How to thrive in a crisis

Bryan Montpetit 00:06 Next up, we have Christina Ricci via the head of localization from Skyscanner. And she's going to be presenting how to thrive in a crisis again, coming back to that keyword relevancy. So, again, it's so relevant how a company went through the pandemic. And, you know, with the the domains and industries that were serving, how they actually had to strategize and overcome the pandemic, and not only just overcome, but learn to thrive and actually grow their company during that period. So we're going to have for standard join us momentarily. How you doing great things. How are you? I'm very good. Thank you. I'm so happy that you you could join us for the presentation. I'm looking forward to it. And I know a lot of others are as well. So again, I think you've got all the secret sauce that you're going to tell everybody about. So I'm what I'm going to do is turn it over to you hop back in towards the end of your time. And that will that go through any q&a you might have. Kathrin Bussmann 01:05 Sitting on my screen, just if you can let me know once it's working. Bryan Montpetit 01:09 Absolutely. And I'll help out as soon as that's done. There we go. Kathrin Bussmann 01:19 And also in very true fashion of live performances. Someone upstairs started reeling. So if you hear any noise, let me know. And I can try to put my headphones in case it's too loud. All right. You can see the screen well hear me well as well. Bryan Montpetit 01:38 come through loud and clear. And I can see the screen. Kathrin Bussmann 01:41 All right. Great. All right. Well, hi, everyone. I'm Christina, from Skyscanner. And today, I will talk a bit about how we've gone through the last year our brand has mentioned thrive in a crisis, or actually to continue thriving in the existing crisis because we know we're still in this situation. But before we dive into this, I'll just do like a very high level quick introduction on the localization setup at Skyscanner. So we have, we are available and 35 languages, we have a team of seven project managers and localization managers. We also have five internationalization engineers, and we are spread in four different offices. And as crazy as it sounds, actually, last year has been probably one of the most successful inefficient years for us within the localization team. And I'll touch a bit on that as well later in the presentation. So that's the localization overview Skyscanner, let's just dive into our topic. As you know, travel alongside other industries has been really impacted, if not probably the most impacted industries, as the situation. And throughout the year. It's crazy that it's actually almost a year now. We've learned a lot. We've done a lot of things at Skyscanner and I told you, it'd be great to share some of those learnings. But also because hopefully you see that these are learnings and lessons that can be applied for any organization independent of the industry. And also in any crisis. However, I hope that once we learn how to COVID, we won't be seeing any major global crisis later as well. And more than ever before, this situation has proven that it's critical to work closer as an organization as a team, to not just deliver things faster, but also to support each other. So we let's start first with a year ago, in January 2020. It was quite a great beginning to the year for us at Skyscanner. Just a few months before that we had a massive milestone, we've celebrated having 100 million monthly users a month, which was a really amazing achievement for us as a team as a company. And in January, we gathered for the first time, the whole company, about 1500 employees on a company event in London employees from 10 different offices. And it was such an energizing experience to get everyone together and spend three days together. The goal for that event was on one hand to celebrate our achievements, our successes over the last maybe year or two. But also to get ready for the future. We had our kind of recently updated strategy. And it was so ambitious and we were just ready to take on the travel world and do even better things. And interestingly, I think it's quite actually almost shocking looking back but the title of this event was beyond 2020 How Our goal was to set up ourselves as a company beyond that here. And it's just feels like a bit of a visionary title where our name where obviously, we everyone in the world have struggled to get beyond 2020. Luckily, we are here today. So what happens a year later? Where are we at Skyscanner a year later, you know, unfortunately, just like many other companies, not just in travel, but other industries, we did have to layoff a certain number of our employees, especially at the beginning of the crisis. We as a result of that, we also closed a few offices, and also to centralize a bit more our teams, because as I mentioned, we had 10 offices around the world, from Miami to Tokyo. So these are some of the, you know, unfortunate things that have happened. However, a few months after the beginning of the situation with COVID, we started really kind of striving and doing so many different things to manage the situation. Some of those are, we launched new products, new features, starting from late summer until today. And we're also hiring again, if anyone is looking for roles in product management, UX design, engineering, we are our hiring as well. So not only have we managed to keep as an organization as teams stronger, but we are starting to see