Self-disrupt for Growth

The road to building a x10 Growth business

27 min readJul 31, 2018

By Rebecca Moore

Today I’m sharing a copy of the presentation I gave at Turing Fest 2018. My talk is based on the concept of self-disrupting for Growth as the title of this post says. To unlock growth, a business needs to continually (re)organise and (re)educate itself, across the disciplines of product, growth marketing and engineering. This presentation will talk through what we have done to continually organise and educate for growth at Skyscanner, and share the resulting learnings, successes, fails, tips and techniques.

Short on time? Here is the presentation shared at Turing Fest 2018 below, I’ve written up my notes in long-form below this. You can view the supplementary presentation slides below and on Skyscanner Growth on Slideshare.

But first, what is Skyscanner?

We are a global travel search site, designed to support and inspire people to find the right travel options from the millions available at the best prices. Our secret is our unique proprietary technology that connects people directly with everything the travel industry has to offer.

Skyscanner is always unbiased and free and we never charge commission. The two questions I always get asked about Skyscanner are:

Do you get cheap flights?
How do you make money?

Yes I do get cheap flights, I get the same cheap flights that anyone else can get through using our website or app ;-) (we are free, unbiased and transparent, so no special deals for staff!).

The second question how do we make money? Answer: either through very small referral fees from our partners or advertisement

So how have we grown?

In 2003, along with co-founders Bon Grimes and Barry Smith, Gareth Williams started Skyscanner with a simple idea; a site that compares all flight options and prices for every commercial airline in the world. Gareth was a regular traveler and was finding it time-consuming to sift through the many travel websites to get the right flight options. So he launched Skyscanner using a simple spreadsheet and the company has grown from strength to strength from then. We are continually increasing our global coverage, and currently serve 30 languages, with a team of around 1000 people across 10 offices, consisting of 50+ nationalities.

So looking at all of those numbers, probably these are indicators that we have grown pretty well, you might think. But it is worth us getting super clear on what we mean by growth. Actually a more important question is “What is the Goal”. Because if you are clear as a business on what the goal is, the metrics of growth come to you really easily.

Our exponential and healthy growth curve!

Is this growth? We have seen extremely healthy exponential visitor growth ever since we launched. 70m have downloaded our app and 70m come to our site monthly. Awesome right? We are doing a great job of pumping all these visitors into the product. The truth is this is vanity. When we really examined it a few years ago our goal wasn’t actually just bringing users. Our goal is to facilitate people travelling. That tells us we are bringing them value. And if we facilitate travel, that means travelers are booking with our partners, which brings them value too.

So how do we measure that we are bringing this value? Well the closest proxy we have to tell us how much we are helping our travelers to travel is to measure how much we facilitate them to spend on travel. So our North star metric is Total Ticket Value (TTV). And this is what we align all of our Growth activity against.

Who is responsible for Growth?

Well in a start up this is really simple obvious. Everyone is responsible for growth.

It gets harder and harder to figure this out as you grow, as you start to have more support functions, and grow out your product and engineering functions. It all can feel quite a bit more siloed and complex, quite quickly. Labeling up a team of people and calling them “Growth” further complicates things. Unless you are explicit about it, the rest of the business will quickly assume that team are therefore responsible for growth, and by default, nobody else is.

The truth is, that growth problems will still always be product problems and vice versa. Growth is still and always should be everyone’s problem. But when you get to a certain size cross functional working doesn’t just happen naturally — you need to hardwire the organisation to enable it.

Today I want to answer this question. How do you continue to grow when you have already found scale?
The short answer: It is Hard. Complex. There are no constants.

You’ve got a great product that has strong word of mouth growth. You’ve done the hard yards of establishing your “long and hard” channels like SEO and all the high endorphin, one-off quick wins and instant gratification from scaling up channels like SEM. You’ve scaled out to most of the markets where product market fit is naturally strong and you haven’t needed to tinker too much with your marketing approach or product to stimulate growth in those new markets. What do you do once you’ve done the easy start up stuff?

