Why Skyscanner changed to a Growth Focus
By Rebecca Moore
Abandoning conventional wisdom
Take it back to 2014
Skyscanner reached a point in late 2014 when, despite having a healthy number of very talented marketing experts, we just weren’t achieving the growth rates we knew our product was capable of.
When considering why that might be, we realised we had a fantastic product that our loyal users loved, but that we had become trapped in applying the conventional old school marketing wisdoms that have worked for many years in traditional organisations, whilst the marketing landscape had completely changed. We didn’t have a growth mindset or organisational model befitting of an Internet Company operating in the Online Travel space. So we set about changing that.
It is 12 months to the day that we kicked off our first Growth Squads and Tribes, having just transitioned into our new Growth model.
Tribes and Squads are a new way of structuring organisations and something we’ll talk about in a bit more detail in the next few posts — we have realised huge benefits in efficiency, agility and delivery from adopting this model. Take a look at the short video introduction to this set-up here.
A year ago we had the following hypothesis:
“We believe that Growth isn’t solely achieved from isolated efforts by a marketing department, a commercial team or product engineering. We believe that it is achieved by blending these specialisms together in a cohesive approach to our markets.”
Since then, we have frequently iterated and evolved as we have learned more and more about what it will take to win in the markets we work in.
A year on from embarking on this transformation, we have a far deeper understanding of what it means to operate in a Growth culture and mind-set, and the importance of making this transition. Here are some reflections on why this change has been so important, and some of our learnings.
Abandoning conventional wisdom
Conventional organisational models have traditionally optimised for functional efficiency and therefore many organisations operate with functional silos. We were very much operating in this way a year ago.
Change is progress
However, the entire landscape of how a product is designed and brought to a market, and additionally how the market is then stimulated has completely changed since these conventional models were established as common practice. These factors in particular have greatly influenced how we at Skyscanner have changed:
- A data driven mind-set: We are changing our mind-set to becoming more data driven in everything we do, from content production to product building. If the data proves or disproves the need for something, we move forward or pivot.
- The importance of product market fit: we have to ask ourselves ‘is the market ready for our product?’ and ‘is our product right for the market?’. Ultimately, for any given market, we are looking to answer the question ‘does our product solve user’s problems?’, ‘will they recommend us to other users?’
- Clever content marketing triumphing over traditional marketing: The rise of the social network, the blogger and content online means we had to completely overhaul our content marketing approach, and invested in Social Advertising to boost traffic to our news site.
- Our product is our most critical growth channel: A significant amount of our traffic claims to either be regular users coming back, or recommended to come to us by existing users’ friends and family. THIS TRAFFIC IS FREE!
Through all of the above we encourage a Growth Hacking attitude so that anyone with an idea on how to achieve something that contributes to Growth is not inhibited by their own skill set (I’m not a developer or I’m not a designer). We recruit at Skyscanner for Growth centric roles with this attitude at the forefront of our minds too.
Let the transformation begin
With all of these insights, we realised we didn’t just need to change, we needed to transform. We approached this transformation on two major axes:
- How we organised ourselves to become far more lean and agile and allow for autonomy, separation of concerns and creativity.
- How we changed our mind-set and approach to growth, to become far more data driven and scientific, abandoning conventional wisdoms.
We want to share more
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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.