that recovery that we've been seeing or hoping for. So what what is it that got us here, and that is setting us for for the future. There are three things that we'll look at today. And these are the three key things that I think any company in organization can use to, to thrive and not just survive in any crisis. The first one is to stay true to its values, and what's important for them for the organization. Second, put its users first and last but not least take care of its employees. So these will be few examples that I will look at what we've done in particularly at Skyscanner. The first one, from the very beginning, especially the situations where he started developing was critical to connect with our travelers, but also understand their needs as we go through the situation. Second, we build products, completely new, different products and features to respond to those needs of the travelers, but also of our partners as they're critical for us as well. And again, last, but not least something that has been from the beginning until today support our employees. If I have to choose one of our values within Skyscanner, this will be the one that stands more to me and one that has been the longest with us. And what we mean by that is in everything that we do, we put our travelers first, then we put our partners and last our Skyscanner as an organization. And the way we leave that and the way that we see that expresses in everything that we do we ask ourselves, is this the right thing for our travelers? How is this going to impact our travelers? So it's one of our strongest values and our strongest approach to decision making. So that's why it was really important, again, to connect with the user to travelers and understand their needs. So what did we do? And how did this happen? The part where we connect it so as early in the situation around March and April, when was the biggest, almost like shock as we didn't for everyone around the world, when people couldn't travel, there were concentrations, people couldn't get back home, they lost their money, they lost their ticket. So the immediate reaction and the immediate actions that we had from our side was to help travelers that were stuck that were impacted by the situation. So in any way we could, initially in our communication and marketing approach that was to inform was the situation to inform what their rights are to inform them how to get either their money back or to change their flights. And then just a few weeks later, as the situation started somewhat settling, the key kind of focus for us was to empathize to really show that we understand how difficult that time is we ourselves a traveler, we are impacted. So it was really that empathizing with everyone in that situation. And then as weeks went by, we probably all remember how the first few weeks of lockdown without board and stuck at home. Some of the our marketing approach was to almost inform and entertain. So we were creating content around Spotify travel lists, playlists, or content like travel from home, being able to watch live cameras from around the world, or museum from around museums from around the world. So content that would keep your users engaged. And really the key thing was here to support everyone our users but also to keep us on top of their mind and be with them throughout the situation. And, of course, you know, as a result of that the goal was into this marketing communication approach, the goal wasn't to drive revenue to drive, purchases and buying, right, because no one was able to do that to travel. The goal was really to connect. And we found out that a few months later, as we were analyzing our performance, especially with our social media, and content, we found that we had at that point, the highest engagement among other travel brands, which really showed that our work was really, we're able to connect and reach our travelers. And then the next part was understanding, especially as the situation was changing, it was important to understand how is everyone feeling? So what we started doing from the beginning until today, we run regular global surveys from around the world to understand from our few key markets to understand how people in general feel about traveling, are they likely to travel again, when are they likely to travel again, and the interesting part where, you know, that kind of brings us back to localization is that being able or doing those kinds of surveys and investigation per market or per region, and this is where we started seeing differences as different regions were recovering and different rates, and different travel distances were possible. And we also developed based on this data, but also external data we developed an internal data to, through which we're able then to make informed decisions, which is very critical for the situation that is changing on a daily basis or weekly basis, and continues for the whole year, right. So what do we use this data and these insights for, we're able to plan our campaigns campaigns based on readiness or willingness to travel, have campaigns and market content and promotion content only in markets, where people are willing to travel where there's possibility to travel, so really targeted, and also to support our partners with these insights for them to make decisions. And I think the key word, just like the topic of our the whole day to day is that collaboration and working together because this wouldn't have been possible within that collaboration within