Expert Interview: Filip Filipov, VP Product Management, Skyscanner
Discussions about — growing Skyscanner to asking questions to Elon Musk
Skyscanner, a global travel metasearch engine, is recognised for its solid product. Founded in 2003, the company raised a total of USD 197 million and finally got acquired by China’s leading OTA Ctrip.
Filip Filipov, VP Product Management at Skyscanner, speaks about the role he played in accelerating Skyscanner growth, common mistakes people make in product building, and more. Filipov, a Harvard graduate, was also a venture capitalist in his prior work experience.
From a product perspective, how is Skyscanner different from its competitors?
Skyscanner compares thousands of options in an optimal way and allows travellers to easily search and compare the biggest and most comprehensive set of travel suppliers to choose their products.
We have incredibly localised content, which extends beyond the pure translation of the site and goes into sourcing local airlines, agencies, hotels, and car hire companies.
Skyscanner’s different tools resonate with travellers well — the ‘everywhere’ and calendar searches are one of the most popular ones, as well as setting price alerts to monitor prices. We are a truly global player, as opposed to some of our competitors.
When you were an investor, which startup’s pitch WOW’ed you and why?
I don’t believe there is any specific pitch that Wow-ed me in particular. I was impressed by the focus of some of the founders, who had a clear vision for a specific, niche market.
Typically, companies that focus on solving a niche problem and become monopolies in the space (even if the total market is relatively small) would gain more respect from investors.
What are the top 3 things you did in Skyscanner that accelerated the company’s growth?
I have been responsible for the growth of our B2B business, giving access to our API and best-in-class white label solution to power more than 1600 sites and apps.
Currently, I am responsible for the product engineering team that builds products and services for our airline and agency suppliers as well as the ad products on the site.
I think that my biggest contribution could be defined as building and learning from a great team, who are the main reason we have been successful within our field.
That applies to Skyscanner as well — building on the great culture we have and keeping it intact is where the contribution of senior managers come in. That, and the strategy and prioritisation stuff.
From a general Skyscanner perspective, we have been very focused on our travellers and we don’t ever shy away from taking unpopular decisions to ensure that our users get the best experience.
When startups come to you for pitching, what are the common product mistakes / disconnects you have seen?
The typical story of “we are targeting 1% of $100Bn+ market”.
Basically, founders say that if they only capture 1% of that market, they will do great. I believe that this shouldn’t be the right pitch, as you can define the market in a number of different ways to give you the right potential size.
Another common mistake is the — Airbnb of X or the Uber of Y. Any company that starts the pitch with such an argument seems to miss the point — if you are just copying a model and applying it in your industry, then there’s little innovation — any other startup can do exactly the same.
The product should look at a new, different way to solve an existing need, rather than a copy in the hope that it solves a need in a new industry.
Before investing in a company, what are all the product pointers you look for?
Product-market fit is the most critical one — have the early adopters or closed-beta users found the product useful and intuitive?
The startups should focus on the must-have features, rather than the nice-to-have. As I say to my teams, a product is defined not by what’s in it, but what’s missing without diminishing the customer experience.
What are the top 3 products you admire, and why?
At any given moment, I am impressed by different products and their functionality. I think there’s a few that have capture my imagination for longer in terms of simplicity and focus
- WhatsApp: For years, Jan Koum hasn’t changed the vision of simplicity. The product works great, it is almost never down (last time was right after Facebook’s acquisition), and there are no gimmicks, ads or tricks. It simply does what it sets out to do — fast, simple, secure messaging and video calling.
- Medium — by simplifying the interface and the ability to do a lot of things, Medium emerged as the leader in self-publishing. It did take away a lot of the functionality in the blogging sphere — for example, WordPress, historically the leader, has lost a bit of its mojo in the blogosphere due to its endless functionality. Medium managed to create a good marketplace for writers and readers with simplicity.
- Amazon Echo (and Echo Dot). Amazon missed on the phone craze, but learnt something extremely valuable for the ultimate frontier in user interface, which is voice — people relate to a device and we as human being would like to talk to something, which replies. Instead of making this part of an app or phone, it dedicated a device, which identifies the voice with a physical object.
I also really like our all-in-one Skyscanner app :)
Google+ could not catchup even remotely close to Facebook. What you think could be the reason?
Focus and desire to copy, rather than build something new.
Come to think of it, Google has been great at building things that are 10 or 100X better than the existing products, but their most successful initiatives have been a copy of an existing technology already — search (Altavista, Yahoo), mail (Hotmail), phones and mobile OS (iPhone), Google Docs (Microsoft Office).
The rest, which they didn’t build, was just purchases and improved — DoubleClick and YouTube comes to mind.
As a company, they haven’t really defined from scratch a lot of categories (I know some will argue against this view).
In the Google + example, they faced a product that already had the stickiness and product feature set that was way better than anyone else built (MySpace, etc) and they couldn’t catch up with it.
Their attempt at building a similar, rather than a truly innovative way for people to connect hurt them. Finally, the network effects that Facebook built created a massive moat — Google’s products are single-player usage (or most of them), while Facebook’s experience gets better the more people from your network use it.
To be honest, however, we have to admit that outside of Snapchat, no other company has been able to match Facebook in social networking (except China).
To Elon Musk, what are the three things you will ask/tell him?
- What do you need to make your 10 year plan executed in 6 months? If we depend on renewable energy and going to Mars as a human race, we should do everything possible to speed this up.
- What was the biggest mistake in starting Tesla and SpaceX?
- If you had to make a bet on one company of the two, would you pick AirBnB or Uber?
Have questions for Filip Filipov? Ask in comments section below.
