How could London’s Historical Tube teach you a thing or two about Growth
On Saturday, 16th of January an article from the Guardian really caught my eye throughout my weekend readings.
Basically London tube is facing a peculiar problem (good problem?): the number of users is getting bigger and bigger by the year. Predictions point that London will have around 10 Million inhabitants by 2030 (1.06% CAGR) which makes London the fastest growing city in Europe. London Infrastructure Plan 2050 estimate that with that current growth and the tube’s growing “market share” could make demand spike an astonishing 60%!
According to the article there are currently 4.4 million people using the tube everyday in London but just in a couple of years they will have to accommodate around 7.6 million people!
OK now I’m sounding like one of those people who loves trains right? Hey I’m not judging…
The article caught my eye because London’s tube is having the typical problem of companies/startups “growing too fast”. Sure, the tube does not have the economics of scale that we see in today’s startups, but still the problem is somewhat similar. Companies/Startups reimagine the flow and process of users over their website/platform just as TfL has to figure it out how to get passengers in and out of the tube.
But consider this, when a company is struggling with too much growth, or a clear bottleneck on their product, they face problems as low conversion rates, slow site speeds or in extreme cases downtime; In the case of the London tube they can have problems that can range from congestion to stampedes on escalators!
While companies face the loss of revenue when not fixing bottlenecks, the London tube faces problems as public order, welfare and economic impact of the city!
I ask you, how could the tube tackle this issue?
“Just build more stations! Get more trains, faster and bigger”- This is happening and constantly! Right when the article was published they were finishing the upgrade of Tottenham Court Road Station which cost £500M. Building more infrastructure and upgrading current facilities is a good way to tackle the issue though it’s still not enough… Just like when startups start Crossing the Chasm you shouldn’t just apply the same formula you had until that point and just pour the money in! “War-Chests” are good (in case of the tube: tax money) but they are not the only or should not be the only factor of success! Sometimes you just have to think differently regarding your product, strive to build growth/capacity from the inside, making your product even greater!
The task seems sexy and attractive but sometimes you have to go really dirty to do this! You will have to challenge established conventions that will make your customers, colleagues and even superiors look at you twice since you are directly defying their beliefs. Transports for London did just that.
The Challenge
TfL went the distance, trying to challenge one of the biggest conventions in the tube’s history: The golden rule of standing on the right when in the escalator. (The left is reserved for people in a hurry.) TfL wanted test an idea by going against this major convention of British society: they wanted people to stand both right and left of the escalator.
My first thought was: “Why test escalators? Why not make trains go faster? Or take more people?”. The problem is that the current bottleneck is not on train speed, frequency or capacity but indeed in getting in and out of the tube station. Contrary to many technology improvements it seems that the evolution of train technology is just making things worse in this particular problem.
Without a clear understanding of your business it’s easy getting stuck on the though I initially had. Just like TfL, companies and more importantly startups should get to know deeply the levers of their business on what makes its business grow. More than often you see key leaders in organizations saying that you just need some kind of silver bullet to get to that exponential growth or the usual more of the same: “We need MORE Leads!”
Strive to understand deeply your customer, your product, your whole growth equation so you are able to take more and better informed decisions. You will be able spot quick wins that will feed your growth machine faster! You will be able to identify the “escalators” of your business, low cost/effort actions that result impact significantly results!
TfL clearly identifies that if they get more people in and out of the tube they will be able to fill more trains therefore they can grow organically their station passenger capacity or at least adjust to the organic growth estimated for the foreseeing future. By taking advantage of this aspect of their product they are able to empower a key lever in their business and probably save a significant portion of tax money.
Now getting back to the Holborn Project.
Holborn is one of the busiest tube’ stations with an escalator height superior to 20 meters. According to the article a 2002 study of escalator capacity only 40% of users would even contemplate to climb it instead of standing. Seemed like the perfect test subject!