the organization, and also relying on our external partners, translation partners, freelancers and agency to really be able to respond as quickly as possible within that volume. And that constant changes. Another key for collaboration is, as the situation was developing and changing so quickly, you know, done a lot of effort to set up processes and strict timelines and tools and how to our stakeholders would request content. But at this point, it wasn't important anymore that things need to be done in a structured way. And we did timelines and the same, the pros that we would have been asking for in the past, we were there to support our teams, marketing, user research teams, were also almost like running around against the clock. So this is this is the part where going back to connecting supporting travelers users, and responding to their needs. So how do we respond to those needs, is by building products that were relevant to the current situation. One thing that we are certain about and we are confident within Skyscanner is a travel will return. We all cannot wait to travel everyone that we speak to, and probably all of you guys here on the call today, we cannot wait to go back to travel. However, we can't deny that the situation and the circumstances would be different. What would start traveling look like? And right now in the near future, in the long term? Future? How can so we're trying to ask ourselves, how can we help travelers navigate this environment? How can we give them a peace of mind when they travel that can actually enjoy the experience? So these are the questions that we're asking ourselves. And this is what has led us to developing two quite revolutionary, almost products and features. The first one is our app where where can I go with the name internally to the with Mark map. And what this map allows, as we started working on this, probably towards the end of the summer, and it has already undergone a few iterations. But what really this allows users is for example, for me, I'm based in Barcelona, and I can check start living from Barcelona from my origin here, where where can I go? Which countries are open? What are the type of restrictions within each of those countries? And what do I need to do if I want to go to a specific country? What do I need to have in mind? And this is incredibly complex, complex product complex solution because all of this content that provides this information around restrictions and limitations and requirements is a content that we take from a third party provider. This is our travel authority. And these comes in the form of right, we have 200 countries, and for each of those countries on roughly 300 countries in the world, and for each of these countries, we get this content on the restriction. And it's possible that as well that we get that on a daily basis, some of these restrictions will change. So the content needs to be updated. So we have to make a decision, how can we all this content about, you know, 200 snippets, paragraphs of information changing potentially on a daily basis having to translate that in 35 languages? Was it worth the cost, were we even going to be able to do that as the situation develops? So we made a decision together with the product team. To do that through machine translation, we integrated the Google API on the fly. So as we were showing this content to our travelers, it was the content was already pre translated from machine translation. And they would have been able if they wanted to switch back to English. And of course, we all know machine translation is not always great. And it's not especially for maybe product content. But again, this was the only solution that we were going to be able to do in such a time constraint. And interestingly, we as a side effect, we're also looking at data for things like the number of travelers your users that maybe this machine translation, they will switch back to English and looking at maybe our language and informing us do is the machine translation may be bad that users would rather use English or is it maybe that level of fluency in certain countries is fine, and people prefer English anyway, so as a sides kind of effect, or we're using this to gather different insights. And the next product that we launched, which just happened just before Christmas, was the first COVID-19 travel protection. So we were able to partner again with a third party insurance provider. And if I users would buy flights or tickets or any other hotels through us, we were able to then add that as an add on for them to get that extra protection. And again, the localization team plays a key part here, because not just translating the content and the product from our perspective. But we also work very closely with this third party provider of the insurance to support them in their localization as they had much less markets. And as another interesting thing that we did here was working closely with our user research and product marketing teams, where we launched surveys to understand traveler perception per market, when it comes to insurance. What do users care about when they buy insurance, what's more important to them. And based on that, the long term goal is to be able to adjust either the product or the messaging per market based on these perceptions through the survey. So sorry, so that's, that was a bit on our products, and what was it that we did to respond to those needs. And again, it was a cross company collaboration, where teams had to