How understand a traditional company structure and deploy digital products ?

During 3 years I worked at MK2 to solve main customer issues, I managed the production process of new digital points of sale (web/mobile/app) and I tried to improve customers digital experience.

Since 2008, I worked as a Product manager on e-commerce / m-commerce and high availability products. I’ve always worked as an intrapreneur and a self-starter. I managed the end-to-end development and the launch of new products. I like to be close to customers by mail or phone to help them to resolve their problems.

During my first workshop that I led at Inseec Bordeaux in January 2015 about product management, I was thinking how that could be interesting to build a case study about digital products that I built during my time at MK2. The idea is to explain steps of building / deploying products but also give details about success and failures.

MK2 is a french broadcasting group founded in 1974 by Marin Karmitz which has remained familial and independent over the years. I will show limits of developing digital product in a traditional company.

During 3 years I worked to solve main customer issues, I managed the production process of new digital points of sale (web/mobile/app) and I tried to improve customers digital experience.

Understand the context & issues

When I started to work at MK2 in 2011 there were several existing problems on several subjects (online and offline).

Customer experience and pain points

• The first one was in movie theater, customers had to wait long time before being able to buy ticket, especially during public holiday or weekend.
• The second one was that customer couldn’t be sure to get a ticket for a special event (avant-premiere) if he arrived just few minutes before showtime (we had recommended to come 3 hours before the show).
• The last one was about buying a prepaid card in movie theater. As a customer you had to stand in line (with people waiting for buying a ticket). The salesman had to write down the expiration date (with a pen on the card) and finally you could use it to buy ticket. You can imagine what happens on saturday night if everybody want to buy a new prepaid card…

Data updates & synchronization

• Updates of movie information and movie sessions should be done by manual update (editing fields in back-office)
• There was no synchronization between digital platform and scheduling provider system and that made difficult the process to inform customers about canceled sessions (ex : cancel for some technical reason)

So we had to find new ways to buy tickets or prepaid cards but also keep service alive and go on step by step.

At that moment, I thought we could use digital to solve these customers issues and make buying tickets easier.

Core business

In order to build new products in a traditional company and try to solve problems, I had to see the big picture and understand core business (customers / salesmen / core data model / softwares).

I started to go inside movie theaters at different times and saw what happen when people were buying tickets. But also what kind of problems salesmen had to deal with and what was the level of stress (customers or salesman) for peak time.

Next step was to understand business data model :

• what’s the different functional objects ? ex : movie / session / fee / theater / event / visa number
• what are the links between them ? ex: one session match with one movie in one theater
• what are the data flow ? when one session is created and when it dies

To address that point I talked with IT service and all providers, especially with our main one “ticketing provider”.

Once I began to get the data model and write down functional documentation (it doesn’t existed at the time), I focused on software by talking with theaters managers and watched them using programming and reporting softwares.

I did the same exercise with customer-facing software (point of sale and ticketing kiosks), I defined few use cases (buy tickets or use prepaid card) and tested them.

I organized interviews with managers of accounting and legal department at MK2 headquarter. I wanted to get more information about dataflow. But also understand rules and legal requirements of movie theater business (ex: National Centre for Cinema / ticketing provider).

The last step but not the least was to understand the global business equation (online & offline). Indeed movie theater business is not a full profit, it’s a distribution profit. That means all profit are distributed between many businesses : CNC (National Centre for Cinema), distributor, movie chain. It’s also important to know and take into consideration the fixed costs (hosting, ticketing provider…) and the variable costs (payment transaction percentage…).

Restrictions & opportunity

To build digital products in a traditional company is not like in a startup company, you can’t start from scratch and choose all your preferred tools.

You have to deal with service already in production. And turn their restrictions and problems into opportunity.

• Work hand in hand with historical partners like ticketing provider, even if he is not really aware about digital subjects and that’s not a priority for him.
• Take into consideration the existing businesses models, in our case, MK2 company monetize their audience with ads and we can’t delete this source of income, even if it doesn’t match the same objective than the booking service. So we worked to add value to our advertising space by combining it with our booking service, for example, for movie distributors we propose for one movie campaign to track all steps between display ad and booking confirmation for the movie.
• In a perfect world when you want to build a digital product, you work with a full team dedicated to your product (engineer / designer…). In fact in cinema business there are not enough money to hire a full digital team so you have to make up a team with different people who will not available at the same time.
• To reduce the amount of custom development, I had to keep in my mind the technical bases of Drupal’s architecture (node / taxonomy / media) during all interface’s conception process.
• I had to work with designer 2 months before starting to work with developer. It made me think the design as a UI design (with components reusable) and not like a static page design. That’s a good way of thinking.
• It was also difficult to find strong technical partners to help us to build our new platform (Drupal 7 / Drupal Commerce). We were looking for them during several months and at the end we found the most skilled partners and we made a deal with Commerce guys team. As a result, I was brought to work with three developers : 1 lead dev Julien Dubois and 2 junior back-end developers : Florian Lebrenn and Yohan Tillier. They also recommended Arthur Itey as a freelance front-end developer to work on drupal theming. All this team really helped me to make my product’s ideas become alive.
• With a limited budget (80K€) to produce all interfaces : desktop / mobile / API, I was facing a challenge by organizing technical development and limit technical debt. As we didn't have the resource to reinvent the wheel, we had to develop an e-commerce platform through Drupal commerce architecture. On the front-end experience, we had to do some compromises between an advanced customer experience (ex : beautiful form controls in javascript) and a basic experience (ex : form controls on server side)

Solutions

It’s easy to find theoretical ideas to solve customers problems but the operational reality is much harder to face…

When a company is already in run mode, you can’t switch process in one night especially when more than 200 people in 10 movie theaters rely on the tools you are working on. You have to change process step by step and keep your ending vision in front of you.

The best way to solve pain point about waiting time to buy ticket is probably to build a check point where people have to show their e-ticket (printed by themself or on their mobile phone) without going to a cashdesk before. This requires dedicated theater employees in charge of scanning bar-code at the check point. Some theaters already use this way like Gaumont Pathé in Paris.

That’s great for customers experience but no so easy to deploy on all movie theaters especially in old movie theaters where space is very limited. It’s necessary to have one ticket taker to check tickets printed at kiosk and one ticket taker to scan e-ticket, or one ticket taker who check tickets in two ways, that could be complicated in peak time…

In summary, we have to keep in mind our idea of the ending process (use e-ticket) and adapt our product step-by-step to the current business context.

First steps of solutions to solve customers pain point :

• Allow customers to check showtime from mobile and desktop with real time updates
• Allow customers to buy tickets at any time from mobile and desktop
• Allow customers to withdraw their tickets by scanning a barcode at ticket kiosk
• Allow customers to use their prepaid card on all point of sale (inside movie theaters or from digital platform)

End step after concluding test :

• Allow customers to go directly to checkpoint with their e-tickets

My next post will about : How I designed digital product at MK2 to solve customers issues.