Johannes Reck, CEO, GetYourGuide - Growing Your Engineering Culture – What GetYourGuide Learned While Scaling Up From 5 to 100 people

Growing Your Engineering Culture Techsylvania, June 1st, 2014

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

GetYourGuide Overview Who we are & what we do

Our story starts in Switzerland in 2008

!   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

Pascal Tobi Martin Johannes Our first Christmas Party J

We built the website, launched it and discovered....

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

…that few people wanted to book travel activities from unqualified amateurs 07/06/14 GetYourGuide AG 9

$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

GetYourGuide Offers the Largest Travel Activities Inventory Worldwide June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 14 800+ 10,600+5,300+ 800+ 4,000+ 2,000+

120 City Cards 124 Snow + Winter Sports 378 Rentals 913 Shore Excursions 1011 Attraction Tickets 1,079 Transfers 1,820 Culinary + Nightlife 3,089 Outdoor ActivitiesJune 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 15 Our Inventory Ranges Across Different Categories of Travel Activities

Scaling the Engineering Organization Our Lessons Along the Way

Stage I: Everyone & Everything (3-8 people) June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 17

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?

The Problem with the HIPPO (aka Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 24

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…

We don’t listen to opinions, we look at data! June 7, 2014 GetYourGuide AG 26

Building A Sustainable Culture …and why it matters to your engineers!

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

02/25/14 GetYourGuide AG Passion Commitment Learning Clarity Positivity Our Values

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

Thanks for your time Stay Curious!