hacking?
- 28. 1.1 Introduction to Growth Hacking
- 30. What does a growth hacker do? 1 Creates a product or feature people want Scale acquisition and increase activation, retention and referral only after achieving product market fit 2 Embrace free, low cost alternative ways for growth Incorporate virality in distribution channels and products, think about technology based solution, avoid paid advertising 3 Define actionable goals for experiments Understand growth funnels, prioritise experiments, define tracking and analytics, execute experiments and optimize based on results
- 32. AARRR - Acquisition First point of contact between a user and your product
- 33. AARRR - Activation User performs a key activity with the product at which we deliver enough value that meets user’s needs
- 34. AARRR- Retention Users coming back, consistently getting value by having their needs met
- 35. AARRR- Referral Users share the product or services with others
- 36. AARRR- Revenue Money we make by meeting users’ needs
- 37. So what’s the impact?
- 38. Plenty of graphs like this
- 40. •This Won’t Work for you
- 41. Want to know more? @SkyscannerGrwth codevoyagers.com/
Editor's Notes
- There’s some other points of context that I think are helpful to understand why we operate why we do. Particularly compared to FMCG.
- As a tech business we are impacted by the pace of change in the digital landscape from 2 directions, both in keeping up with the speed at which the channels and activities available for promotion change, but also the speed at which our own product evolves and changes.
- So this is Hypegrowth Our marketing efforts also need to keep up with the growth of our business, which is tough.
- We are a tech business that does travel. As such, other tech businesses are our contemporaries and influencers of how we operate.
- I’m going to go through 4 key areas that we’ve used to help drive growth at Skyscanner. There’s a an element of buzzword bingo in there, but what we’ve tended to do is take best practice from a number of techniques and mashed that together into something that is right for Skyscanner. So what’s the first stage in getting ready for hypergrowth?
- When a business is moving at the pace we are, there has to be huge levels of autonomy throughout the organisation. Gate meetings or approval process simply slow things down, so we don’t have them. We did have them once but they had to run twice weekly to try and keep up, and it was a huge waste of time and still slowed things. So teams are empowered to make their decisions themselves.
- To support this we have adopted the Spotify model of tribes and squads to create cross functional teams that have everyone needed to take all decisions in a given market. The best way to think of these is they turn a matrix organisation on it’s side- So the vertical squad is your day to day team, you sit with them at all times and take your direction from that squad lead. The horizontal “chapter” is the function, which would be the day to day team in a matrix organisation, but in this model is a group of like minded individuals who share best practice and learnings on a common area of expertise.
- For context at Skyscanner, we have organised ourselves around Geographical tribes, and then a central tribe which tends to focus on anything that can be done centrally or globally, eg. Media buying.
- Squads are relatively small. They are very cross functional across the marketing, data and engineering disciplines.
- This is a typical squad makeup, essentially you need to ensure the squad has all the skills it needs to operate autonomously in their area. At Skyscanner the squads are either grouped around countries, or particular specialisms such as paid media or SEO.
- One risk of making teams entirely autonomous is that it reduces their need to engage with others in the business, so we need to over emphasise communication. We have a big sharing culture within Skyscanner, both internally and externally, with each squad having it’s own internal web page and blog. Externally facing we have a growth blog and twitter to share best practice.
- Another part of the culture is to encourage people to be curious and learn and we have a set of recommended reading for all squads, that is always updated.
- We also actively bring in outside influencers to learn from, with recent speakers including Mark Webber and Rand Fishkin of Moz.
- And it is all backed up by our competency framework. There’s no point in “suggesting” people change how they operate, or are curious in nature, then to use the same old set of competencies against which to judge performance.
- Within that framework there is a big focus on broadening the skillset of our marketing team and making them more T shaped individuals.
- Next is Lean Startup principles.
- The Lean Startup is a must read for all employees at Skyscanner. The key principles that we take into work in all our departments is how we use the build measure learn loop to create products or activities. The principles very much focus on getting a minimum viable (or loved) product in front of users as early as possible to test their response to it in the real world, rather than in a false research environment.
- We have built these same principles into our growth model, with the idea to build a minimum viable campaign as quickly as possible to get in front of our travellers to see if it has the potential to scale. Stage 1- We come up with the idea and validate it through some secondary research, why do we believe it’s a good idea? Stage 2- We define a hypothesis for our test- IF we make a certain change then we expect a certain response. Stage 3- We create the assets. Stage 4- We test it, this may take many forms but the idea is how so we get it in front of the same users as the end idea, to test it real world. Stage 5 and 6 we analyse the results and take a decision whether we need to iterate it and continue testing, if it’s good enough to ramp up then and there, or if it’s a fail. Earlier on I talked about our lack of stage gates or approvals, the reason is that this process should be the one that tells squads if something is a good idea or not, it shouldn’t need a meeting to decide that.
