Developing Digital Services At Finnair

Jussi Luhtasela at UXDX Community: Helsinki. Video: https://youtu.be/_nXkqqLywow

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and a bit of context on Finnair

[00:00:06] I'm running the digital platform at Finnair. I will introduce that a bit later, and I'll talk today a bit about how we develop digital customer experience in our setting, and how we coordinate with the rest of the company. So the topics for today: we'll do a slight introduction into Finnair so that people get a bit of context, there is an elephant in the room so I'll address that, and then we'll get on with the topic of the day, of how we are building the customer experience. I'll talk a bit about our future plans, although of course the timelines of those might be somewhat challenged as of today.

[00:00:44] Finnair is a 97 year old airline, flagship carrier for Finland. Our business is really built on connecting Asia and Europe, and as you can see from the map here, we have really built the backbone of our business on flying people from Europe to Asia and vice versa. Of course we do operate some routes to North America as well, but really the core and the growth drivers are the Europe-Asia routes. As you can see from the map, it's kind of a geographical advantage of having our main hub and our only hub in Helsinki, so north, so the shortest distance from many European capitals to North Asia and Central Asia, say Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, those places, it goes actually via Helsinki. So we have a very good business package there. Last year we flew 15 million passengers, we have roughly 6,000 employees, we're operating a fleet of 94 aircraft.

The elephant in the room: coronavirus

[00:01:50] But yeah, let's address the elephant in the room. I would just do one slide about this so you can understand where we are today. The whole aviation industry is today facing the biggest crisis since World War Two because of the coronavirus. So we started seeing this happening already a few months ago. Many of you probably, if you work in Europe, you had seen it gradually edging towards you guys, but for us it really started with us, like I said, where we're one of the biggest carriers to Europe from China. So we grounded our fleet already in January, and that already had quite a big impact for us.

[00:02:32] Of course we started rolling out those required changes at that time, and we were already expecting that this might hit a bit of a larger area as well. But to be honest, it was only when we saw that Europe — and we cancelled Milan some time ago, this is March 3rd, so it's only two weeks ago — but the scale of that then started hitting us fairly hard. And as of yesterday, we announced we're grounding 90% of our fleet. For an airline that is a huge, huge situation. We are actually just operating a few routes that are out there. And like I said, a lot of the airlines out there are facing bankruptcy, so we are in a tight spot[?]. But Finnair itself has gone through turbulent times before, we have a strong owner, we should be getting through this. But you might understand that it is a bit of a shock to the system. But we'll manage through it, and I'll explain when we get to our roadmaps and stuff like that that these are to be taken with a slight caveat.

What the Finnair digital platform is

[00:03:52] On to the topic of today: how we're building the customer experience at Finnair. So when I talk about the Finnair digital platform I mean our customer facing touch points. So from left to right, you'll see the Finnair app, which is on the left hand side. We do have an iOS or Apple Watch app as well. Then we have our in-flight entertainment system, the big screen onboard the aircraft, and we do have a Wi-Fi portal which is related. Then we have finnair.com, of course both mobile and desktop as well. And then we have our Aurinkomatkat brand on the right hand side. So Aurinkomatkat, for those who are not familiar, is a package tour operator mainly here in the Finnish market. Roughly three million uniques per month on our properties, and 300,000 unique app downloads, 30-day actives. So that's kind of the scale we're talking about.

[00:04:56] We already developed a few years ago a strategy on looking at these touch points as a platform. Every piece has kind of their own role, and this is what I'm going to be talking about: how we see different digital touch points, how we develop them, how we take this to the rest of the company so that we're aligned. Because in an industry like that we're not a pure digital player, although we're the second largest e-commerce operation in Finland, with 600 million euros last year turnover that we reported for our direct channel, so our e-commerce operation. We still are there only to support our physical service of carrying people from A to B.

[00:05:45] And that's how our currency from the platform point of view works. So finnair.com, our website, is there to give you your best deal. We have servicing elements there as well, but it's there also to sell you flights. The Finnair mobile app is there to be your world-class travel companion, so that once you're traveling you have your updates, you have your boarding passes with you, you can do your upgrades, you can do your buying and selling there. Naturally we also sell flights there, but the main purpose for its existence is to be your travel companion.

[00:06:19] Then onboard the aircraft we have two services, IFE and Nordic Sky. They are there for entertainment. Especially IFE, the seat back screens on the aircraft, they're there for entertainment, they're there for movie playing. We're actually one of the first airlines where we've developed the software for the screens ourselves, together with some of our development partners. We've done that now for three to four years, ever since the A350s were launched in 2016, and whatever you see on the aircraft on the screens is built by our teams, designed by our designers and so forth, as part of our digital experience.

