Our mission
Everything we do is for you, the traveller. Your trust and happiness is sacred to us. We believe in eliminating the pain of booking travel by giving you an insanely great experience. It’s a wonderful world out there, and you have access to all of it, on Skyscanner.
Introducing the designers at Skyscanner
This is a first for us — and me. We want to say hi and introduce ourselves — we’re the bunch of misfits who make up the design team at Skyscanner.
It’s also a first that we’ve used such a cheesy title for a post, and I dare say, not the last!
There are 35 of us, spread over 9 offices, speaking at least 12 different languages, all with the dream of making better products and services for travellers.
We’re a shy bunch. We know we have much to improve, so this publication is going to be about our attempts to make things better. It’ll be a very open and direct collection of stories about our wins and our epic fails, in the wonderfully complex world of travel.
What you can expect from us.
Stories about growing and nurturing Design in Tech.
I joined in January 2016, 6 months after we had gone through ‘squadification’. (Our own tailored version of Tribes and Squads, codified from our dear friends at Spotify.) During that time however, we couldn’t fully comprehend the dramatic effect this would have on the design team, positively and negatively. This is something we’ll talk about over the coming months — it’s something we frequently get asked about.
Learnings from experiments in product, growth and research.
As we’d grown over the years, many of us had never met physically, and never all at the same time, can you believe that, and we’re a travel company! So we fixed that last year, when we all got together in London for 3 days.
What happened during those 3 days, was just the start of a design team’s journey, as we Design like we’re right, and test like we’re wrong.
Practical frameworks
We love a good framework and mental model. We’ll share the ones we like that have really resonated and been adopted, and others we have had challenges with. Some of these will be home grown, and others we have blatantly copied.
We promise to be: generous, candid and practical.
We very excited about the things we’re going to be shipping over the coming year, and no doubt we’ll make some mistakes along the way, some might be quite funny — who knows. All we know is that we want to do the best work of our lives, and have a life at the same time.
Made with alacrity.
Written by Steve 'Buzz' Pearce