THERE IS no such thing as perfection. If BlaBlaCar were to have waited for the perfect product to be created before launching online, it wouldn’t be where it is today. In the same way that a ship should be placed in water during production to see if it floats. If it sinks, you’ll quickly find the hole and fix it. If it floats, your focus will shift to making it even better. That’s the premise behind BlaBlaCar’s core value “Done is better than perfect,” which works in tandem with “Never Assume. Always Check.” These two values ensure that whichever element or feature is released has a significant chance of success.
Looking back to the early days, the first version of BlaBlaCar’s platform could only handle up to 100,000 members. Any more volume, and it would explode. But that didn’t stop Founder Fred Mazzella from putting it online to test whether it worked. When Co-Founder Francis Nappez joined BlaBlaCar full time in 2008, he took what Fred and friends, Damien and Nico D, had developed and shaped the architecture to withstand 5 million members. A few years later as BlaBlaCar expanded internationally, Francis lead the charge in transforming the platform to sustain future growth. Today, the platform currently holds 40 million members with Francis and the rest of team continuing to evolve it every day.
When BlaBlaCar first launched in Spain in 2009, Country Manager Vincent Rosso, a former colleague of Fred, and his team had wanted to add many features to ensure people would like the service the first time they used it. They soon realised that it would be more efficient to release the product as is and just focus on listening to members instead. A much faster way to converge a product, they could trust that if something didn’t work, people will shout and let their thoughts be known.
Finding the signal
Building the right product is a state of mind. It’s about achieving something ambitious, yet realistic. To this day, one of the most difficult parts of product conception inside BlaBlaCar is separating the signal from the noise. There are thousands of features that people want developed but there are only a dozen that they would really use and which would truly improve their experience. Finding those specific features is hard but in the long run is much more efficient than developing all the nice-to-have features.
It’s much more powerful to ask 50 people the one feature that needs to be added, rather than asking a few people for the 50 features they’d like to see implemented.
From Fred cold-calling members and gathering their feedback in the early days to today’s 130-person Member Relations Team who collate feedback and the Product team who organise regular user testing and focus groups, BlaBlaCar remains constantly engaged with their members. After all, the Member is always the Boss! When a fair proportion of the members mention the necessity of a feature, that’s when the team weighs the importance and start to understand the real value behind it.
