Inside Schibsted Nordic Marketplaces' transformation with Jostein Emmerhoff and Hatice Fidan
👋 Hey there! I’m Afonso, founder of Scandinavian Product Group.
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Today’s deep dive is about Schibsted Nordic Marketplaces transformation - an organisation providing the leading marketplace brands across the Nordics - such as finn.no, blocket.se, and more.
I sat down with Jostein Emmerhoff (Agile Delivery Director) and Hatice Fidan (Product Manager) to learn more about what they’re up to.
Jostein started his career as a developer and has held various leadership roles over the past 15 years, primarily focusing on building, scaling, and transforming (product-) organizations.
He has led the work with organizational design and way of working for the product organization of Nordic Marketplaces.
Hatice is a Product Manager with expertise in building online trust to drive growth. She has a solid background in product management, analytics and technology and is passionate about leading teams to develop outstanding products that drive meaningful change, foster a product-driven culture, build powerful communities, and shape ways of working
You’re in for a treat… Let’s dive in!
1. Tell us about the change journey you are on.
Two years ago, Schibsted had four independent companies operating marketplaces in the Nordics - the biggest of these being finn.no in Norway. Our journey started at the beginning of 2023 when Schibsted decided to merge all these companies into one organization, encompassing over 1500 employees and 100+ Product Teams across all the Nordic countries.
The journey - that we are in the middle of right now - is to build a new Nordic organisation that can provide a common platform serving all our beloved brands. The brands will remain the same. The reasoning for making this consolidation is fairly straightforward—it is not that different buying a dress or a car in Norway versus Sweden, or the other Nordic countries.
This change is, however, not merely a merger of four organizations; it represents a comprehensive and rather bold redesign aimed at completely changing how we deliver value to our users.
We see that we need to change how we operate. Being one large organization that delivers a common platform to help customers with everything from selling their car, to buying a lamp or getting a new job is too big of a scope. We need to be much more specialized within the various areas we provide products and services to our users - and we need to structure our company accordingly.
Our aim is to create a new organization with smaller and more autonomous units.
These new units are aligned with the problems we solve for our users:
Recommerce vertical: Help users buy and sell things
Jobs vertical: Help users find a new job
Real Estate vertical: Help users to find their next home
Mobility vertical: Help users find their next choice of transportation
2. What has changed, and why?
Looking back, the main service we offered our users was letting them place an advertisement on one of our marketplaces. With this we could offer pretty much the same solutions regardless of what our users wanted to buy or sell.
However, this placed the burden of solving the actual problem largely on the users themselves. Simply posting an advertisement does not resolve the user's underlying problem to be solved.
We now want to take an active part in solving the entire problem the customer has when they visit one of our marketplaces. For instance, if a customer wants to sell their car, their task isn't finished merely by posting an ad... The complete problem is solved when the contract is signed, the payment has been securely made, insurance is arranged, the change of ownership is officially registered, and the car is listed under the new owner's name.
We can help with all this - but it is a much more complex problem to solve compared to just helping our users post an ad.
Making our services more comprehensive is something we need within all our main verticals mentioned at the beginning. Helping our users sell their car is very different from helping our users sell some Pokemon cards. Internally we refer to this as we need to go much deeper into every vertical to become true vertical experts.
EXAMPLE: We have already started this journey on our marketplaces - especially on finn.no with the product Smidig Bilhandel where we help people sell or buy their car including all necessary steps that need to be done to get the deal done. Another example is the product Fiks Ferdig where we have reduced friction for users when buying and selling used goods by including transportation, payment and insurance - making it easy and safe to buy and sell used goods.
Smidig Bilhandel - seller and buyer side
Fiks Ferdig - seller and buyer side
3. Nice. Walk me through the overall rationale. What do you have in mind?
For many years, we have been able to do internal optimization where we have created generic solutions that solve many of our users' problems.
