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Johannes Reck, CEO, GetYourGuide - Growing Your Engineering Culture – What GetYourGuide Learned While Scaling Up From 5 to 100 people
Agenda 07/06/14 GetYourGuide AG 2
! Overview of GetYourGuide ! Company Background ! Business Model & Market ! Scaling the Engineering Organization ! 3 Stages of Growing an Engineering Organization ! The Truly Test Driven Organization ! Building a Sustainable Culture ! Our Values & Our Mission
! Original Idea !
5 students from ETH Zurich wanted to build a website where students could offer tours in their cities ! Travelers around the world could book these unique activities ! The Team ! Founding team: Pascal, Tobi, Johannes, Martin & Tao ! Everyone worked on the project every night and on the weekends Five students started a project with the goal to connect travelers with locals
We went back to the
drawing board and came up with… ! Students & amateurs tour guides are a very small market that is hard to scale ! There are hundred-thousands of activity suppliers, museums, attractions and sightseeing tour operators around the world ! There is no platform to aggregate and sell all these amazing services online June 7, 2014 www.GetYourGuide.com 8
$24 $49 $20 $10 Market
Size in Billion US$* US Europe Asia Pacific Rest of World Travel Activities is a $100 Billion Market Opportunity ! Key Facts ! Bigger than the car rental & cruise industries combined ! The addressable online market is 25%, growing at 13% YoY ! Online aggregators own a tiny fraction of the market ! Average margins are greater than 20% June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 11 *) PhoCusWright Study “What they do when they get there” 2011 & 2013
Discovery There Are Significant Challenges
In Connecting Consumers & Activity Suppliers June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 12 Suppliers Customers • Difficult to find & compare activities • Suppliers have limited marketing capabilities • No Distribution to Online Travel Players Trust • Little reviews, vetting and varying quality of activities • Anxiety to miss the best part of the trip • Very hard to differentiate USPs against competition in an opaque market Transaction • Cannot book mobile, online or last-minute • Dependent on same day offline bookings • Very limited reservation, ticketing & yield technology G A P
GetYourGuide Has Built an Efficient
Two- Sided Marketplace for Travel Activities June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 13 Suppliers Suppliers upload and self-‐manage the product inventory GetYourGuide quality controls, op/mizes & translates the content. We also add professional video & photo content. OTAs, Tour Operators etc. drive traffic & cross-‐sell our products Partner Network Customers 35-‐65 year old travelers, spending $160 per basket Get Your Guide
Stage I: Everyone & Everything
June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 18 ! From 2010-2011 we were 5 people in a tiny room and everyone was involved in all engineering projects (full-stack). All decision making was in a group setting. ! The progress & development speed was insane. It all ended when we hired more engineers.
Stage I failed, because we
needed more resources to handle growing complexity ! As the code base grew and our system became more complex, our development speed for the individual parts of the system decreased ! Initiatives: ! Hire more people ! Get more functional knowledge on board (e.g. design & front-end) June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 19
Stage II: Moving Towards Functional
Differentiation & Agile Development (8-20 people) June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 20 Design & Front-‐End Building the iniGal prototype & front-‐end implementaGon Engineering Figuring out technical specs & ImplemenGng the feature on the back-‐end Quality Assurance TesGng on the live system & making sure that it scales
Stage II: Moving Towards Functional
Differentiation & Agile Development June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 21 ! From 2011-2012 we built out a functionally differentiated engineering organization ! This allowed us to improve the functional expertise on each layer of the platform ! We started working with JavaScript libraries on the front- end (e.g. Backbone.js, JSON) ! We built more scalable processes on the back-end
Stage II failed, because we
completely lost track of engineering resource allocation ! With increasing headcount in the engineering team and only one general backlog, your development loses focus & control. You end up over-staffed in “nowhere-land” ! Initiatives: ! Come up with a clear strategy ! Group the teams according to focus areas ! Set KPIs, Objectives & Key Results June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 22
Stage III: The Truly Test
Driven Organization (20+ people) June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 23 Discovery Product Management Design Front-‐End Back-‐End Conversion Funnel Product Management Design Front-‐End Back-‐End Mobile Apps Product Management Design iOS Android Scalability DevOps Back-‐End Support What’s Next?
Stage III: The Truly Test
Driven Development June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 25 ! From 2013 onwards we built a matrix organization, where small teams are dedicated to specific parts of the product ! We had huge increases in productivity, output & customer satisfaction: ! On any given day, we launch more than half a dozen tests on the website ! Any iteration is evaluated based on a set of consumer related KPIs ! If we find something interesting, we start digging in…
What is NOT part of
the culture… ! Pizza & Beer Events ! Hackathons ! Offering English Classes ! A Yoga Teacher ! Having an Office Dog June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 28
Our Mission We want our
customers to enjoy the fun part of the trip! June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 30
Summary: Our Key Learnings in
Growing the Engineering Culture ! Structure follows Strategy ! Formulate a clear product strategy ! Build a mission oriented team structure that supports the strategy ! Formulate clear KPIs, Objectives & Key Results ! Move towards test driven development ! Get rid of the HIPPO ! The only opinion that counts is the consumer data ! Build a strong culture ! Define the values on how you want to work together June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 31