The Marktplaats Journey: becoming the best version of ourselves
Once upon a time not-so-long ago, some employees in Marktplaats (which is where the heroes of this story work(ed)) rose up and demanded change. Not just any kind of change — a change which required a cultural transformation, organisational shake-up, re-thinking and re-defining “value” and “success”. And those in power listened, because they were some of the people demanding this change. So the radical reorganisation was announced, and thus begins the story of the Marktplaats Journey: a shift from an old top-down structure to a collaborative and inclusive way of working.
And from this point on, these four writers, who are some of the heroes of the story, change the pronoun from “they” to “we”. And we invite you to come along on our journey: what we did, why we did it and what we’re (still) learning. And if the conditions are right, you might join us to be part of our journey.
TLDR;
So we begin with the end-state, i.e. the current setting: an open office in Amsterdam which, at around 7am, a trickle of employees walks in and sit at their desks until, starting at 10 and ending at 11, multiple team standups (each lasting 15 minutes or less) block hallways and organic walking paths. People chat by the fancy and not-so-fancy cappuccino machines throughout the day, ideation for experiments and user interviews happen throughout the week, on-site experiment analyses are presented to their respective journey teams, journey team members from business, marketing and customer relations maintain contact with the external world and communicate trends and opportunities with their journey teams. Every developer has the opportunity to be rotated into a team which drives the technical strategy of Marktplaats.
Yet before we embarked on our journey, our organisation was siloed, our product fractured and we were becoming an inward-looking business. It was evident in the way we built our product: we were thinking in functionality and business cases where success was the delivery of features rather than users and their needs; it was evident in our vibrancy and growth. To have a bigger impact on our customers we needed to change the way we worked in every part of the organisation.
We regrouped ourselves around outcome-based goals for our entire company, and we created autonomous cross-functional teams that are outward-focused on specific parts of our customers’ journey. We empower those teams, our customer Journey Teams, to achieve those outcomes by learning what our customers respond to — we believe this is the best way to have impact.
As a result, we have improved our product, cut down on pervasive silos and micro-management, and are having a bigger impact on the needs of our customers.
Interested? Read on.
Background
Every good story starts with a bit of background, setting the scene if you will, after which our heroes can come in and save the day. In this story, picture a pretty successful and mature internet company in the Netherlands, consistently one of the most used e-commerce sites in the country. As we state in our job descriptions, on a typical day, we have over a million unique visitors, approximately 400 thousand new advertisements, several hundred thousand transactions… in a country with 17 million people.
While we could be very comfortable and pat ourselves on the back for how well we were doing, we weren’t happy with our product, our user experience, our growth, our revenue and the way our people were developing. Users were telling us we were not making any big difference in their daily lives and new disruptive companies and technologies were showing up, ready to start taking away our customers with new and different user experiences. It was clear something needed to change.
Before we dive in to the story of what we changed, let’s take a look at how the company was structured and how we reorganised to focus on our product and technology.
Old Hierarchy
Hierarchically, we were (and still are) organised around specific business areas. As an organisation, we worked exclusively within that hierarchy, creating silos between each business unit (including us, Product and Technology).
To support this hierarchy, we used to align our product development teams (made up of Product Owners, Developers and QA) with each business unit. The idea was that a Product Owner could work with a specific business to get what they needed. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as simple as that.
We knew we had problems delivering value to our customers; the way we were organised prevented us from making big, meaningful leaps. We had to find a way to put our customers first and center in everything we do, and we had to do it in such a way that everybody within the company could make a meaningful difference.
The change
Remember the heroes mentioned in the last section? The great Don Quixotes who make us charge at windmills? In our case, the dragons they saw were real, but were invisible to those who only saw the status quo. Our heroes turned the hierarchy sideways and shook things up. These heroes were in multiple levels in the hierarchy: the executive management team members who pushed for a cultural transformation. The individual contributors who shook AND stirred the organisation in a martini shaker.
Today, each Journey Team is the hierarchy turned on its side: product, technology, our business functions, marketing, customer relations, product analytics (part of Finance) and data science: the old “stakeholders” and “service providers” work together to do the right thing for the customers, our business partners and for us. So the heroes who demanded change work side-by-side, building small improvements, validating, learning, and re-building (Lean Startup).
Our executive management team, aka “MT”, changed from being the decision makers to the keepers of the boundaries, that is, defining strategic company goals and ensuring the teams are empowered to meet them. To achieve this, MT found we (because some of us are MT) needed some new tools and some new thinking. Out went our yearly old roadmap, and in came a shared Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) by everyone. No more than three Objectives for the entire company; not more than four Key Results per Objective; make Objectives long-lasting and strategic, whilst we refresh our Key Results every quarter.
We also tackled our company culture head-on. In our middle age (because Marktplaats is middle-aged for an e-commerce platform & company) we’d become grumpy and set in our ways; that slowed us down and diverted focus from our customers. We had a wonderful midlife crisis and called out our bad habits; we crafted a Cultural Manifesto. Many of the “we” made cultural change a movement which continues today. We made the old culture unattractive and the new culture aspirational.
What are these Journeys?
To create our Journey Teams we simplified our customer journey so that each team had a clear remit and measurable impact.
Did it work?
Our heroes occasionally take a break from their marathon to look back at the path left behind, and are happy with the changes. Employee satisfaction scores: up. Company targets: gone above and beyond. Product user experience: much better.
Are we ready to put our feet up? Not in our industry, we’re not. And we won’t.
What’s next?
This story is about making an initial big shift to make a step change in how we operate and have an impact for our customers. However, we’re not done; we want to continue on this journey. We have set ourselves up to continuously improve, by constantly making small disturbances in how we work, experiments if you will. Maybe these experiments will say we need another revolution or maybe evolution.
Every next step we can conceive requires new colleagues to join us, maybe replace us. Are you one?
About the authors
Mine Ogura heads Continuous Improvement in Marktplaats and was the interim Head of Delivery at the start of the journey. In both roles, she worked toward the empowerment and autonomy for the Journey Teams. She was a manager of Tech Team Leads before the transformation.
Arne Bultman is the Head of Technology, managing the technical direction of developers (back end, front end, native mobile) and Data Science. By changing to this way of working, the platform has been changed from a set of monolithic services to microservices, allowing teams to deliver 10x faster each year.
Jeroen Jonker Roelants is the Head of Product and Mr. Marktplaats Product. He provides the product strategy, guides the tactical decision making, keeps people focused on the vision that we have and is our strategic leader.
David Halsey was the CTO & CPO through 2016, and was the Leadership Team’s principal sponsor of the change to Journey Teams.
… and Marktplaats Journey Team members have done the work to change the way they work by owning the product, their processes and their interactions with customers.
Marktplaats is an eBay Classifieds company, serving the Netherlands since 1999.
