Ship It: Staying Lean at LivingSocial

Transcript

1. Ship it: Staying Lean at LivingSocial Andy Atkinson
2. Your projects? Actual Expected
3. ...even worse? Actual Expected
4. Move quickly Focus Ruby +
5. Andy Atkinson SOFTWARE ENGINEER
6. LivingSocial is the local marketplace to buy and share the best things to do in your city
7. CONSUMER WEB
9. SHOW PRICES?
10. Counter-intuitive! Showing prices converted worse.
12. BUILD, MEASURE, LEARN
13. Lean startup Try concepts Preserve focus despite growth
14. TEAM GROWTH 2012 2010 a/b testing, iterations, start small. still works!
15. SLOW ROLLOUT Release process Release features to segments of users first.
16. MOBILE AND NATIVE Release process Add mobile and native device support eventually.
17. Engineering process Build it Make it pretty Ship it Make it fast Make  it  work Add  tests Finalize  design  and   user  experience Verify  and  measure   usage Scaling
18. Engineering culture Optimize for quick recovery from mistakes. Learn from mistakes. Share remediations with team.
19. Test ideas cheaply
20. PURCHASE FEEDBACK
21. TWO ASSUMPTIONS Consumers would give feedback 1 2 1 2 Merchants would find the feedback valuable PURCHASE FEEDBACK
22. OVERALL: SUCCESS Surveyed millions of people. Collected millions of records. Could have validated product interest with merchant using sample and survey data PURCHASE FEEDBACK Could have validated with consumers before building
23. Test small changes that could have a big impact.
24. QUICK CHECKOUT
25. HYPOTHESIS Increase purchase conversion 1 QUICK CHECKOUT $
26. MISSED TARGET Tested on a small set of deals (good) Failed to achieve a statistically significant increase in purchase conversion. QUICK CHECKOUT Removed code
27. FACEPILE
28. FACEPILE WINNER! Better subscription conversion from paid clicks originating from Facebook ads. 5% Social proof
29. Automate something after doing it manually becomes painful, but not before.
30. WAIT LIST FEATURE
31. HYPOTHESES Additional purchases on deals from additional inventory 1 WAIT LIST FEATURE $ More inventory allocation from merchant for re-runs 2
32. MISSED TARGET Learned we typically had the maximum inventory from hotels Purchase conversion from wait list subscribers was < 10%. WAIT LIST FEATURE Learned the majority of deals do not sell out Small opportunity, removed code.
33. Automated reporting merchant notification Did not build:
34. Test riskiest assumptions first
35. LOYALTY PRODUCT
36. Would consumers sign up? 1 2 Would merchants sign up? LOYALTY PRODUCT Would integration with third-party work? Quality of the data? 3
37. DID NOT LAUNCH Working with third-party added extra time to our development speed LOYALTY PRODUCT Could have validated riskiness assumptions first (merchant enrollment)
38. ESCAPES NEW DEVELOPMENT Booking Air Tours Payment Mobile
39. ESCAPES NEW DEVELOPMENT Manually loading inventory Building piece by piece (air, packaged tours, mobile) Deferring merchant payment project while working with hotels that don’t require it Starting small
40. CONCLUSION Validate riskiest assumptions first Use a/b testing for optimization and new product development Optimize for iteration speed and quick recovery Test small ideas with big potential Make customer validation your primary goal
41. Hiring Ruby, iOS, Java/Scala, remote is ok
42. Thanks! andy@webandy.com webandy.com andy.atkinson@livingsocial.com