Note to all founders and start-ups — I know that stuff is very not easy.

The truth is the next step isn’t any easier. Its hard, its complex and there can’t be any constants. You start to get into the land of diminishing returns very quickly with the likes of paid marketing, competitors start to weigh in and eat up some of your brand space, and your organisation becomes more siloed and slower.

Maintaining a hockey stick every year takes a different type of organisation.

We all probably have a nice idea in our head that as we pump more humans and effort and blood sweat and tears into a business, so we get the same return in outcomes, company growth, fulfillment etc. Not so. The truth is we hit these inflection points as we grow as an organisation. You will know them by the symptoms. It gets harder and harder to get anything done; velocity slows and throughput declines. People work crazy hours but can’t get anything done or they give up because they can’t get anything done. Morale declines and people get frustrated.

To navigate an inflection point, requires first of all recognising it and then proactively and consciously managing the organisation through it. That usually means looking at how you are organised, who you are hiring, how you are attacking growth, and rethinking it. In short, it requires a lot of self-disruption.

Organising for growth

I find it really useful to think about the organisational phases described in this diagram by Reid Hoffman which describes the concept of “blitzscaling”.

The numbers in this are indicative and around orders of magnitude; they aren’t precise, and every organisation transitions through this model differently, but it is a helpful way of understanding the growth scaling issue that accompanies an organisation as it scales. Because growth is everyone’s problem, or at least it should be.

One important concept supports this theory; Dunbar’s number. This is the concept that there is a cognitive limit to the number of people a person can maintain a stable social relationship with; a relationship is one in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to another person. Dunbar limits this to 150 people. I would argue that in the work place, it is closer to 100.

There are a series of stages an organisation transitions through. When it is first launched, it is a Family — a very small team of generalists that have identified a market in which they believe they have a unique advantage and are looking to get to product/market fit ASAP. The family has a single focus and need generalists, because the team will have to do a lot of pivoting and switching around.

Next comes the Tribal phase. Here is where you execute — you improve your plan, grow your market share, adjust your product/market fit, and figure out how to move faster than your competition. The key here is being able to move really, really quickly. You have a bigger team with more varied functions but you can still survive with relationships rather than processes. When it comes to dealing with competition, and growth tactics, you aren’t taking the competition head on. You are thinking guerrilla tactics; how do you approach the fight asymmetrically.

The Village Phase is next and it is the first big substantive shift. The village stage is when you have stickiness in your product, a model that works and you need to scale it up. Now I joined Skyscanner as employee no 535, so quite well into this phase. At this point we were moving away from hiring generalists and were bringing in more specialists (like me — change and transformation). We had just gone into Asia and the Americas and were getting right into global scale, and it was creating quite a few challenges, as well as causing quite a few things to break.

The thing is, and it seems so obvious when I look back now. You just cannot expect the things that always worked to keep on working.

I’ve lived through 2 of these transitions with Skyscanner, and in particular scaling Growth through them, so I’m going to talk to you about what we had to change and the impact it had, for these two phases, and the many many things we have learned along the way. So this presentation/blog post will be a game of two halves; the village phase and the city phase.

The Village Transition

When and why to change your Growth org

So I shared earlier some numbers and characteristics on how a business might transition as it scales, but every business’ story is different as it navigates scale, so the key thing to look out for are the signs that tell you it is breaking. Don’t wait for it to really degrade, because when that happens, you lose good people. Get on it and do something about it. The earlier you can recognise the symptoms that you are heading into a transition, the better. And the symptoms should be easy to spot.

For us in our old marketing org in Skyscanner we were seeing:

Functions that should be working together weren’t even talking to each other (e.g. Social and PR).
We thought we were optimising for a global scale, but in reality we were trying to force one solution on all of our markets
Limited or no impact at a local level, and local teams getting quite frustrated or feeling marginalised
High levels of wasted effort and we weren’t scaling anything
Morale low and frustrations running high

But the biggest indicator and the one always to look out for — we just couldn’t get things done. It was taking us many months to execute things which previously had taken days or weeks.

