Strikes, COVID & Ukraine: what crises reveal about your Product org, culture & people — Benjamin Retourné, BlaBlaCar

tl;dr

• Don’t try to predict the future!
• Having clear Product Principles is key in a difficult context.
• Assumptions become obsolete with time, especially in a fast-changing environment.

Introduction

Benjamin (VP Product) has worked at Blablacar for more than 8 years. From strikes to COVID and then Ukraine, his past two years have been quite a ride. From his unique experience, he asks himself what crisis can reveal about your Product organization, culture and people.

Let’s start with a timeline:

February 2020: huge activity for Blablacar because of the strikes since there was no train. In addition to this particular context in France, there are many more users also in Brasil, Spain, India…it was about to be the best year ever for the company.

March 2020: there are no more people on the road because of Covid. Blablacar is telling its own users not to use their product.

2021: Blablacar’s activity follows successive lockdowns and deconfinements in different countries, a true roller coaster.

January 2022: there is some hope again, activity is starting again, the future looks more stable.

February 2022: the war starts in Ukraine. Not only there are no more travels in this area, but there are people in the Product Team working in Kiev — Benjamin is showing us their faces on a slide and it was honestly a very moving moment. Such a hard situation, that no one is prepared to handle.

— — — Facing such unexpected events , what should we do? — — —

#1 Accept the unknowns: don’t try to predict the future or when will things get back to normal.

→ Try #1: they tried to act on features. They already had a “two seats max in the back” feature, and made it to one. But it didn’t work, because users didn’t see the value: in a fast changing environment, your learnings get obsolete really fast also.

→ Try #2: they did a first hackathon that led to the creation of Blablahelp, to help people do their groceries shopping. But there were actually too many uncertainties and it didn’t work either, since people were not looking at data at this point.

→ Try #3: they did another hackathon, that led to a change from “comfort” to “necessity: they allowed full capacity (and not just two seats in the back) and remove their fees for passengers. Principles they followed: 1) leverage existing tools and parameters, 2) make tiny changes in UI, 3) accept ambiguity.

First conclusion: you should slightly adapt if needed, but don’t try to predict the future.

#2 Stick to your principles: be clear on where you’re heading to. What are your intangible principles?

When their roadmap becomes irrelevant overnight, having their 9 principles was a huge help to bounce back.

How do they keep their principles while adapting their path?

→ uncertainty: make a six-weeks plan because there is no point in projecting further into the future

→ finish first what you are doing, before starting something new

→ having less traffic is also an opportunity: they had fewer people complaining, bigger changes could be implemented with less need to invest in transitioning.

Second conclusion: be clear on where you are heading to, so that you can easily adapt if needed.

#3 Go deep on your basics

2 types of features were blocking them on their principles:

→ “that’s the way it is” features. For example: display of duration of a trip on Blablacar. They simply did not know why it has never been done. So they added this basic feature to give more information to the users and be more transparent.

→ “it used to be this way” features, similar to the situation of the frog slowly boiling in hot water without realizing it. For example: regarding Blablacar’s objective of filling-up all carpools, if they look at short-term data, shares between automatic carpools and manual carpools are pretty stables. But on the long-term, automatic carpools shares decrease. Why? Because assumptions made before the launch of automatic carpools are no longer valid, so we should not see them as definitive.

Third conclusion: be perfect on your principles, to unleash their full potential.

What learnings for us at Yousign?

Obviously, Blablacar had faced exceptional circumstances, but we can learn from their experiences since unexpected situations happen all the times. Since we just established our Product Principles, this is so interesting to see their application in Blablacar’s context and it encourages us to use them as often as we can!

👉 Learn more about our S.I.G.N. product principals and how we use it here ✨