However, given our strong desire to help our users even more, the solutions we have to build within each vertical are increasingly different from each other. Considering the technical solutions we need to build for the two different scenarios mentioned earlier, it is clear that the user needs vary significantly. As we continue to specialize within each vertical, our solutions are evolving to become even more unique within each vertical.
Generic solutions are no longer good enough and it is not enough with yet another strategy - we believe we need to completely change how we operate and are organized to be able to win in our markets and to continue to make significant progress towards our vision of making the sustainable alternative the obvious choice. We need to be vertical experts - but also big and powerful at the same time. Is that even possible?
4. Can you elaborate on the “completely change how we operate” part?
When we implemented the completely new organizational design a little over a year ago, we designed our organization in a way that will enable us to become much more specialized within our main business areas - true vertical experts. The result is that we no longer align our organization with our brands nor the countries we are represented in - it means that we now have divided the whole company according to our verticals:
Recommerce
Jobs
Real Estate
Mobility
We want each of these units to evolve more freely on their own terms to reach their full potential. That's why we have ended up with several product organizations within the new company and not one big product organization.
5. So you ended up with several, independent, product organizations? Tell me more.
Our aim is to build an organisation that (1) enables every vertical unit to develop great products independently of each other - but at the same time (2) utilise the strong position we have with our brands in all markets.
We worked simultaneously on Business Architecture, Technical Architecture and People Architecture:
Business Architecture: As outlined earlier - the objective is to optimise for our four vertical units enabling them to develop products independently from each other.
Technical Architecture: To enable this we need to create a technical target architecture that promotes these independent verticals. To enable the verticals to win in their markets without overloading them with investments in generic stuff - we also needed to have a Platform for generic services, such as Infrastructure.
People Architecture: And to be able to realise all this, we need an organisation that promotes the same as our Business architecture and Technical architecture. Align our people architecture according to the same high level values streams with a long term focus on removing dependencies.
The result of this work was that we did not end up with one product organisation - we actually created five separate product organisations. One for each vertical and one completely new platform organisation that we internally call Aurora Foundation.
Each product organisation is headed up by their own CTO and CPO.
6. Interesting. How does the platform organization work?
As mentioned - the main goal of the way we have organised ourselves is to help the vertical units win in their market. One way of doing this is by relieving them of things they should not need to spend time and effort on - so that they can use their energy on things that are specific to their vertical.
By having a platform organisation providing generic platform services to all teams, we can:
Reduce Cognitive Load: Reduce the need for deep knowledge on generic matters in the teams within the vertical units - to enable them to focus on their business. As an example - we can have a Notifications platform provided by a Notifications platform team that knows all the technical details of how to send notifications across different devices. This is provided as an easy-to-use service to all other teams that have a need to send out notifications.
Leverage synergies across verticals: Reduce the need to invest on generic matters in all verticals - to enable them to invest more in tailoring to their users needs. As an example - all units do not need to invest in top-notch infrastructure and developer experience - this can be provided.
The platform provides typical services that most modern product organisations need - such as Infrastructure and Data platform capabilities - but also platform services that are more close to our domain of building and running trusted marketplaces - such as generic advertisement management.
The platform organisation consists of several platform teams distributed into different areas depending on their technical or functional domain. The aim is that this organisation should be a customer-oriented organisation delivering platform products to the vertical organisations.
The design of this Platform organisation is heavily inspired by what is outlined in the book Team Topologies written by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. When we talk about a Platform in this context we use the definition by Evan Bottcher: “A digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product.” - Evan Bottcher, 2018
7. One year in - what are some of your lessons learned?
In general - the main learning is that this kind of big organisational change is somewhat painful for the organisation. When designing these changes we took a really bold move. We took a big leap and created an organisation optimised for our intended and future state - while all our systems, platforms, processes and even our business have not changed overnight.
This has created a misalignment between (1) how we create value, (2) how our technical platforms are structured and (3) how we organise and communicate. This again creates a lot of friction and a feeling that things do not work as it should.