In marketing, as we were known at the time, we had hit 100 people and Dunbar’s law kicked in. We couldn’t operate through relationships alone. And besides, growth isn’t just a marketing problem, right? It’s a problem for the whole organisation, and the whole org had busted through Dunbar’s number quite some time ago.

When you get big you can’t just get your Heads of Marketing, Sales, Engineering, Product, Design, Data in a room and thrash it out to get a great growth plan together and then assume that level of cross functional working will continue through the rest of the org. Why? Because the rest of the org is now 500+ people. And when you have that many people the default is silos. When you are small you are never that far away from the engineers, product managers, design, data etc. As you grow the divide between these teams can become quite chasmic, because the board become quite far away from actually the folks on the ground that are executing. You need to find a way to foster that collaboration and shared ownership within your organisational design, and your culture — bottom up.

Also, I want to touch on an additional challenge we at Skyscanner needed to overcome, that at the time was unique to us. The challenge was Geography. We had amassed our scale, in terms of our marketing teams, in Edinburgh in Scotland. The tech ecosystem was starting to get going but it was embryonic and we didn’t have the likes of Linked In, Google, Amazon and Facebook on our doorstep so we weren’t naturally exposed to new ways of working and disruptive thinking — there wasn’t the ready-made cross pollination of thought. So we literally didn’t know any better. We had been building out a very conventional marketing organisation that might have suited a consumer goods business. We had hired some great people but we had a lot of conventional wisdom knocking about, because that was all people had ever known. Conventional wisdom is a killer.

Thankfully, our leadership team and in particular our founder Gareth Williams had the foresight to recognise that we were playing in a very different industry with a different set of norms and we should be taking our lead and our inspiration from the tech giants. So we adopted this philosophy of “internet economy sensibilities”, and we went about building this way of being into every facet of our org, from the design of our offices to the people we hired. We had immersion trips, read every relevant book we could that came out of silicone valley, themed many company updates around it, held lightning talks, aired ted talks, read many, many blogs. We eventually defined it as a set of competencies that we use for performance management and hiring even today. As well as this we did a whole pile of reading and research into Growth hacking and how the tech giants did it.

What did we want to achieve?

So, from all of this research, what was the ideal state we were looking for? Well we wanted to:

Innovate in our current channels and markets;
Whilst we tested and scaled new and emerging ones;
We wanted to continue to take on new territory;
We wanted to move away from big bang campaigns, and do high volume hacks, cheap and free wins; and
We wanted to capitalise on our strong word of mouth and properly build growth into the product

…. oh and do this at scale across 40 markets.

How?

Well where do you start with a task like this. We knew it was a fairly substantial change that needed to make, not just to our structure but to our entire mindset and approach. So we looked at what enablers we needed, and what we could inject to bring them to life. Our enablers were:

Organised for market focus with global scale through our structure Tribes and Squads
Enable rapid execution with a Lean startup, scientific and agile approach
Instill an ability to test, pivot and iterate across the entire marketing mix in a market, at velocity; for this we upskilled our teams using the concept of T-shpaing.
Create a culture that was fearless in executing, and learning through a Growth Mindset.

Taking the orginsation first — we were functionally organised. This was focussing us to try and take a globalised approach to things that should actually be done locally, and yet at the same time we weren’t able to rapidly scale globally, either. We thought we were organised to be hyper efficient but we were actually anything but. So our first significant change was to put in place Tribes and Squads.

So we moved to tribes and squads which you can read all about in this post written in 2016 on the topic.

Why? Well if you think about this 2 by 2 matrix below, what we were actually trying to do was to emulate all of the great characteristics of the early start up — the “family” phase, but at scale with high velocity, and get ourselves back into the top right box. When you want to operate at pace there needs to be huge autonomy. Squads and tribes enable this autonomy. Squads are empowered to make decisions themselves, and should have the right mix of skills and tooling to do so.

When we embarked on this change, we were probably landed somewhere here as per the matrix below.

