RetailT But this was certainly not always the case.
Founded in 1998 by dotcom digital gurus Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman to offer late holiday deals online, the site’s popularity grew rapidly despite a lack of ubiquitous consumer internet access to amass more than 500,000 regular users by 2000. By then it had also expanded its offering to include travel, gifts and entertainment, before floating on the London Stock Exchange at a value of over £500 million. During this time
Lastminute.com has operated its
own, now mature technology platforms, which have been built at different periods during its history or adopted through acquisition. In 2005 the company was acquired by Sabre
Holdings, owner of online travel company Travelocity and the business-to-business Sabre global distribution system, which is used to sell flights, hotel stays, car rentals, cruises and tour packages through High Street and online travel agencies. The evolution of Lastminute’s business supports
Crosby’s assertion that, where it was once a pioneer, now it must fight harder than ever before for market share. “There are the metaplayers, like Kayak and Trivago, and the specialist sites, like Secret Escapes and Hotel Tonight,” he said. “Then there is Google and others, like the
supplier partners including the airlines and hotels, as well as a variety of other disintermediaries, plus the main players like Expedia and TripAdvisor.” Crosby said that, in such a fragmented, crowded
and competitive market, harnessing and maintaining the agility to innovate was a major differentiator. “The winners in this market are able to take any learnings about changes in customer demand to market as quickly as possible,” he said. “So for the last two years we’ve pursued the
principles of continuous design and delivery. We’ve spent a lot of time understanding the needs of our customers and partners, then on deciding what products we can offer as solutions to the problems or to satisfy a particular need or demand.” Once a new product or service offering is
identified, “getting it into the marketplace as soon as possible is key,” according to Crosby. “We have a ‘build, measure, learn’ loop that allows us to gain the knowledge we need to know what to do next.” This has led to the company adopting some
of the same product and technology development methodologies used by modern startup companies, including Pivot, which was first by Eric Ries in 2011. As Crosby explained: “When I joined the business in
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
We were able to truly understand that the technology itself is not a cost centre. It is fundamental to our business
2012, the
Lastminute.com IT platforms lacked the ability to deliver new functionality into the products we offer rapidly enough. “We were on this monolithic monthly release
cycle, where a number of months’ work would’ve have gone into each of those cycles. So introducing new functionality onto the front-end shopping path could take up to 8 or 10 weeks,” he said. Given the seismic changes that the internet
brought about in travel, leisure and hospitality sales since the early days of Lastminute’s growth, Crosby said that in order to not only survive, but thrive in its increasingly competitive market, it was necessary for the company to accelerate its product and therefore software development cycles. “Also, the world was rapidly changing again as a result of mobile, where we did not have a mobile platform,” he added. So it was decided the company would use the
building out of its online functionality into a new platform that could accommodate and optimise mobile shopping journeys to also showcase the introduction of more Lean and Agile software development methods that would also help enable greater agility across the business. This meant initiating an organisational shift away from hefty development projects to a laser focus on the end-to- end delivery of tangible products. Crosby said: “I had worked with Thoughtworks
over the years in my previous role at Auto Trader, where I’d had the same remit to introduce an Agile
Spring/Summer 2014 11
echnology
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