Trade Me is New Zealand’s largest, and most trusted, online marketplace and classifieds business. Since launching in 1999 to help “Kiwis” (a moniker for New Zealanders) find a second hand bargain, they have since evolved to become the destination for Kiwis to buy a home, launch a business, purchase a car or take the next career move. Trade Me is there in every one of their customer’s big moments, helping Kiwis create the life they want.
Today, their website is visited by 650,000 users daily and there are more than 7 million listings at any one time. Even New Zealand’s former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is a fan.
Being customer-led is deeply rooted in Trade Me’s purpose and values, including “customer aroha”. The word “aroha” in Māori (New Zealand’s Indigenous language) means many things, including love, compassion and empathy. “It’s about winning our customer’s hearts. We know that by investing in customers, we can grow the business and drive that value,” said Sue Anderson, Head of Consumer Product at Trade Me.
To stay at the forefront of consumer preference, Trade Me needed to reinvigorate their approach to product delivery to improve their speed to customer value and enrich their understanding of desired customer segments. “We felt our product practice had atrophied over time and we saw the opportunity for an independent set of eyes to help us identify where the best opportunities for improvement were,” said Jeremy Wade, Head of Classifieds at Trade Me.
Further, with over a third of Trade Me’s workforce involved in product and engineering, they wanted to ensure that their teams were working on the right problems, learning and solving in the most efficient way possible, and creating an environment where their employees could develop their own product craft.
Thoughtworks was engaged to support Trade Me’s journey towards an innovative customer-led organization. “The opportunity cost of not improving Trade Me’s product delivery practice became the most important justification for this engagement,” said Sue.
Thoughtworks conducted a five week assessment of Trade Me’s product maturity and we helped identify where the best opportunities for improvement were. Thoughtworks brought a collaborative approach to understand the varied needs and operating modes across Trade Me’s business to determine where to prioritize work.
We co-created the [product delivery] approach together. It became Trade Me’s product ways of working, powered by Thoughtworks.
We co-created the [product delivery] approach together. It became Trade Me’s product ways of working, powered by Thoughtworks.
The team ran multiple six-week sprints with Trade Me teams to trial the solutions before scaling the methods across the organization. In conjunction, Thoughtworks helped accelerate customer research in one of their desired customer segments by creating time-boxed research sprints and customizing the research methods to the resource available. Thoughtworks’ strong cultural alignment with Trade Me, and our adaptive but structured approach helped shift the dial across four opportunity spaces:
Strategy development and communication
By utilizing Lean Value Tree methods, Thoughtworks helped the Trade Me team transition to a customer-oriented strategy development approach. Furthermore, impactful customer benefit stories helped build relevance with employees and bring them on the journey. Simple changes in strategy communication to better convey the why behind the what has helped Trade Me set the foundation for greater alignment and cross-functional collaboration.
Experimentation practice
Trade Me has seen an important shift in their experiment mindset: that experiments are an opportunity to learn from customers, to validate or invalidate their assumptions, and ultimately reduce risk and increase the chance of their initiative succeeding. Delivery teams are now employing a range of lean, low-cost experimentation methods to iteratively build confidence in their chosen solutions.
Lean decision making
In this fast-paced business environment, companies need the ability to be able to make effective decisions quickly. Thoughtworks helped provide a decision framework to assist Trade Me’s Product teams to communicate more effectively with stakeholders and influence the decision direction.
Cross-functional synergies
Thoughtworks helped bring greater visibility and alignment across teams for enhanced value creation. By working with Trade Me’s Motors B2B extended team of Product, Engineering, Delivery, Sales & Marketing, Thoughtworks were able to demonstrate the value of smaller incremental releases. This led to an MVP version of a product in market in just four months, instead of the planned six months. “Our biggest challenge was a fear of the short-term consequences of slowing down to speed up. The Thoughtworks team approach actually de-risked our go-to-market plan by helping us get thin slices of value out early to pilot customers,” said Jeremy.
While it’s early days, we’re confident that we will get product into the hands of customers quicker, accelerate our learnings and ultimately deliver quicker, and better outcomes.
While it’s early days, we’re confident that we will get product into the hands of customers quicker, accelerate our learnings and ultimately deliver quicker, and better outcomes.
Impact delivered
The right framework, mindset and practices have brought greater consistency to Trade Me's product discipline and these methods will be scaled across their organization. Together, we’ve set the foundation for Trade Me to keep customers at the heart of everything they do. “By addressing the most important customer needs, we’re enabling ourselves to improve on the strong, and in most cases, market leading positions we have, to enable us to continually improve towards this ambition,” said Jeremy.
Developed a value-based framework to articulate customer outcome and translate the outcome to business value.
Experiments are smaller and more frequent, with a goal to validate or invalidate an assumption.
A new language and framework for Trade Me's product ways of working.
Facilitated identifying an early release in market two months earlier than originally planned used by ~30% of target customers.
We saw a real shift in mindset at Trade Me as teams proactively adopted this new product delivery approach; empowered with collaborative practices that are uniquely Trade Me’s. Together, we’ve established a foundation that will continue to support and evolve with Trade Me’s journey for years to come.
We saw a real shift in mindset at Trade Me as teams proactively adopted this new product delivery approach; empowered with collaborative practices that are uniquely Trade Me’s. Together, we’ve established a foundation that will continue to support and evolve with Trade Me’s journey for years to come.