Iterating at pace

At the same time we wanted to embrace the concept of the scientific approach. A great read on this is The Lean Startup — it was one of the mandatory reading books we set for our growth teams as we went through the transition. One of the key cornerstones of this approach is to do things in small batches with super quick cycle times (we were doing big global campaigns that were big bet gambles and would take us months to create; we wanted to swap this for small iterative quick turn around tests that we could scale up).

If you look at Boyd’s Law of Iteration, a fundamental concept of this is that the “Speed of iteration beats Quality of Iteration”. Here is an analogy to explain the concept. In the Korean war, two aircraft were constantly engaged in high speed, mid-air dog fights — the MiG 15 (Russian built) and the F-86 (American built). Despite being considered a technologically inferior aircraft in many ways (it was significantly out-gunned by the MiG 15), the F-86 was consistently winning in head to head combat. Why was this? The answer lay in its ability to change direction. Its tail-plane design meant that it was incredibly responsive to shift direction — it had a very fast cycle time.

If we now apply this in a more industrial context, take two scenarios:

Below you can see these two scenarios modeled, with a cycle time of one month; scenario B starts to exceed Scenario A in terms of performance.

In this chart you can see the same thing modeled but using a weekly cycle time.

And here we have a daily cycle time.

Here you see that less of an improvement over a shorter time can have dramatically more impact. Than more of an improvement over a longer time. Of course this assumes there is zero friction in changing direction and iterating, which there will be, so there is a practical aspect to this too to be considered, however the opportunity that short cycle times, small batches and iterating rapidly is clear. This is where start-ups can find their asymmetry and their unfair advantage against the big tech giants.

And then where does the science come in?

Well the scientific method is actually something most people learn in school, its just a question of applying it to growth. The ethos of it is that rather than applying years of conventional thinking, where people will back an idea because they have an emotional attachment to it; that we drive very objevtive and data based decision making. So a simple experiment requires a hypothesis that will be either true or not once the experiment is complete; “if I do “A” then “B” will happen. I will know this is valid when I see “C”metrics shift by “D”proportion.” We have since put quite a bit more definition to this in our scientific cycle and have built these same principles into our growth model. The aim is that when we have ideas we build a minimum viable campaign as quickly as possible to get it in front of our users as quickly as possible to see if it has the potential to scale. Here is our scientific cycle:

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 to 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.

This is a very simple mechanism for dramatically reducing cycle times, and bringing data driven decision making into your approach.

Whilst making these changes we also ensure we shifted our squads to agile practices, including:

Kanban / scrum to plan work, with everything broken down into small batches.
Stand-ups, retros and backlog grooming sessions, rather than long unproductive meetings
Everything visible such as performance, dashboards, goals on intranet
Obsessively eliminating waste (we used the Theory of Constraints as a model for that — The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt is a good book for this — set in a manufacturing environment but can applied to any process)

So we are always running at pace and producing minimum viable products to test as opposed to taking many months to build something we think may work.

Priming our people for Growth

In short, T-shape all the way. First of all I’ll explain what I mean by T-shaping.

Most marketers will start off with a specific expertise they have developed in their early career e.g. performance marketing, SEO, Email etc.

These are really great skills and we need them in our business, but what if the market needs something completely different. A market, users and tech can change rapidly. We need growth marketers that can recognise the anomaly and the opportunity through data, and rapidly deploy those gorilla tactics I mentioned earlier, to take the fight to the big guys. So we need marketers that are very versatile.

We also need to be constantly reinforcing and building out sustainability in our marketing mix. That means not chasing out the quick and unrepeatable wins like SEM, but building out proprietary growth opportunities in our product.

So we need to equip our growth marketers with a couple of layers of foundational skills. One area we massively focussed on initially was data. Not just reporting, but using it to understand the weaknesses, opportunities and significance of our marketing stimulus and product through data. We changed our company KPIs to reflect the Growth metrics of Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue, which are our leading indicators of TTV, our north star metric.

We put our entire team through intensive training on all of our key data systems, and we actually built our own Growth Data Store to store all of the metrics we need to power our growth engines.