- Here’s an example in practice, in this particular example we believed that displaying a live feed of temperature of destinations on ads or content would make users more likely to search and book, this idea required engineering resource to create tools to pull such data into dynamic ads, or at the very least hunt for an off the shelf solution. But instead we created an MVP which was manually searching for temperature in destinations every day and updating a range of assets to assess impact on key metrics, these were then A/B tested against non-temperature ads. So instead of taking time and effort to create a solution we…… In this particular example the idea failed, but that’s not the point. We found that out a lot quicker, with less resource used.
- Area 2- Agile Marketing
- Agile marketing is not simply real time marketing by another name, as is assumed by many outside the tech industry. The Agile Manifesto, also called the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, is a formal proclamation of four key values and 12 principles to guide an iterative and people-centric approach to software development.
- Agile marketing is not simply real time marketing by another name, as is assumed by many outside the tech industry. The Agile Manifesto, also called the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, is a formal proclamation of four key values and 12 principles to guide an iterative and people-centric approach to software development.
- Agile marketing is not simply real time marketing by another name, as is assumed by many outside the tech industry. The Agile Manifesto, also called the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, is a formal proclamation of four key values and 12 principles to guide an iterative and people-centric approach to software development.
- And this is how it then applies in Marketing. There’s a lot more reading on each of these areas in the Agile Marketing Manifesto. Validated Learning- BML loop Customer Collaboration- Adapt to what they need, not rigidly sticking to convention. Adapative & Iterative- Ie. lean start-up. Customer discovery- Not an annual deep dive, always on research and understanding. Flexible- The amount of change in a 12 month planning cycle is massive, need to be able to react. Respond to change- As above. Small Experiments- 5x things per sprint, looking for the one to scale.
- So we’re 31 slides in and no ninjas or pirates yet, so here we go….
- Script – WHAT DOES HACKER MEAN? (Fiona) The best way to understand growth hacking and what growth hackers do is to first understand what is meant by the term 'hacker'. There are a lot of definitions out there. But the best way to explain it in layman terms is that a hacker is someone who is more concerned with achieving an objective than following a conventional way or a prescribed process of doing things. In other words, hackers care more about what needs to get done than how it should get done. As a result, hackers often come up with innovative ways to get things done. Reference: https://www.quora.com/What-is-growth-hacking?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=zeef.com&utm_campaign=ZEEF
- So this is how a Growth Hacker is “officially” defined.
- At Skyscanner we have developed an internal Growth Hacking ninja program to help train the entire business on the skills needed to become an expert in this area. With a more far-reaching vision in mind, we hope to become a thought-leader in the area of Growth Hacking by make all this Programme available to the Public at some point in the future.
- In terms of the broadening skillset, there are 3 key areas growth hackers tend to pull on- Marketing and commercial skills, software engineering and data analysis. As you’ll remember before we are building cross functional teams with these areas, but we also need individuals to develop skills in all these areas too. I don’t expect my team to become expert coders, but in an instance where we have a campaign that needs a widget or a “thing” made, we shouldn’t always need to call on others to make it.
- Another key area is the focus on product. Product Market Fit is the first, and most important thing in the strategies of a growth hacker, and adapting that product to drive growth is part of your armoury. This is not dissimilar to perhaps a smaller goods business, where your marketing and innovation teams might be one and the same, but it’s quite different from the background I came from in larger FMCG where innovation in product is a separate team from the marketers. Point 2 is also very important. Growth Hacking is hugely popular in start-ups because many of the techniques and tools are free or low cost (evidence being adaptations to your own product which only take time to code). With Skyscanner we have been very vocal about our desire to retain a start-up culture, and this is no different.
- The final area is measurement. For Growth Hackers we refer to our Pirate metrics, because arrrrr. Dave McClure, the cofounder of 500 Start-ups originally proposed the growth analytics framework, namely the pirate metrics (CLICK)- AARRR as the growth hacking funnel. These 5 metrics are great for start-ups, because they cover the whole lifecycle of a user from acquisition to referral. The funnel stages are easy to understand and thus the Pirate metrics are widely adopted also as comparison between start-ups. There are several other, and far more complex and clever models used by various organizations. But the power of the growth hacking funnel comes from it’s simplicity.
- So does it work?
- While somewhat anonymised, this gives you an idea of the impact. The top graph shows you increases in bookings in a key market after we changed our ways of working in mid 2015. The second graph shows our acceleration away from key competitors in search trends, despite being up against marketing budgets significantly larger than ours. The 3rd graph shows the impact of an agile approach on one of our annual campaigns. In 2015 we took the “big bang” approach to launch, which saw a great initial spike that quickly tailed off. By taking a more iterative and agile approach in 2016 we didn’t see the initial spike but the overall business impact was much greater.
- So in summary, 4 areas
- But just to be clear, what I have told you is definitely not right for your organisation. In the same way as we have taken several different principles and mashed them together for Skyscanner, you need to look at which of these are the right combination for you.
- As I said already, we are very big on sharing at Skyscanner so there are various ways to get more information via Twitter or Medium. The slide deck will be on our Medium channel next week and I’ll be sure and let you know when they do, or just follow Skyscanner Growth on twitter!