An environment for great products
Like most kids his age, my son Isaac loves Lego . It’s a great product (if not a little pricey). Once, in a misguided attempt to save…
Like most kids his age, my son Isaac loves Lego. It’s a great product (if not a little pricey). Once, in a misguided attempt to save money, I bought him some fake Lego Star Wars characters thinking he wouldn’t notice the difference. They were similar in shape, design, and colour to the real deal but as time went on, they just sat collecting dust. When asked about it he explained, “It’s not real Lego”. Something about those figures didn’t feel right to him but he couldn’t express exactly what.
I think what he was trying to say was that the quality of an experience, as Robert Pirsig theorised, “cannot be empirically defined as it precedes any intellectual construction of it”. That quality exists as a “perception experience” and can “only be described through analogy”. At least I think that’s what he was trying to say. Maybe he was just getting bored of Star Wars and wanted some Ninjago instead.
Anyway, the fact that we are not able to objectively describe what makes a product experience ‘great’ means actually building one is no easy feat. Even if you just copy, it’s hard to build an analogy.
Getting too obvious
Let’s start with a case study: Apple sued Samsung in 2012 because their phone and operating system was eerily similar to the design of the iPhone and iPad. Samsung’s defense argued that the design was “obvious”; that anyone could have come up with the same thing given what had come before. Basically, it was easy to make an iconic product like the iPhone.
In response, Apple revealed the huge amount of effort that went into producing the design of the iPhone. Sharing the (seemingly endless) iterations that helped refine something to the point it could be considered “obvious”. The initial trial resulted in Apple being awarded $1.05 billion in damages — recognising both the value in what had been created and the difficulty it took in producing it.
Making loveholidays great
At loveholidays, we want to help make finding, booking and managing your next holiday a great experience. We understand, though, that it’s not exactly obvious how to do this. For us to create a great experience requires experimentation, iteration and feedback that is driven by business and customer insight. Fortunately for us, we’re always up for a challenge.
We know it takes commitment from the business to effect this type of change and we are improving our environment in three key ways to support this:
Allowing teams to choose what they work on and how they solve problems
Finding the best ideas by working together
Creating the motivation to achieve this through meaningful work
Over the course of this post, we hope to cover why we believe these areas are so important and the impact they have had.
An environment of choice and autonomy
General Stanley McChrystal observed, “Unpredictability is fundamentally incompatible with reductionist managerial models based around planning and prediction”. That’s a fancy way of saying that when you have a non-obvious goal, the best way to find a solution is by trusting and empowering teams to discover it ‘bottom-up’.
If you haven’t already gathered, there is a lot of uncertainty involved in building great product experiences. Even directly copying something that you believe is great, isn’t enough. One of the key ways we are trying to address this is increasing the autonomy that teams have in decision making.
Our goal is to enable our people to be involved in choosing what gets done and to own how it gets done.
This is especially important with online products as they have the unique (and sometimes scary) ability to develop very quickly. At loveholidays, our platform improvements have enabled hundreds of changes each month across the many different aspects of the experience. To move towards a great product each of these varied changes needs to make something better.
So, how do we go about this? To start with we organise ourselves around challenges that deliver significant, and quantifiable, business value. For example, we have a team that is focused on making it easy for our customers to find the holiday that is right for them, and another that selects, sorts and prices our holiday offers in the most competitive way.
The business interacts with these teams by defining opportunities to work on, not solutions to implement, with clear commercial context and outcomes. Teams are then empowered to find the best way of addressing each of these challenges — adapting processes and systems to the task using their specialist knowledge and experience.
With autonomy comes accountability for the impact of these decisions. Owning this helps build and maintain the trust that continued ownership is predicated on. To enable this, product teams are required to engage with, and understand business needs. This is done by working closely with business stakeholders and articulating success and progress in a way that is clearly linked to the key performance indicators (KPIs) the team is accountable for.