To embed the T-shape model we created an online training program that builds up the foundational knowledge across the “T” which we put everyone through, and we still use today for new starters.

If you get T-shaping right, some amazing things start to happen. Here is a great example. Our PR manager for Russia who had previously only ever done PR realised that SEO was a massive opportunity for his market. Firstly he recognised this because he was in the data like he never had been before and he saw the anomaly and opportunity, and he realised we needed to scale it fast and that it would be much more impactful than PR. Secondly he realised that doing it manually would miss the opportunity. So he taught himself to code in python. He released and is still releasing today thousands of automated pages with multi-variant tests that he has hacked into the product and made some awesome learnings that we are now taking back into our global approach to SEO. He had only ever done PR.

Making the shift while retaining our culture: creating a Growth Mindset

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

This change required a transformative shift in mindset, approach and skills from our teams; we had to get our experts within our squads to learn a lot of new things quickly. We needed them each to Self-Disrupt. They had to learn other marketing disciplines, they had to upskill on data, programming, agile, scientific method, the product etc. It was huge for them and quite daunting. Culture is at the heart of this. Contrary to what you might think, if fundamentally you have great people that are open to it and embrace it, you can shape culture and make seismic shifts in a surprisingly short period of time.

The biggest shift we made was to ignite a culture of learning, and growth mindset.

Summary of Growth vs Fixed mindset (from Mindset by Carol Dweck)

Firstly it was all about making learning accessible and pointing people in the right direction. So we put out as much reading we could on the change we were making, so people knew what, why, and how. We put out as much reading as we could, there was a Blog library and Intranet hub — What are Squads and Tribes, What does a performing squad look like, How do you bootstrap a squad, What does a good Market Growth Lead / Product Owner look like, What is T-shaping etc. We put out more material than people could consume.

We completely overhauled our marketing competencies and we renamed ourselves as Growth; everyone got new titles. We were no longer marketing. We also implemented a few learning ‘must haves’ such as:

Core reading (The Goal, Lean Start-up, Toyota Way, Growth Mindset)
Agile coaches facilitating squad and tribe kick-offs and health checks and team building
We made sure we had the right leadership team in place that would own and lead the change and shape the future
We need to fail if we want to succeed — celebrating failure with the concept of #fail forward.
We completely overhauled our recruitment process

The great thing about a Growth Mindset is that it is completely free. You do not need a fancy education, a privileged up bringing. You just need to have openness to learning; to welcome new and difficult challenges and not be afraid to fail.

So you can put all of this in place but that still isn’t enough. The only way to really properly embed a culture of learning, in my experience is to openly role model it, and to celebrate it.

I just want to expand on the part about role modelling it from my personal experience. The great thing about it is that positively modelling it has strong network effects and viral characteristics.

Take me. There is really nothing special about me. I was born and raised in a tiny farm outside of Glasgow. I was state educated at the local rural schools right through. I was lucky that I had Growth Mindset role modeled to me early on in life. My Dad started his own business, but unfortunately got very sick when I was 11 and died from cancer when I was 14. So I went through my most formative educational years being raised by a single parent — an amazingly strong woman — my mother, who was a nurse. Very soon after my Dad died, my mum, who was trying to support me and my younger brother, decided she wanted to do a nursing degree. She was already fully qualified and had been practicing for 20 years but still wanted to learn, and she was constantly doing this. So she put herself through her degree and she then decided she wanted specialize in diabetes so did a whole heap of learning and courses on that. And then she wanted to learn how to prescribe so she went and got herself qualified for that. And then she decided she wanted to learn to prescribe medicine so she did the learning and got herself qualified for that. I had this continued role model of someone in extremely tough circumstances, who was constantly role modelling this. So by the time it got to choosing higher education for me, I was so open to options. I didn’t need a male role model to push me into engineering, despite the fact that 20 years ago, not that many women doing it; I was in a ratio of 15–1 in class but it didn’t bother me I’d developed a fearlessness about learning and I got that from my mother. And I have to say I was fortunate I had great career counselling and school and we have some world class universities here in Scotland on our doorstep, I looked up and down the UK and picked the most challenging engineering degree I could find and put myself through it (at Strathclyde University). And it opened many many doors for me ever since. And I keep getting injections of that role modelling now. Our CEO Bryan regularly emails out to the whole company and always updates us on what he has read and learned. Gareth, our founder and Chairman has always been a great example of this. And I count this as one of the most important facets of my job now to role model the growth mindset.