[00:06:56] And then last but not least, Nordic Sky, which is the name of our Wi-Fi portal, the portal that we have onboard the Airbus aircraft, where you can connect to the Wi-Fi and you will have some content there. We launched audiobooks and so forth there a while ago. So that's the kind of big customer facing platform that we're talking about.

[00:07:14] But as important, I would say, are the common services that you see at the bottom of the screen. So you'll have elements that we're developing with the purpose of these being shared across all the touch points and potential future touch points. So ways to log in, ways to make payments, ways for us to collect customer understanding, ways for us to do content management, CMS, so if we create an article, how do we publish that to different places. This work started a few years ago, it's by no means done, but that's the direction where we're heading, building more and more of these common elements that can be used across the services.

In-sourcing development and how the teams are set up

[00:07:56] Naturally all of this takes a lot of coordination, and that's what I'm going to be talking about when I go further in this presentation. But a bit of history. So four years ago, in 2016, we started in-sourcing a lot of our development work. Up until then most of the development work was done by our partners. So the Finnair app launched in 2014[?]. We had our first website already back in 95. That wasn't an e-commerce platform, but it was a site, world wide web at that time, but it mainly was developed also externally. Back in 2016 we decided that this is such a strategically important part of an airline and an airline service that we need to build and understand this ourselves.

[00:08:39] I'm myself running a team of seven product owners that then manage a larger group of people. We have roughly 80 people developing the digital services, divided into these seven, or actually eight, scrum teams, where we have designers, developers, both back end and front end developers, full-stack developers, we have a few architects, we have scrum masters naturally, and a few other skills there to manage all of this. So in-sourcing this work has been a big part of the reason for the moment. Naturally that has developed a really different kind of culture at the company as well, and I'll be talking about that.

[00:09:19] So just to give you a bit of a flavor of what kind of teams we have: all of these are cross-functional digital development teams, headed by a product owner and scrum master. Then they have a designer. Although it says design there on the top right corner, that's kind of a virtual team, because the designers are dotted across the teams. So we have five teams building finnair.com, one team building the app, in my opinion getting a bit too large of a team with 50[?] people in it, so we might need to think about how we do that, but iOS and Android apps are both in that team.

[00:09:52] We have our in-flight entertainment and connectivity team, which is a different kind of team, because they're building the end-to-end experience, not only building the software front-end. A .com or a web design team or an app team would not normally build that, in different companies, because these guys are taking care of the hardware as well. Of course hardware comes from a vendor, but they are in charge of making sure that the connectivity hardware, satellite connections work, make sure that the hardware onboard the aircraft, Wi-Fi endpoints and all these work, and also building the screen experiences I was talking about. We have a payment team and we have a few other teams as well, such as internal applications and so forth. Let's not go into those details.

Long-term vision and guiding principles

[00:10:35] The main purpose and thing I wanted to deliver today is, how do you plan and coordinate this kind of work with a lot of teams, I'd say 80 people, inside a company of 5,000 employees, 6,000 employees at us today, where we also have a lot of different kinds of projects ongoing? So how do we do digital development within a larger company, and also our thinking of how do we do long-term vision versus very short cycle, anything sprint-specific? But now I'll go into a few of these so you better get an idea how we do it.

[00:11:12] So in the long term, we just renewed our strategy last year, and as part of that work we kind of don't want to nail down what we want to exactly build. You don't want, especially for example if you take a system shock like Corona now, for an airline we can't really tell what kind of features, or even larger epics, sets of features, we're going to build in a few years' time. What we can do is that, through a very good design process, by talking to our customers, by talking to our employees, by understanding where we should be heading, we can set a few principles. And this is what we've done last year. So we have a few sets of guiding principles that we then use when we evaluate whether a feature or an epic is relevant for us to be built. Of course there are other factors coming into it, such as money and so forth, but these should always be kept in mind, because these are the ones we feel that will create good customer experience in the future.

[00:12:11] So personal, that kind of goes without saying. As an airline you understand who your customer is. We have a lot of data on you as an end user. There are a lot of issues of how we can use that data, of course, especially taking GDPR into account, but we should be using all the understanding of who you are and where you're traveling to, into making our experience much more personal, and not offering things that you already have decided that you don't need for this particular travel, for example.

[00:12:40] Effortless. We feel that, as I said, our main service is, we're not selling a digital service, we are supporting a physical travel service. So we want to get you from A to B as easily as possible, and for that we want to be there with our digital services, but in a perfect world you wouldn't be needing to interact too much with us. You can interact when you need to, and we can inform you of changes, irregularities, cancellations and so forth when needed, but if all goes well it should be smooth sailing. That's what we're after.

