How to unlock Growth — and how we did it at Eventbrite, Lyft, and Booking — Kristina Gibson @dott

Kristina Gibson, CPO at Dott (ex Booking.com, Lyft, Eventbrite and Mint) was on stage to talk about Product Growth. Before showing examples of growth projects, Kristina mentioned the key success point to unlock growth:

“Be one step ahead of the competition”

What’s exactly the competition?

• Similar product or services
• My siblings and me
• Champions league
• Inevitable

Winner takes all. Only the top 1 or 2 of your competitors will really succeed. Get deep knowledge of what your competition is up to will get you a competitive advantage, especially during the economic crisis. This is what helped General Motors, the automaker, to grow sales during the Great Depression.

General Motors

As car sales went 70% down during the Great Depression, GM quickly adjusted its business strategy to increase its market shares. How did they turn a negative event into a growth opportunity?

They knew their market better than others. From a luxury car focus market where money was not a concern, they changed their car range strategy and focused on affordable cars.

To make it happen, they knew their main competitor (Ford) had complex car production processes. With that in mind, GM decided to come up with an opposite strategy. They simplified the car production process by slashing their product line, and reduced the number of engines used in cars. Those cuts, let them drastically reduce their ad campaign fee and more importantly their car prices. Following their new strategy, they launched a new ad campaign.

The result was a 20% bump in their market shares. They also used this opportunity to introduce a banking activity, offering loans to their clients.

What’s the main learning of their strategy? Have in-depth knowledge of your competition and get ready to change fast when the time comes.

Mint

Kristina also shared another interesting business story from her experience at Mint, a personal financial management solution.

Back then, managing personal finance meant spending an entire Saturday inputting manually data. This is after identifying this pain point they had the idea to create Mint as we know it today, a solution connected to your bank accounts. Every transaction is tracked and categorized to facilitate your finance management.

Similarly to the GM example, they also made a move at the right time when the iPhone and the app store have been released. At that time, it was impossible to imagine a mobile app would explode that much. They took a guess, anticipating their users would be interested in checking their personal finance on their smartphones.

Eventbrite

Another interesting growth example was Eventbrite, an event and ticketing management solution. Managing this type of platform meant spending a lot of time chatting with event organizers. In addition to being time-consuming, this approach did not generate any business value as a lot of events were free. At that time, the ticketing system was only helpful to make sure organizers were not over offering tickets compare to the venue capacity.

In this context, the product team at Eventbrite turned this non-ROI approach into an opportunity to generate business.

How so? They simply defined a limited quantity of free tickets.

Kristina did not communicate the impact of this move. However, my intuition is that it had a positive impact on user engagement by creating an urgency feeling to get free tickets. This was also a “natural way” to introduce paid tickets and therefore help generate more business.

Another learning from Kristina was about product internationalization. The question was in which country should we launch our product next? She had a very pragmatic answer. Her main takeaway was to understand as much as possible the country context you are targeting.

From checking the local competitors’ landscape, to payment methods or spoken languages, everything matters. From a US only product they then expand first to the UK. That sounds pretty obvious but she said to not underestimate localization efforts as it could become a blocker at some point.

On the product internationalization and features development, she recommended thinking on a worldwide scale. Try to find user needs which are common in most countries. This will simplify product adoption and rationalize development costs.

Lyft

Lyft, a mobility company offering ride-hailing services, was another interesting experience.

Tipping feature

The first experience she shared was about the launch of a tipping feature.

They ran interviews with riders and drivers. What came out is that not necessary for all riders to carry cash which meant tipping drivers was pretty rare and not really convenient. At the same time, their main competitor Uber was not offering this feature as well.

The combination of both led to taking action and launching a tipping feature. Kristina did not mention the results of this initiative, but the main takeaway here was to highlight how to differentiate your product from competitors.

Express Pay feature

Kristina also shared how they came out with a new feature for drivers. For context, drivers are entrepreneurs meaning they don’t receive a paycheck every 2 weeks. They need to transfer money earned with Lyft to their bank account. The issue is that it took a few days to complete a transfer. This is after getting drivers’ feedback they decided to develop a solution offering instant money transfer: Express Pay.

Similarly, Kristina did not share detailed results about this initiative but she said it had a positive impact on the business.

Booking.com

The last product growth example she shared was about Booking.com, a travel agency. Tourism is an industry where the competition is really intense, with a lot of mature actors. Every detail matters to differentiate your product from competitors. In this context, Booking.com runs a lot of A/B testing all year long to optimize conversion.

From Kristina’s perspective, they do so many A/B tests they almost know more about their users than UX researchers. This positive testing routine allows the product team to put more focus on qualitative feedback.

Besides those quantitative insights, they discovered after running a qualitative research phase, that users were interested in non only booking hotel rooms. They were also looking for other types of accommodations: apartments, houses, B&B and more.

This discovery led to offer various range of accommodation types with a positive impact on business.

Wrap up

Product growth is the combination of multiple factors. With those various examples, Kristina reminded us that nothing is possible without a deep understanding of your competitive landscape and user needs.

This will allow moving fast and take a competitive advantage whenever the time comes. The General Motors example is the perfect illustration of how to turn a negative context into a business opportunity thanks to good preparation and an agile organization.

Also, from a strategic perspective, think big if your product has an international destiny. Prioritize features which common to various international markets and don’t underestimate the efforts it takes to localize your product.

Finally, remember that product growth also requires identifying weak signals. Get inspired by Mint which anticipated new mobile usages and be among the first companies to develop an application on what was at the time an emerging platform: the App Store.

Hope this talk report will get you inspire in your upcoming product initiatives.

—

Written by Alban Carmet — Senior Product Designer
Yousign Product & Engineering