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Planning & Strategy

Risking it all. A story on how designers helped rebuild a global company in 6 months.

September 19, 2024 3:55 PM
Long Lecture
🇬🇧 English
Bratysława 1

About

As a big scale-up, we grew significantly over the years, struggling to maintain our speed of delivery and customer focus. This year, we've decided to risk it all and undergo a significant company transformation where design worked directly with the C-suite to achieve our vision for the future. The talk is a hands-on case study of this transformation, failures, and learnings. It focuses on three main areas: 1. how has my leadership style changed? 2. What new expectations (skillsets) do we expect from designers, and how did we change internal team processes? 3. How did these leadership & process changes affect the product & business results? The talk is focused on personal stories, which I hope would inspire designers & product managers to organize shifts in their companies. It also touches on the topic of layoffs, the role of product designers in 2024, and how AI accelerated some of the shifts.

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Talk by

Photo of Martin Jancik, Product Design Manager at Kiwi.com
Martin Jancik
Product Design Manager at Kiwi.com

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From the recording

Talk in brief

At WaysConf 2024, Martin Jancik, Product Design Manager at Kiwi.com, shares the story of how the global travel company underwent a massive strategic and organizational transformation in just six months. After years of rapid growth, Kiwi.com had developed highly complex internal processes, an over-reliance on incremental AB testing, and a bloated product offering that neglected fundamental user experience flaws. Following a pivotal discussion with the CEO in late 2023, the company decided to risk it all by stripping away non-essential products and restructuring its teams. Drawing inspiration from Jim Collins' book Good to Great, Jancik details how Kiwi.com consolidated its design department, adopted a Hedgehog Concept focused purely on flights and peace-of-mind travel, and implemented a rapid two-day design and two-day testing cycle. By establishing a single company-wide roadmap and launching a transparent upfront pricing model under the Kiwi.com Guarantee, the team successfully simplified the booking experience. This talk provides a candid look at the emotional realities of organizational restructuring, the pitfalls of hyper-optimization, and the power of design-led strategic alignment.

Key takeaways

  1. 01

    Beware of Hyper-Optimization Bloat

    When companies rely solely on incremental AB testing, they risk ignoring fundamental product flaws. Kiwi reached a point where they tested microscopic design changes while neglecting core user trust and booking friction.

    Watch from 10:59
  2. 02

    Prioritize People Before Strategy

    Strategic shifts must begin by getting the right people in the right roles to ensure long-term adaptability. Reorganizing Kiwi's design team meant consolidating specialized roles and introducing unbiased external talent.

    Watch from 20:18
  3. 03

    Consolidate Around a Hedgehog Concept

    To succeed, a business must focus on a single intersection of passion, world-class capability, and economic viability. Kiwi eliminated adjacent offerings to focus purely on flights, peace of mind, and transparent booking value.

    Watch from 26:42
  4. 04

    Unify the Entire Company Under One Roadmap

    Managing cross-team dependencies during a massive redesign requires eliminating individual team roadmaps. Kiwi aligned hundreds of employees by establishing a single, prioritized company-wide roadmap owned by senior management.

    Watch from 31:48
  5. 05

    Mitigate High-Risk Changes with Pilot Markets

    Drastic business model changes should be validated incrementally rather than launched globally overnight. Kiwi tested its new transparent pricing model in smaller markets like Poland and Slovakia before scaling to larger regions.

    Watch from 33:49
Read edited transcript highlights

These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.

The Pitfalls of an Engineering-First Approach

In its early years, Kiwi.com operated with an engineering-first mentality, building highly complex features simply because the technical capability existed. A prime example of this was Nomad, a sophisticated search feature designed to solve the traveling salesman problem by calculating the cheapest multi-city routes. While technically impressive and entirely unique in the travel market, it ultimately served only a tiny fraction of users, as the vast majority of travelers simply wanted to book straightforward trips to specific destinations.

Watch from 4:48

The Illusion of Progress through AB Testing

As Kiwi.com scaled, the product development process became heavily reliant on continuous AB testing, to the point where even microscopic design adjustments required extensive validation. This hyper-optimization created an illusion of progress while masking severe, fundamental issues in the user experience. Users were utilizing the fast search engine but booking directly with airlines due to a lack of trust, confusion over multiple protection upsells, and complex refund policies.

Watch from 10:59

Restructuring the Design Department

To support the company's massive strategic pivot, the design department underwent a painful but necessary restructuring. Kiwi.com eliminated several specialized teams, including Design Ops and the dedicated Design System team, and downsized its research and content staff. The remaining designers were consolidated into just two core teams: Shopping Experience and Self-Service. This change brought designers closer together and streamlined collaboration, ensuring everyone was focused entirely on the core product.

Watch from 21:46

The Value of Hiring Fresh Perspectives

Introducing new talent during a major organizational transition is vital for breaking through historical biases. When employees have spent years working under an old paradigm, they carry a natural bias toward how things used to be done. Bringing in fresh designers who have no prior history with the company provides an unbiased perspective and helps lift team morale after difficult organizational changes like layoffs.

Watch from 23:54

A Rapid Iterative Design Cycle

The redesign of Kiwi's booking flow was executed through a highly disciplined, rapid iterative cycle consisting of two days of design followed immediately by two days of user testing. This continuous feedback loop allowed the team to quickly transition from abstract concepts to high-fidelity, highly usable designs. To keep stakeholders aligned, the team presented comprehensive user insights and data directly within Figma files, facilitating faster decision-making.

Watch from 29:24

Simplifying the Business Model with Transparent Pricing

The culmination of Kiwi's redesign was the launch of the Kiwi.com Guarantee, which completely transformed how the company generates revenue. Instead of offering cheap tickets and overwhelming users with confusing protection upsells during the booking flow, Kiwi introduced transparent upfront pricing. The search results now clearly present the added value of Kiwi's protection services compared to booking directly with airlines, allowing users to make an informed, stress-free choice.

Watch from 32:40
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