This contract between product teams and the business ensures that, whilst the measures of success are objective and linked to business outcomes, the solutions chosen can be customer-focused and move towards a better experience. It also gives the space for the team to experiment and learn what a great product experience means for that area of the business. Everyone’s a winner!
Example: Finding a holiday
Helping a customer easily find their next holiday is one of the key business challenges we have created a team around. There are so many factors that contribute to a great experience that knowing exactly what will help people in choosing a holiday is difficult to fathom. It requires customer research, industry insight and lots of testing. As we all know, progress is not a straight line.
Understanding this, the team had the autonomy to focus on ways of making this as easy as possible. They invested in creating a new design system, defining customer journeys, reworking the infrastructure of our front end systems and building bespoke testing tools.
The resulting experience was many times faster and more responsive, less error-prone and a whole lot easier on the eye: foundations that a great experience could be built on. The success was articulated and justified based on the impact on our KPIs: increases in conversion, cost savings and return on investment for our advertising spend.
An environment of collaboration
To build a great product, it’s not enough to just empower teams to make decisions and come up with solutions. You also need to have an environment that helps ensure these solutions actually improve the experience. We believe the most innovative and creative ideas emerge through collaboration across a range of backgrounds and specialisms.
To achieve this, the teams we build contain the cross-functional skills necessary to implement and manage the business challenges they are accountable for. So each team is tailored to their specific challenge, containing a range of expertise from design to research, engineering, product, data science and the many related commercial functions.
Arranging teams in this way removes the functional silos that limit interactions between different specialisms. Instead, it creates teams with a range of different skills, backgrounds and perspectives who work together on the same problems on a daily basis.
In this environment it becomes important to be able to explain your ideas in simple relatable terms. This has the joint benefit of refining your thinking (“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough”) and, more importantly, allowing ideas to be challenged and built upon. These are foundations on which innovative ideas can emerge to help improve our experience.
This way of working is not without its challenges. There is always going to be tension when integrating different perspectives and ideas on what is important. To be able to use this tension in a constructive way it is important to have a shared approach to work.
Our approach at loveholidays requires teams to use data to assist their decision making and deliver solutions in an incremental way. Using data, not opinions, when prioritising work helps stop needless disagreements that specialisms often have about what is most important to focus on. We instead focus these skills and energy in generating solutions to those problems and finding ways to quickly validate them.
Ultimately we want an environment where experts, across many disciplines, are able to harness their creativity to share and refine solutions. In this way teams can use their autonomy to find innovative solutions to the most important customer problems and deliver great experiences.
Example: Managing holidays
A great holiday experience isn’t just about finding and booking, it also involves managing any changes to your holiday in a stress free way. Customer Experience (CX) plays a key role and is another area where we created a dedicated team to improve. To do this we brought together an eclectic mix of skills from engineering, analytics, product and IT specialisms with contact centre operations and management experience.
As a first step the team addressed the platform, as it had historically been the major factor that limited our customer experience. Migrating to Twilio provided data about the service we were offering that allowed us to identify the key customer issues and its flexibility allowed us to quickly implement features to address them.
The first obvious challenge for the team to address was “wait time” for customers. We were in the middle of a pandemic and, with demand 10x normal levels, were struggling to get to everyone quickly. The data showed that only 25% of customers were spoken to in under 10 minutes. Not a great experience.
Working together, the team identified and implemented a number of innovative solutions to address this. These solutions drew on the collective experiences of the team and helped improve the experience in a range of different ways.
The team wanted to address urgent queries first and streamed our queuing process using booking data. So you weren’t stuck to your computer whilst waiting for an agent to create the ability to join via text when an agent was available. For our agents to help get through queries quicker we built new tools including pre-canned responses generated by NLP. We also started to fully-automate responses to customer queries with a chatbot using Google’s CCAI.
The results were pretty amazing — we not only doubled agent efficiency but also were able to answer 30% of the customer queries without the need for an agent. This means that, against a backdrop of contacts nearly doubling, the team increased this number of customers being answered in under 10 minutes to 88%. A massive achievement.