[00:13:15] Inspirational: that's something we've always been debating, do we want to be also going into the world of travel media. And we decided that that's an area where, based on what our customers are telling us, based on what we're seeing in our data, that's something that we should be developing more, and we are doing more as well. In control means that it goes hand in hand with the effortless part: when something happens, say we need to cancel a flight or something, you feel that you're in control, you can change your flight, you know who to talk to, who to reach out to.

[00:13:47] And I think a few of the most important pieces coming out from that work last year are especially number five and six. Any digital service where you're collecting personally identifiable information should be really cautious these days about how they treat that information, not only because of GDPR but because of consumer trust. And we feel that we have been making product choices along the road where we have turned down some things because we don't feel that it fits into this bucket of trust.

[00:14:18] And sustainability is a very challenging topic for an airline, where our core business is flying aircraft, but it's something that we need to, as an industry, work towards really hard, to make the whole ecosystem more sustainable, meaning the travel ecosystem, and we can do our bit in the digital space for that as well. So that's kind of a big topic, even though we kind of want to have it ringing in our ears when our people are making product choices.

[00:14:49] So another kind of long-term vision, how we communicate, is doing these to-and-from: this is where we see us today, this is where we're going to go. To go through all of these takes a bit of time, but the whole idea is to paint the picture of the path we want to take, because you're doing an increment. We do over 150 individual features every year. If you count in bug fixes and everything, it's going to be around three or four hundred. But the whole idea here is, what is the direction where we're heading? And this kind of opens that up. This is kind of storytelling as well.

[00:15:28] So if you look at this convoluted[?] vision, we are trying to tell that we start with individual touch points, that point I was just talking about, the whole platform part. We start to integrate: the same login works for the app, the same login works for Nordic Sky, saved payment methods that you stored in one place will be available in other places, these kinds of settings. And then when we think about the next step, it's really about what I was talking about, that smoothness, that being in control and so forth. So it's kind of a storytelling for the vision.

[00:15:57] Then one more slide about the future. This is just more about how we see different touch points playing their role in different phases. It is something that of course we probably will adjust as we go, but that's kind of what we had last year when we updated.

The one-year roadmap and the development drumbeat

[00:16:15] But then when we get to a much more concrete level, this is now last year's example. This is what I use when I talk to my stakeholders, especially around the company outside of our digital development: a lot of development projects, management, other people who need to understand, what are you guys doing, how are your timelines looking? In a perfect world I wouldn't use this kind of one year view, because as you can see we're looking at two, three, four agile cycles per view. But as we are living in a world where we're combining an agile development organization together with a company that works otherwise in a fairly waterfall kind of approach, it's something we just need to do.

[00:16:58] And then, as you can see, there's my big red disclaimer: we only commit to things for one cycle. So everything you see beyond the ongoing cycle is just a plan. And plans do change, they change every day, and now of course, for example over the last month, we've changed our plans so many times. But anyway, that's kind of the idea. Somebody mentioned earlier today that you can't be a purist when you're working in a large company with some pockets of agile and so much waterfall, because you need to find a way to work in these kinds of borderline situations. Of course it creates different kinds of situations[?].

[00:17:40] Then when you go to short-term, we have our development drumbeat. This is where the actual development happens, this is where the actual work happens. Apparently somebody showed already the SAFe model earlier today, so this is kind of an adapted model from it. Not following it regimentally, but taking the best pieces from different kinds of models. We are now in our planning cycle eleven, so we've done this now for three years. We do an experiment or two every time to kind of improve it gradually, but we're currently trying to find our way of working.

[00:18:21] But it's very straightforward: a three-month cycle, an agile planning day in the beginning, a large demo day at the end. We do also monthly demos, and then pretty much every team, there's some flexibility for the teams to choose what kind of sprint model they want to run, but typically they do their one or two week sprints depending on the team.

[00:18:44] We also have something called innovation sprints twice a year, which is kind of free time to do your own stuff, but you need to pitch for it. So the idea is that you pitch an idea, you'll have a few more people joining your team, preferably from other teams so you're not just using the same people you work with. Of course you could do that as well, we see that happening, but preferably you get to know more people from your own development organization. And recently we actually expanded that into our business units as well, so there's not only development and designer people but also more business owner types joining in. A lot of good things have come out of it. The whole idea is that you need to have something to demo, something clickable to demo, at the end of the week, so it's not just a slide. It's been very, very popular, our developers like it, our designers like it, and we've gotten quite interesting services out of that also.