In the following illustration you see quite clearly the flow of passengers and the clear bottlenecks represented as blue circles in the Holborn escalators..
TfL in order to mitigate the bottlenecks chose the first escalator to run their trial. The hypothesis was simple, “If we get more people on escalators, we will be able to reduce the amount of number waiting in the bottom of the stairs”
Source: TfL
I’m going to once again stop right here. This part right here is what amazed me the most on the whole article. What we see here is a well done and implemented testing framework to prove an idea. You have a clear assumption, a clear hypothesis and a clear estimation of success.
While this might seem obvious to everybody I dare you to take a look around your business and see how many times you made or you saw decisions being made in the past without first doing a proper test.
First think in the multitude of things that were decided because someone thought it was the “One True Way” without any kind of testing or informed assumptions behind it.
Second, think on the number of people who said “NO” to an idea because in their minds it was not executable.
Third, think of the crazy amount of stuff that you have done in the past, but no one measured its success properly. Got enough examples?
Building growth is not about finding silver bullets! It’s an ongoing war with small victories and defeats that both pave the way to success. To keep consistency in this “ongoing war”, you need to have a clear and fast process in your company that streamlines all decision making through tests that will create assumptions to build your business upon.
“You need a process that is going to continually generate new growth ideas, test them efficiently, learn from them effectively and use those learnings to navigate towards unlocking continual growth.” Brian Balfour
(Source: http://www.coelevate.com/essays/growth-process-first-tactics-second)
The Trial
The challenge now was the execution of the trial. TfL was a bit afraid how the tubers might react to this change so they’ve decided to reduce the amount of people exposed to just one escalator. Also instead of forcing people they went with the approach of encouragement:
“That meant teams of staff standing at the bottom of the escalators with loudhailers, asking commuters, as cheerfully as possible, if they would mind standing on both sides.”
Even by being so cheerful their initial results had some really nasty customer feedback:
“This is a charter for the lame and lazy!” said one. “I know how to use a bloody escalator!” said another. The pilot was “terrible”, “loopy,” “crap”, “ridiculous”, and a “very bad idea”; in a one-hour session, 18 people called it “stupid”. A customer who was asked to stand still replied by giving the member of staff in question the finger. One man, determined to stride to the top come what may, pushed a child to one side. “Can’t you let us walk if we want to?” asked another. “This isn’t Russia!”
Changing conventions is not for the faint of heart! The negative feedback will come, and more often than not it will come even before you start to run the test directly from your peers. You’ve got to be resilient.
Steve Krugs, user experience and usability expert and author of two (here & here) of the best selling books on the subject, might disagree with me on going against conventions. He believes utmostly that when a user is experiencing your product he should not be made “to think”. Instead he should clearly navigate your product following established conventions and visual cues. It is your product that needs to fit the user.
Though in his book Steve states something clearly:
“There may be some times when you choose to have your site do some of these ‘user-unfriendly” things deliberately. Sometimes it makes business sense to not to do exactly what the customer wants. For instance, uninvited pop-ups almost always annoy people to some extent. But if your statistics show you can get 10% more revenue by using it and you think it’s worth annoying your customers you can do it. It’s a business decision. Just be sure do it in an informed way, rather inadvertently”
And that’s precisely what TfL did and it payed off The escalator used to carry 12.745 customers in rush hour, now it with people standing on left and right carried 16.220 — a 27% improvement in capacity. The results exceeded even their initial theoretical hypothesis!
The trial was a success. Enough to start implementing in any escalator with enough steepness right? Nope…
After some time customers got used to standing on the left of the escalators which made TfL think it was time to unplug the “encouragement” treatment.
After only just one week people were back to their old habit again…
The next challenge was set: How could the TfL influence customer behaviour without direct input of it’s workforce? But that I guess is for another article.
Even with this misshapen TfL is able to teach one final lesson about growth:
You never stop working on it! Failures will come more often than successes but that is good thing as well as long that you build upon the learnings.