Once you get it going, it is infectious. So if you do nothing else after reading this — please make sure you role modelling your learning (you clearly are interested in learning if you have bothered to read this far!). It is infectious and it will catch on.

The cost of change

So all of this sounds great, loads of models that can be adopted and some great outcomes, but I do just want to sensitise you to one thing. Change is inevitable and necessary when you are scaling an org, but whole scale, big bang organisational and cultural changes are short term expensive. They have a high emotional price, which you can’t completely eliminate but you can minimise the price tag. My advice is not to go into a change naively. Whenever you have a change you will have a distribution curve something like this.

Get on the ground with your folks and figure out where they are. Tune up your Emotional Intelligence and if it isn’t your strenght, get someone on your team who has got it. There will be some people that really get the change and are breathing a sigh of relief — “finally you guys understand”. Our Korean and Asian emerging market teams were a great example of this. They got the cross functional and T-shaping thing right away and wasted no time figuring out what they needed to focus on, got deep into the numbers and the product and they were kicking out experiments almost immediately. Know who your ambassadors are, get great examples of their work elevate it and celebrate it. Get them up presenting at all hands, get it blogged, refer to it as examples of what good looks like. Pretty soon more ambassadors will catch on and you will have more to share and the quality will start to improve, and the supporters will start to catch on. They probably wont get it right first time, but that isn’t as important as the fact they are trying, and if they are trying, they will learn. Elevate and celebrate the people that try. Publicly celebrate the ones who are leading the change bottom up and get inventive about how you do this. They will bring everyone else along with them.

Unfortunately, the law of statistics dictates that you will always have defectors and saboteurs. These are horrible labels to put on people. What you need to figure out is, are these people genuinely a) not going to get it or b) not willing to get it or are they just having a really strong emotional reaction that they need help to work through. We had quite a few folk that have been enormously successful since the change, that had quite a severe wobble during it. This is where you need your EI up at its highest level. Once the dust has settled, and people have had time to emotionally adjust, then you can see the ones that either just aren’t going to get it or are determined not to get it and then it is time for honest conversations and difficult, but necessary decisions, from both parties.

Impact

This is anonymised but gives you an idea of the impact these changes had.

The top graph shows an increase in bookings following a squad abandoning marketing activity and focussing on product market fit.
The second graph shows how we accelerated our share of voice away from our competitors without expensive brand campaigns such as TV.
The third shows how the switch from one big bang campaign that took months (LHS) impacted vs the sustained and cumulative impact of many small iterative campaigns (RHS).

The City Transition

Where did we land?

So we made some real substantive shifts in how we operated, and most importantly we saw the impact of this. But we didn’t get it all right.

This is where we landed…

We managed to really increase the autonomy of our teams, but we still hadn’t quite got their with our alignment (we were aiming for top right box).

Let’s say that in this case our #failfowards were:

High autonomy / low alignment (and duplication, inefficiency, blockers to scale)
To scale, growth should be owned by the whole business, and it still wasn’t

And we had another transition to make as we were getting bigger again; :

We needed to refine our structure and instigate the next phase of investing in our people

Alignment

So earlier this year we focussed on greater alignment. The good thing was that we now had all of the T-shape skills to analyse our entire market end to end. This is easier to explain using the Horizons concept. Here is a generalised version of ours below.