reshuffle and get together leave behind some of their priorities to be able to focus on these very key products for us and for the travelers in this situation. And the last week we look at is looking at supporting employees and and the team. So focus first on general the support that we get got from our leadership team. From the very beginning, the team was absolutely transparent. In general, we have this cultural transparency within the company. But even in this situation, there was complete transparency about the severity of the situation, the potential impact that was having on us the potential solutions and measures that the leadership team was looking at. And we had like different level of support for managers, especially at the beginning, we had a weekly catch ups, managers had a weekly catch up with the CEO and other leadership where we could understand better the situation so we can support better our teams. And something amazing, I think quite unique to our team and company has been since the beginning until today, we have what we call this your choice time, it's a block of four hours every single day, for hours in the afternoon, all our employees get the time to do whatever it is for them to either to take care of their families, their kids, or maybe have a parent of anyone that's reliant on them, but also to take care of ourselves if it means to go out and do my grocery shopping or to take a long lunch break and go to the gym. But that four hours, we don't have meetings and we can do anything that that we need to and it's quite, quite amazing to have that support and that that's pace. So that's, that has been that key or that genuine care throughout the situation. So from the leadership team, towards everyone within the company of understanding and support, and when it comes to the localization team, this is the part where I mentioned we've had quite a an amazingly successful year, but also such a challenging year, at the same time, it was literally the first week or two of the corporate restrictions, and all the countries where we had four new members join our team. And it was pretty intense, because, you know, onboarding people remotely, it's, it's something that we as teams are usually remotely, so it hasn't been the big, the biggest challenge, the biggest challenge was kind of assuring people that have, you know, just joined a company, that's the most impacted other situation, assuring them that whatever happens, we're together as a team, and that we have that faith in our organization and our leadership team. And just bringing them that assurance, especially to the first few months, and also creating that team spirit. And then again, something that happened for us and was super critical was that collaboration and flexibility between ourselves. And that understanding that, you know, it's there are a lot of changes that are happening. And we needed to respond very quickly to within the company, and the changing priorities, and the changing focus. And we had to, obviously, we had our own OKRs, we had our own focus and plans for the quarter. But then based on that changes in organization, we had to quickly adjust and adjust focus somewhere else. But also the key thing learning for me as a lead the team and as just as our team as a whole was that leaning in on the vulnerability and being open and honest, it was incredibly hard. But you know, as a lead, anyone that is responsible to take care of a team and to lead a team is to provide that assurance, while at the same time if you don't know really, if that's if you can promise anything, or if you can't know what's going to happen next, and being open and honest, saying that you know what, maybe today, we don't need to worry or this week, let's not worry about our next week's focus. And let's just focus on how we feel. And let's just take time for each other and have this open conversations. And it's it's quite a powerful feeling. When especially, you know, that leads or different senior people with a team when they are open, and they're vulnerable. And that just allows everyone else on the team to be so. And it's cool. It's quite amazing. Because we run yearly surveys, company, culture surveys, and this year, we actually had two, and both times the kind of the perception, the feedback and the feeling from the team, we score about 30% higher than the average in the company. So despite the challenging year that we've been through, it's been quite a bonding experience for us as a team. So this is it. There you have it, the three key things that anyone in your organization, any team can take and be able not to just survive and thrive, but thrive in such a situation. And this is, know what your values are, and stay true to them no matter what. Put your users first and always take care of the employees and in any way that's true for you. And that's that was our learnings. Thanks. Bryan Montpetit 23:38 Thank you so much for that presentation. I think that a lot of people can relate to and just the fact that the you know, we've gone through this pandemic, now it's so destabilizing for all the all the members of the staff, our colleagues, and I think being truthful with them. And living in the moment, as you said is really important. Your presentation degenerate quite quite a few questions. So we're gonna hop over to those, if you don't mind. So the first one is from Yulia Burmese Strava. How much of the localization personnel did Skyscanner have to lay off during the crisis? Kathrin Bussmann 