Growth Hackers are the new age explorers

A guide to what it takes to be a Growth Hacker based on how we do x10 Growth at Skyscanner

By Rohit Acharya

“Life is growth. Business is growth, you grow or you die.” — P. Knight, Shoe Dog

Why bother with “Growth Hacking”?

Sustainable and continuous growth doesn’t happen easily. It is like finding free gold every day and this is highly unlikely. Finding growth is exploratory, fast, adventurous and experimental. Hence, you have to hack your way. Hacking your way to find these new frontiers of growth is a highly skilled craft. This is what a growth hacker does, and S.Ellis notes, a growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.

If this excites you, come work with us at Skyscanner in our Growth Tribe in one of our fast-moving Squads.

Skyscanner is an exciting place for working in Growth

Skyscanner enables people to have the best holiday. Over 50M travellers use our product. As a growth hacker, you can make this happen at a massive scale. You have complete autonomy on your work and can draw help from teams in product, engineering, commercial. You control your destiny. This makes Skyscanner an exciting place to work in Growth. Let’s hear what some of our people have to say about their experience.

Gavin Harris

“We love experimenting at Skyscanner. It is dynamic, always changing. We have great flexibility, and this gives us ownership. In short, we have full control over our destiny at Skyscanner.” Gavin, Growth APAC

Natasha Bath and Michael Grierson

“ A deep sense of ownership and ability to make an impact is really valuable to us and Skyscanner provides that.” Natasha + Michael Growth APAC

More from Natasha and Michael: Read Michael’s Growth blog post on How a bad social media post become one of our most successful campaigns and Natasha’s post from a little while ago on Taking a scientific approach to identify our hungry hippos.

Kelly, Peishan and Elaine

“Interacting with customers from a variety of cultures and countries helps us build empathy. This leads to better insights and actionable ways to grow faster.” — Kelly, Peishan and Elaine, User Satisfaction and Internationalization

Aldous Penaranda

“My team contributes directly to the supply of our business. This is a critical element in growing faster. The better our supply, the happier our users. “ Aldous, Partner Engineering

Mahasen, Mito, Rohit and Rodolf

“We are always working on new challenges in Growth and it is never boring. We can make a direct impact to millions of users with our experiments. We have a chance to be creative and take ideas from scratch to full experiments.” — Mahasen, Mito and Rodolf, Growth Engineering

Fiona Li

“We are constantly learning, and enabling this development is key for improving our growth hacking capabilities.” Fiona Li, Growth Ninja Programme

More from Fiona

Listen to this Skyscanner Growth Snippet featuring Fiona Li on why structural changes to Squads and Tribes have contributed more to x10 Growth at Skyscanner.

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What does it take to succeed in Growth at Skyscanner?

As we noted earlier, building engines of growth is tough. Here at Skyscanner, we are given autonomy to pursue our goals. With this autonomy, we work very hard to find individuals with traits that are critical for growth. I would like to highlight a few examples.

Empathy for our travelers

Always start with the need for the traveller, and work your way backwards. We apply this principle when we make decisions at micro and macro levels. We use it while building products and seeking growth opportunities.

Relentless problem solvers

Growth hackers have an obsessive need to solve problems and uncover opportunities. You are relentlessly resourceful to find solutions. You can think in multiple dimensions of the business. You try unconventional ways to solve a problem. Most importantly, you constantly draw power from other functional teams to get closer to your goal.

Iteratively turn data to actions

You have an analytical mind and can take the raw power of data and convert it into highly impactful actions. You learn whatever tools are necessary to get the job done. Michael G. And his team started with a Christmas campaign but after iterating they built a way for anyone to harness public holidays to extend their vacation days.

Here are a few principles we apply to grow our markets

Product market fit

We are obsessed with product market fit in our markets. We have taken this principle and adapted it to Skyscanner. We want to grow our markets in a sustainable way — which means we’ll spend time and resource on ensuring we have the right product for our markets, coupled with a great customer experience.

Retention

At the core, we’re trying to enhance the experience for our customers, so that our customers return to us frequently. We experiment constantly via new channels and product offerings for our travelers.

Emerging channels

We also keep up to date with new techniques and channels to connect to the traveller and help them discover Skyscanner.

Data to actions

We strive to inform our decisions based on data. Data that is generated by users can be used to build insights and hypotheses. We make this a basis for our experiments and convert them into actions. We repeat this iteratively till we have reached our goal.

I hope this has given you an overview of our culture, our love for autonomy in experimenting and love for exploration in growth. Working at Skyscanner makes me very invigorated. I wake up to a sense of constant exploration.
You have a chance to join our revolution.

About the author

Hi! My name is Rohit Acharya, and thanks for reading my post. I lead our consumer product management efforts for Skyscanner in APAC. Skyscanner provides me with autonomy to explore and experiment towards our goals. I’d encourage you to take a look at the current Skyscanner Product and Growth roles we have in our organization.

A big thank you to my colleagues Natasha, Michael, Emily, Fang Fang, Gavin, Mito, Mahasen, Rodolf, Jessica, Jinny, Kelly, Peishan, Elaine, Fiona and Lisa for their input to this post.