In Growth, we have the difficult job of keeping the growth pumps going today whilst wanting to invest in the growth of the future. We found a really simple model that has enabled us to think about how we invest our time to ensure we are doing both well — the McKinsey 3 horizons model. So there are 3 horizons:

Horizon 1 — what are our core competencies as a business, what should we focus our time on strengthening and protecting

Horizon 2 — what are our emerging opportunities — new markets, channels, products that we can build on from our core competence, and that can become Horizon 1 in 6–12 months

Horizon 3 — what is the new and the beautiful? Entirely new disruptions that no-one has thought of yet?

And we asked our market teams not just to come up with a marketing plan, but to look across the whole of our product, market dynamics, commercial landscape, competition, full funnel analysis, and with no restrictions or constraints, if you could do anything with the product or to shake up the market, to win your market, what would you do?

We bottomed up all of these to provide a global view, and pulled our entire board and senior product and engineering team into a room for a day and went through all of it, with many market examples to bring it to life. And the output has made a significant difference to our alignment as an organisation. We are now here.

Real Life Application

We have a collection of tribes and goals, where we have the right team of cross functional experts pulled together to work the problem — Growth, Product, Engineering, Design, Data. But we’ve gone even further than that. When I talked about shared leadership, in each of our engineering and product tribes we now have a Growth Lead as part of that team. A T-shaped growth expert who can ensure that everything those Tribes does has Growth front and centre.

Here are some case studies to show how everything comes together. These examples show how we’ve made the most of these collaborations for growth going forwards

We launched our first vertical in years: Rail. This took 3 months and a team of about 8 people. Most importantly Growth was baked into the product from the very beginning.

2. Ferries

Our Greek Growth team realised that there was a huge opportunity for Ferries in their market. So they found a quick way to build this into the product, without even needing support from Product, and were taking bookings within 24 hours.

3. Arabic App

A small Growth team that were looking at new and emerging markets spotted a great opportunity in the Middle East. So our growth teams worked with the app developers and have produced our first Arabic product, and we are seeing great word of mouth growth as a result.

People first

I have personally learned a lot from this entire process from re-structuring to showing impactful change as a result. And we didn’t get everything right. Here are some of the things we have tweaked to support our people.

Having one king or queen of a tribe isn’t the answer, you need shared leadership.
Tribes are tribal and mega tribes get inefficient — (rule of thumb < 10 squads; >5).
Don’t forget about line management. We have introduced a new role into our squads to support this as our line management became very dispersed; we have now split out responsibility between two leads of a squad so that each could focus on either line management or market strategy. Here is a summary of there responsibilities.

As a result, teams are happier than ever. This is evident in our EMEA employee survey results:

How do you continue to grow when you have started to amass some scale?

The answer is to continue to self disrupt:

Get a scalable org model and know when to revisit it
Small batches, small cycle times, scientific approach, agile, no waste
Growth is everyone’s problem
Choose the right North Star
The T-shaping never ends
Growth mindset culture underpins

Now, go grow!

I’ve said it before its not easy, its complex, hard, there are no constants. But if you get the right org model and mindset you can create the conditions you need for constant evolution.

Here is a self-starter kit that can help you to adapt this for your business; and a lot of these will bring value regardless of how big you are. Our model isn’t a silver bullet but I hope the context above and learnings from our experience along with this kit can help you get started.

Growth transition, Tribes and Squads — Skyscanner Growth Blog; medium.com/@Skyscanner
How an organization scales; “Blitzscaling” series of lectures (Reid Hoffman)
Scientific approach and cycle times; “Lean Start-up” (Eric Reis)
Agile in marketing; Agile marketing manifesto
Read: Improving operational efficiency; “The Goal” (Eliyahu Goldratt); Lean and eliminating waste; “The Toyota Way” (Jeffrey Liker) and Growth “Mindset” (Carol Dweck)
Strategy and Alignment; McKinsey 3 Horizons

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Rebecca Moore is a Director of Growth and EMEA tribe lead at Skyscanner. Previously, Moore implemented and ran Skyscanner’s Growth Tribe in Asia Pacific and lead the programme reorganising Skyscanner from a traditional marketing structure to our current growth model.

Self-disrupt for Growth​