The bold move we have taken is by some called an Inverse Conway Manoeuvre, and is seen as an effective way of actually getting real change. By having a clear view on how we want to deliver value in the future (setting the verticals free), then using this as inspiration for both our organisational design and our technical architecture are a risky move. Implementing the new organisational design a little over a year ago - while using several years on our technical transition will keep us in a difficult state for some time, but at the same time is probably the most effective way of getting to our intended state. It will get better as we progress with our transition.
Hey, Afonso here. I strongly recommend listening to this episode with Manuel Pais, co-author of Team Topologies, where Manuel and I briefly discussed Schibsted’s case! 👇
8. What do the Product Teams feel about this change so far?
[Hatice shares her experience of leading a product team in the Platform organisation]
For our product teams the pain has been real. It felt like—and still feels as though—we are changing the engine of a plane in mid-flight at super high speed. We need to figure out new ways of doing things while keeping pace with continuously delivering value 😅
The changes impact different parts of the organisation at different times, so the initial gap felt quite huge. The vertical units could mostly continue with their existing business goals, while everything around them needed to fall into place to enable them to meet their users' expectations much faster and more effectively through the platform organisation. We knew the end goal, but we did not know how we would get there. And the best learning is by doing, right?
So from a platform product team perspective, we changed from working on one specific marketplace to building a foundational platform for all of our brands and marketplaces.
As an example, my previous team belonged to FINN, but now we have a distributed team with team members from both FINN and Blocket, building and providing our platform capabilities across all our verticals and brands to help them achieve their goals. Our current goal is to strengthen our verticals to better serve our end users.
We needed to rethink product development by adding scalability and platform thinking. This was a significant shift in how we organise product teams and how we work with product development.
Many changes occurred simultaneously and leading and working in product teams through these significant organisational changes has been a real steep learning curve. Looking back, we can all agree that from time to time, a solid dose of frustration was felt, but we are very proud of how we managed to pull everything together on time while steering it in the right direction.
We know that we are not done yet, but we also know that we are capable of making magic happen. Everyone, from top management to the product teams, has learned a lot and we are still learning. We continuously use what we learn to optimise our ways of working. Having open and clear communication is more important than ever when we are implementing changes like these. Knowing that we are building for the future and experiencing the unique opportunity to be a part of this still outweighs most of the pain :)
9. Anything you’d like to share that could be inspiring to other companies?
There are some things we want to highlight that we have had a lot of focus on - and where we may have ended up with different solutions than other organisations tend to end up with:
Less centralization: In many organisations there is a tendency to instinctively go for centralization of various functions and roles. We've tried to do the opposite by thinking about what we're optimising for and staying somewhat true to our strategy of "setting the verticals free". Because of this, we have distributed a lot of functions and expertise that you normally see in central functions. Our hypothesis is that this will make us develop better products by being faster and more adaptable to an ever changing market.
Generic is not default: We tend to always look for ways to create generic solutions that can solve a broad range of problems. With this change we want to be very careful making sure that we find a right balance between specific solutions for each vertical and only have generic solutions to true generic problems across our units.
Business + Technical + People architecture: As organisations we need to constantly change to an ever changing world. To be able to make sure that we are really able to adjust our course - we believe it is crucial to consider all sides of the architecture of how we operate - both Business architecture, technical architecture and the people architecture.
Do we know this will work? No - but we strongly believe in it. To make sure that we can share all the learnings we gain from this transformation we are really glad that The Norwegian Research Council (Forskningsrådet) has recently granted funds to start a new research project focussing on this change. Together with our industry peer Gjensidige and our research partner SINTEF Digital - we will do a 4 year research program learning how this kind of organisation will work in practice. We will get help from scientists to ensure that our learnings in this journey will also benefit others. A big part of this research project is to share the knowledge with the rest of the world - by developing methods/techniques for others to use. Stay tuned! 🙂
Thanks for reading!
A special thanks to Jostein and Hatice for sharing their thoughts on their exciting journey 🙏