Our Tribes: Central Growth and Regional Growth
By Rebecca Moore
Growth is our product, Tribes help us achieve Growth
We have historically, like many businesses, been very functionally biased in our focus, objectives, decisions and activities. This thinking had the potential to impede us achieving the best overall outcome for Skyscanner and also impact our operating pace.
Tribes are Mission-Biased
In our new Tribe structure, we changed this orientation to become mission biased: by this we mean that the Tribe now manages the mission, and sets the objectives and key results.
A Tribe consists of multiple cross functional teams called squads, who each support the delivery of the Tribe mission and are biased towards that above all else.
The function line manages the people, provides them with career development and good practice knowledge in support of delivering the Tribe mission.
Our Growth Tribes have adopted these attributes, and operate to complement this structure.
Regional Growth Tribes
For this reason, Regional Growth Tribes (RGT) combine these different skills together into Squads. A Squad, based on the squadification model at Spotify, sees a small team made up of different skill sets come together to achieve a same goal.
We are bringing a whole new level to the meaning of cross-functional and this is something we consider when recruiting for Skyscanner Growth Roles now. For example, look at the mix in a sample RGT squad. In a cross functional engineering team, you would expect to find Development/Product/Design and Test engineers — in RGT squads, we are being even more diverse.
The Country Growth Squads focus on developing the localised product features that will make a product ready for marketing. The Squads and the Campaign Factories focus on applying the right blend of marketing activity for markets where the product is ready.
However, when it comes to marketing activities, we split these into two types:
- Those that are highly automatable and capable of being algorithmically applied and analysed, and
- Those which, while still being capable of detailed performance analysis, are far more reliant on human intervention.
The most advanced Internet Economy companies concentrate the former in a centralised growth Tribe, thereby ensuring that the same analytical approach is uniformly adopted. By central, we don’t mean located by city, we mean centralised globally, and the teams performing this activity can be located anywhere.
Central Growth Tribe
At the heart of all the Tribes is the Traveller, the focus in Central Growth is tooling, automating and enabling impact at a scale previously we couldn’t achieve.
Below are some of the Squads’ current focuses :-
- Understanding the Traveller — is the traveller planning their next trip, just returning, looking for inspiration on where to go? Providing tools to squads to understand this enables the RGT squads to focus on the most relevant traveller needs for their markets.
- Email Marketing — enabling automatic creation of newsletters to enable greater personalisation of information.
- Budget Modelling — applying Lean and Just In Time principles requires budget practices that can be flexible and adapt in just as lean and agile a manner. We are now finding we are having to spread out our application of Lean and Agile practices to departments like finance.
- Content Marketing — finding and optimising channels to reach users with content that solves their current problems i.e. What to do when I get to Italy? What time of year should I go to Spain?
While generally there is always room for growth, having a structure in place to facilitate growth and make it an intrinsic part of our organisation is what we see as the key to ongoing success. Ensuring great collaboration and synergy between our Tribes is key to success.
Could you Squadify?
Could you employ the Tribes and Squads model in your business? What are the barriers you think you would encounter and what do you think you could do with the model if you adapted it for your business?
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About the Author
Hi, my name is Rebecca, and thanks for reading my post. I work in our Business Operations and Strategy Team, having just returned from implementing and running our Growth Tribe in Asia-Pacific for the last 10 months. Before that I led the program to re-organise into our current Growth Model. I’ve had a fantastic journey with Skyscanner over the last 18 months working with our very talented Growth team. Seeing the impact that our Growth transformation has had on the Growth of our APAC people and business has been particularly rewarding.