24:10 Yeah, we actually only had to layoff one person, because they were based in the Skyscanner of sorry, in the Singapore office. And it was more that that was also the project our leadership team took, instead of laying off certain disciplines, or certain level, it was more like we better close an office. And unfortunately, the people who are in that office had to be let go. Just because we wanted to centralize our teams, you know, being in 10 offices was really challenging, even before that, so that's why we lost someone from Singapore. We also later lost a few members who just left the team or left the company throughout the situation. Bryan Montpetit 24:49 Okay, I have actually seen quite a few people shifting roles during the pandemic as well. I was quite surprised that I thought people would look for stability and hold on to their roles and you have to was almost actually a lot of opportunity for people and they kind of started jumping ship and going elsewhere. So I definitely understand that. Another question that we have is from Irene, I don't have a certain name. So it's just Irene, did you introduce any new staff performance assessments, assessment measures to account for the new routine? Kathrin Bussmann 25:19 Great question, actually know what we did we, we removed our regular evaluation process. So we do that twice a year. And we had our like, regular one, the beginning of 2020. And then we didn't do any evaluation, any performance review for the whole of the year until the end, towards December and 2020. So we decided that, you know, it was important. And that was the message from our Chief People Officer at the beginning, is just do whatever you can, whenever anyone can, whenever it's possible for you in that situation. So we actually removed all the evaluation, we didn't stop, for example, taking feedback and collecting feedback, because we wanted to just, you know, for our own performance and our own awareness, what we're doing where we're not, but it wasn't official, and we didn't have that performance. Bryan Montpetit 26:12 I think it's a good approach. I mean, naturally, you want to ensure that you're continuing to develop and get feedback from from colleagues and do the 360s, and things like that. So I can definitely see that. But the room the, I guess, the official assessments is probably removed a lot of stress from the individuals as well. So one additional question that's come in, from Sam Chandler, which languages saw an uptick in the transaction volumes during the pandemic, Kathrin Bussmann 26:36 we didn't see uptake, what we did is, particularly so we have our products. In the third five languages by default, what we did a bit more or differently was our marketing content. We had like a different set of languages based on the types of campaign and exactly because there was sharing at the beginning is different countries were a different stage of their recovery. So different campaigns and different content was based on that. So it could get a bit chaotic when you're trying to handle several different campaigns for different sets of markets. Bryan Montpetit 27:10 Okay, Theresa, Toronto, we have a question. Did you have any issues when you implement implemented empty in the map application you shared? Kathrin Bussmann 27:20 We had a very interesting issue was with do you do translation? So actually, quite a fascinating example. We had a complaint from a user, if I'm not mistaken, in in Korea. Yeah, in Korea, that the translation for the country of Korea, through the Google Translate was translating something as kind of a territory of China. And that it'd be even though the source wasn't saying that the translation through Google Translate was coming as that. And obviously, this is quite, you know, when it comes to geopolitical issues is quite problematic. And we were able to fix that through like, through the backhand, but interestingly, it came is coming up. So there was also problem with resolution of the Russian country. I mean, so yeah. On our toes. Bryan Montpetit 28:16 All right, and we only have one minute left. So we'll just grab one last question. From Dorian Corbett. We have what's your view on working from home versus working in the office post tech, that post and pandemic is Skyscanner considering becoming a work from anywhere company. Kathrin Bussmann 28:30 My view is I hated absolutely hated working from home. I like a really strong view. Even before we had this complete flexibility, we could work as much as we wanted from home, I never did it. I really missed the environment, not just my team, but the team, the other teams within the office. But here we are shifting now. For example, for the rest of 2021. Anyone can work from anywhere, even if we get back even if we get back to an office, because we don't know what's going to happen. And and indeed actually is looking for the long term approach if we are going to transition into fully remote yet at this point, they haven't made a decision but for the rest of the year, we can. Bryan Montpetit 29:13 Great. And I think that was the best timed presentation we had because it finished right. One second before the the time. So I'd like to thank you so much for taking the time with us today. I really appreciate it. And I wish you well. I'll definitely be connecting on LinkedIn if we're not already connected. And I wish you well. Thank you very much, Kathrin Bussmann 29:31 so much. Good luck for the rest of the sessions. Bryan Montpetit 29:33 Thank you very much.