[00:19:45] Then we use a lot of the standard tools, Trello, Jira, Eveline[?], used as the view of our ongoing work, or something just to support it. And then we all have a wall of post-its, which is our main way to communicate at the office as well.

Launches, design and A/B testing

[00:20:07] I promised that I won't talk about our launches or our products too much, but if you're interested, we have, like I said, a ton of different kinds of launches last year that we pushed out. I did a recap of the main ones and you can find that on my LinkedIn profile. It's pinned in there, so it should be easy to find, kind of a recap. Because it's also important to make notes about the things that we want to do. When you develop a site like finnair.com, it's quite iterative. Most of the launches we do, our end users actually don't realize them before they see it and say, hey, this is something new. Same goes for the Finnair app for example. So all the decisions[?] have to be something that we want to do. So there's a ton of different things that we are pushing out, but like I said, feel free, if you want to dig deeper, go and check my LinkedIn profile and you'll find that article there, a little recap of the main things.

[00:21:05] I'm going to jump over this design piece, or I'll just talk to it very quickly. So a lot of what we're doing is starting from, like I said, customer experience driven. So we'll start from the customer's point of view. We have 11 very experienced designers doing a pretty standard discover-deliver model, where we run our design sprints, do contextual enquiries[?], all of that. Then we have our discovery phase. We try to involve as much of the company as well in the discovery activities, especially when developing internal applications, which is not my team, but the team doing that uses the same methodology when we're developing services for pilots and cabin crew and other people.

[00:21:57] We noticed that when you have the actual people using the end service there, first of all they're very enthusiastic doing it, and you much faster get great results. So a combination of a good designer with a design researcher, a few end users, the business owner typically, is a perfect combination to get these discovery phases onwards.

[00:22:17] And a lot of the launches that I've been personally focused on, what we focused on a lot last year, is we developed an A/B testing capability for the company, where we went beyond Google Optimize, where we wanted to really have a proper A/B testing capability so that we can deploy A and B versions of a new feature, for example, in less than an hour. It takes 20 minutes roughly for development teams to push it out now with our new setup[?]. Of course you still need to design and build the A and B variants, but the whole idea is that we want to get tens and tens of tests every month, and once we get to that level, we're ramping it up now, it should continue. So we start with research, you start with allocation and these other things, develop, launch, maybe test a bit, till the end of the world.

What's next: cross-functional teams and a shared cadence

[00:23:09] But I'm going to spend the last few minutes talking a bit about what's next. So like I said, we're in cycle 11 now, so we've done this now for three years. We've hired a lot of people, we've built up our teams, we have a pretty good machine now building and developing these touch points. Are we developing further forwards? Of course there's things to develop, but hopefully this will give you some ideas of what kind of things larger companies dealing with e-commerce are struggling with, and this is what we see today.

[00:23:42] So this is a bit airline specific but goes for many, many other consumer facing e-commerce operations as well. So you will have people working with sales, e-commerce sales. You have people working with tactical marketing, SEM, Facebook marketing, these kinds of things, who are in charge of acquisition. Of course then you have your product and brand marketing people. In airline lingo, RM is revenue management and pricing, so those are the people who set the prices for the flights, so it's pricing of your product, whatever your product is. And then we have comms, and on this slide as well, a visual part[?].

[00:24:23] So we do have a pretty good day-to-day cooperation. We're not that big of a company, where everybody is sitting in the same office, upon two floors. But there are still different target settings, there's different budgets, there's different reporting lines, which does lead to quite a lot of misalignment on activities. And I think the biggest thing is cadence as well, because people work in different cadences. Our digital platform development teams work, like I just described, in very well defined sprinting cycles, and other teams work in different kinds of cadences depending on their needs. So we are a bit out of sync all the time, and that's the one thing we need to do better at.

[00:25:04] A quite standard thing is, of course, somebody already mentioned that, is we really want to move into a more cross-functional, but cross-skills, cross-behavior kind of teams, where we have a combination of these skill sets in one team, built around an end-to-end customer process. And that's what we're going to aim for, having these kinds of multifunctional teams that, yes, they will have a development core, as you can see on the right hand side here, but they will have a comms[?] person, they will have a pricing person, they will have a marketing and sales manager, they will have somebody leading the whole thing. And, as you can see on the left hand side, everyone will live within the same cadence. And this is what we hope to move to fairly soon, and this is how we feel that we're going to get through this thing here.

[00:26:06] I do have, as I said, I might have some time for questions. So thank you for this. Take care of yourself, wash your hands, and feel free to be in touch if you have any questions related to this or anything else around an airline.