Skyscanner: Abandoning conventional wisdom for hypegrowth

Some Context

How do you perform marketing when your product changes 10,000 times a day?*

*Number created for dramatic effect, but it’s a lot.

We are a Tech Business

1. People

Highly Autonomous Teams

https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/

https://medium.com/@Skyscanner/the-culture-of-growth-squads-in-skyscanner-26653e3590c4#.sdryrwowi

We organized ourselves into central & regional growth tribes

Central Growth Tribe

EMEA Regional Growth Tribe

AMER Regional Growth Tribe

APAC Regional Growth Tribe

https://medium.com/@Skyscanner/our-tribes-central-growth-and-regional-growth-9a28c41532f1#.ri13oz319

~8 people or less

Cross Functional

Squads

Roles within Growth Teams

Product Manager

Experiment Roadmap

Growth Engineer

Implementation of features & products

Growth Marketer

Own acquisition of channel

Growth Analyst

Draw insights from data

Growth Designer

Creative or user experience design and

implementation

Open and Transparent

Learn from others

Competency Framework

2. Lean startup principles

Lean Start-up Principles

https://medium.com/@Skyscanner/getting-growth-facilitation-on-point-guide-f4fafb74dac8#.xz9sn5o88

What does this look like in practice

Idea to MVP in 4 hours.

12x iterations in 2 weeks.

Squad entirely self sufficient.

3. Agile marketing

https://medium.com/@Skyscanner/developing-a-lean-and-agile-marketing-process-d1822be47671#.pfbmwmrsf

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

http://agilemanifesto.org/

Manifesto for agile software development

Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software

Welcome changing requirements, even in late development

Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)

Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers

Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted

Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)

http://agilemanifesto.org/

Agile principles

Working software is the principal measure of progress

Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design

Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential

Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams

Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly

http://agilemanifesto.org/

Agile principles

Validated learning over opinions and conventions

Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy

Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns

The process of customer discovery over static prediction

Flexible vs. rigid planning

Responding to change over following a plan

Many small experiments over a few large betshttp://agilemarketingmanifesto.org/

Agile marketing manifesto

4. From marketers to growth hackers

Growth Hacker 

A hacker whose sole objective is to grow the number of users of a specific

product, and make every strategic and tactical decision based on growth

Unit 1: What is Growth Hacking?

1.1 Introduction to Growth Hacking

What does a growth hacker do?

1 Creates a product or feature people wantScale acquisition and increase activation, retention and referral only after achieving product market fit

2 Embrace free, low cost alternative ways for growthIncorporate virality in distribution channels and products, think about technology based solution, avoid paid advertising

3 Define actionable goals for experimentsUnderstand growth funnels, prioritise experiments, define tracking and analytics, execute experiments and optimize based on results

AARRR - Acquisition

First point of contact between a user and your product

AARRR - Activation

User performs a key activity with the product at which we deliver enough value that meets user’s needs

AARRR- Retention

Users coming back, consistently getting value by having their needs met

AARRR- Referral

Users share the product or services with others

AARRR- Revenue

Money we make by meeting users’ needs

So what’s the impact?

Plenty of graphs like this

People

Lean Start-up

Agile

Growth Hacking

•This Won’t Work for you

Want to know more?

@SkyscannerGrwth

codevoyagers.com/