An environment of meaningful work
Last but by no means least, we also want to provide people something to work on that actually matters. In doing this we create the intrinsic motivation to make the products and experiences we build as successful as possible. As Frederick Herzberg, the man behind job-enrichment, said, “If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do”.
To claim work is meaningful is a pretty lofty goal for any business if you only judge meaning through its social or moral impact. However, it’s important to understand people derive meaning in different ways from work. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink refers to “mastery” as an important aspect of this — specifically the ability to get better at something that matters.
So whilst we are probably not going to fix society’s problems by sending people on holiday, we can create an environment where you improve and progress in your chosen field.
The foundations for this come from allowing choice and enabling collaboration in the work teams do. The novel ideas generated by this type of environment are challenging and engaging to work on and often require teams to work at the boundaries of their skills. These are both key elements to achieve “flow” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept that describes a state when you find genuine satisfaction from the thing you are doing.
Another important aspect of flow is the ability to get feedback on the impact of your work. To understand if your ideas and solutions truly make a difference, learning what works and what doesn’t. You don’t get good at skateboarding without a few grazed knees.
To provide this feedback we use scientific and statistical methods to understand the impact of changes — a culture of “test and learn”. This has been a key part of loveholidays growth and it’s something that we are building on by incorporating qualitative and behavioural measures. In this way, we not only value the impact on sales but also the customer’s experience.
Exploring new processes and tools also contributes to the process of mastery as it puts you at the forefront of your field. This can be contentious as it is often seen to be in opposition to delivering value for the business. However, our environment means you are often at the boundaries of what’s possible, which not only provides the clear rationale for their use but the ability to understand their impact in a low cost way.
By ensuring that work is meaningful through engaging challenges, experimentation with new tools and systems that provide feedback on the quality of the experience we can address the uncertainty of what will make a product great.
Example: Pushing the boundaries
There have been many instances over the last few years when people have pushed the boundaries to solve challenging problems. In doing so, we’ve seen first hand how they have improved their skills and made loveholidays an all-round better product.
Perhaps the best example is how our ability to test the impact of changes on customers and business has evolved. Historically, we have focussed solely on measuring conversion improvements using third party client side AB testing tools. Whilst it allowed us to move fast, it also had some significant downsides that required the team to push boundaries to solve.
Relying solely on performance metrics with no user feedback meant we were missing important insight into the user’s experience. Maria, who drove the design of loveholidays from the beginning, also had a passion for user research and helped us address this.
Incorporating qualitative feedback into our processes, championing tools like usertesting.com and introducing summative evaluations, we started to get fast feedback from users. This highlighted flaws in comprehension and usability and also allowed us to start to gauge the impact of changes at an emotional level. Even cooler, Maria also changed roles and now leads our user research.
The other drawback from this approach was that the tools we used negatively impacted our page speed. This is an important metric as it is strongly correlated with conversion and SEO ranking meaning we couldn’t test key parts of our site.
Our engineering addressed this by first building our own AB testing platform which enabled tests to run with no performance impact. But they didn’t stop there; they went on to push the boundaries of what was possible by building a world-first experimentation platform that runs in Compute@Edge. This meant we could test even cached pages and deliver an average of sub 1ms experiment assignments across the entire globe. An amazing achievement for them and an important new capability for the business.
Conclusion
We believe the qualities that make a great product emerge as a consequence of the iteration and experimentation of skilled and passionate people working together on something that matters. To enable this to happen at loveholidays we have been working hard to build an environment that directly supports the approach.
Whilst we can show measurable improvements in many of the key capabilities of the business it’s difficult to show if we are actually any closer to being considered a great product. Perhaps our progress is best described by the fact that when we release a new feature I can’t wait to share it with my friends. However, to do this, I have to get out my phone to show them as I just don’t have the right words to explain why it’s so cool.
Does this type of environment appeal to you? If you are interested in helping us build great products check out our open roles https://careers.loveholidays.com/