Inside the Makers’ Studio
The story of a bold new initiative at Skyscanner
On Tuesday December 11, 2018, travelers in 11 of the markets we operate in might have noticed something new when they opened the Skyscanner app on their phones: a tile in the ‘Plan Your Next Trip’ shelf with the label ‘Bank holiday breaks’. If they tapped on this new tile, they were shown a list of upcoming national holiday dates for their respective countries. If they then clicked on one of these tiles, they were shown flight prices for destinations — segmented by direct flight times — for the national holiday/national holiday weekends they had chosen. From there, they were able to view all the crucial information about the trip they were considering and go on to book with one of our partners or directly with Skyscanner.
But what the travelers enjoying this incredibly useful and carefully designed feature on that cold day in early December didn’t — and couldn’t — know, was this: it had been brought to life in just four weeks by a plucky band of misfits working under the banner of Skyscanner’s bold new initiative: Maker Studio.
Meet your maker
What is Maker Studio? Quite simply, it’s an internal initiative started in fall 2018 that empowers people from across Skyscanner to come together in order to bring a new idea from concept to life in just four weeks. Each round of Maker Studio involves tackling a new problem with a new team of people. You can think of it as a modern answer to yesteryear's "innovation lab." In this series of blog posts I’m going to talk about how Maker Studio works and describe what we built in the first ever Maker Studio.
Move fast and make things
At this point you may be wondering why we felt we needed a Maker Studio-type initiative — after all, we’re a tech company and we’re always making things (and doing so as fast as we can, presumably). Well, here’s a summary of what lay behind our thinking:
- Skyscanner has grown to over 1,200 people across 11 offices. That’s a lot of people. It can be hard to retain the snappy, move fast and break things energy in a company our size.
- While we constantly adapt to change and traveler needs, we generally plan our work in medium-sized chunks, which means that it’s easy to lose sight of impactful bite-sized opportunities to try something a bit outside the lines of our more goal-focused work.
- We want to retain the hack-y part of our identity. Skyscanner organizes and champions hackathons, both internally and in partnerships with other schools and organizations — but we acknowledge that one, two, or even three days is a really tough timeframe when it comes to shipping a hack to production. We’re working at scale, so that means we need to make sure that (1) nothing we release will break another part of our product, (2) all content is appropriately localized for different audiences, and (3) there’s no compromise on the quality or security of the products we deliver to our travelers.
The road to Maker Studio is paved with good inventions
Maker Studio has two ultimate goals. First, externally: get an artifact that solves a real problem into travelers’ hands within four weeks. Second, internally: foster an even stronger sense of community within Skyscanner based on ideation, rapid prototyping, always touching new tech, and stretching our skills.
The process goes something like this:
- We solicit ideas from across the business.
- We work with each idea submitter to flesh out a problem statement and help ensure the solutions they pitch are feasible given the constraints of Maker Studio.
- Our Pitch Panel selects an idea
- We recruit applicants based on the desired skills and expertise needed to build the concept
- The team kicks off in-person for 1 week to discuss, agree, and define how our team will work together and what we want to achieve
- The team works remotely for 3 more weeks
- After the 4th week, we ship the new piece of work as an experiment to test our hypotheses and generate useful learnings that align with our strategy, and most importantly, our travelers' needs
It was also important to us that we would follow the above process while adhering to our engineering principles:
- We would peer review every change — at least twice within our team for any code that would be reviewed by another Skyscanner team, to make sure we met their quality bar
- We had to ensure that every part of the feature we were building, every milestone, if you will, had a clear definition of Done
- We would validate significant changes and approaches to them by participating in weekly demos with other engineers, designers, and product owners who work on our apps, so that we could both learn from them, and also keep them fully informed of our work
- We would use defined technology standards — talking with other engineers, researching best practices, and documenting everything along the way
Gathering ideas
When I first sat down to think about how ideas should be collected, I wanted something lightweight to ensure that the process of pitching a concept would be as painless as possible. I knew that if we asked people to quantify metrics-movability with precision and create detailed mock-ups, it would be too big a barrier and we’d see few submissions. I’d recently re-read Ash Maurya’s Running Lean and thought that an adapted Lean Canvas model would work well for Maker Studio. Here’s what we asked people to tell us about their proposed feature:
Problem: Articulate the problem you’re solving in 3 sentences or fewer
Pitch: Share your suggested solution(s) or at least the hypothesis you think we should test
Customer Segment(s): This should be connected to the problem, as not all customers face the same problems
Unique Value Proposition: In less than 3 sentences, tell us the promise of the value to be delivered. Encapsulate how the intended customer segment(s) will benefit from this concept
Measure Success: We can’t apply mature metrics to nascent initiatives, but when appropriate, our expertise and intuition can guide how we define success.
Estimated Timeframe: We’d like to limit the scope of each concept to be feasible within a max 4-week time-slot
Expertise Needed: If you believe this idea requires some degree of specialism, please highlight it here. Try to be as specific as possible on helpful domain knowledge, e.g. data science or experience in flights pricing
What it might look like: Whether it’s a mock-up, hand-drawn diagram, or anything else, visuals are very helpful. Please don’t dwell on perfect, as this is just a quick way to express your concept at a glance.
Anyone from any part of the business is welcome to pitch an idea. We selected people from a cross-section of disciplines to form our Pitch Panel, the group of people who ultimately choose the project for each round of Maker Studio. Ideas were scored based on the panel’s assessment of their:
- Feasibility (especially: can we build it in <4 weeks)
- Timeliness
- Novelty
- Impact (on the traveler, partner, or our own brand)
- Revenue potential
The call for ideas went out on October 5th. Join this blog series next time to find out what happened next…
About the author: Megan Murphy
Megan Murphy is a Senior Product Manager who leads product for Skyscanner’s global car hire and airport transfer businesses, and created Skyscanner’s Maker Studio from the ground up. She’s also a full-time student, earning her Master’s Degree in Design Research at the ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering. Sometimes, she sleeps.
Join the march of the makers
At Skyscanner, we put travellers at the heart of everything we do and we’re obsessed with turning their travel dreams into reality. If you think you’ve got what it takes to make things at Skyscanner, take a look at our open roles and get in touch!
