“A lot of people who meet me say, ‘We’re not innovative anymore. We’re not doing cool, new things,’” revealed Skyscanner’s chief technology officer, Andrew Phillips, during his DIGIT Expo keynote last Thursday.

Despite a perception that Skyscanner—the travel site and tech unicorn based out of Scotland—isn’t as inventive as it once was, Phillips doesn’t agree with this assessment. As he said himself, “I think a lot of people think innovation has to be big ticket items that are very easy to see. But actually, our teams are innovating all of the time.”

The CTO is right, of course: innovation doesn’t always manifest in ways that are easily and outwardly recognisable. There’s also the fact that innovation itself isn’t a linear, one-way thing. Instead, it’s more akin to a pendulum, swinging back and forth as necessary.

Phillips delved into the task—and challenge—of innovation in his thirty-minute keynote, explaining how Skyscanner has approached it through numerous internal projects and initiatives (not all of which succeeded).

Here’s a rundown of some of the talk’s key items, for those who didn’t have the opportunity to attend.

Speaking the Same Language(s)

One of the first examples provided by Phillips on how Skyscanner has innovated, which is also reflective of the swinging pendulum, concerns programming languages—and a lot of them.

In the late naughties, when Phillips first started at the company as a software engineer, a small handful of languages were being used. However, and in a bid to harness innovation, the team routinely adopted new languages. “If there was a new thing, a new way of doing something, we jumped on them. So we had another one and another one and another one,” divulged Phillips.

While the accumulation of divergent programming languages (“hundreds,” Phillips said) did create issues—it was difficult for people to move teams due to separate languages being used, for instance—there was an undeniable silver lining. It provided Skyscanner with the opportunity to recognise that, in some cases, you have to go backwards instead of forwards to be innovative.

“The lesson we’ve learned from that is to not necessarily jump on the next bit of technology, the next thing that’s come up. There may be value, there may be benefits, and we need to evaluate that. But we went from one to hundreds. And we’ve been pulling back and trying to scale back.”

This example was one of a few concerning technological innovation—but Phillips also touched on innovation in other significant areas, not least product.

Honouring the Product Life Cycle

Considering that product is the beating heart of Skyscanner, it wasn’t surprising to hear that the company has routinely tinkered in this crucial area.

One specific example concerned “facilitated booking,” an offering launched in 2016. Its aim was to facilitate flight bookings on Skyscanner’s side, rather than redirecting people to the airline’s website to complete the transaction. It was also built to help capture a mobile market through a cleaner, more engaging user interface. “The mobile booking experience was shocking,” Phillips noted. “Most people at the time were not booking on mobile.”

Facilitated booking was an initial hit. As Phillips explained, “We had a 50% increase in conversion on mobile on our first release—a hugely valuable product, and hugely innovative at the time.” This then led Skyscanner to build out the offering further, which included the creation of an Edinburgh-based contact centre to handle inbound calls. Phillips recounted that the product and its infrastructure “grew, and grew, and grew.”

However, later down the line, and after “looking at it more holistically,” the pendulum began to swing backwards, not least due to other companies in the industry following in Skyscanner’s footsteps. Referring to one well-known firm in particular, Phillips said they “basically copied our look and feel—the product looked really similar. Their conversion rate had come up on par with ours.” This subsequently meant that the product had become a cost centre without its original impact.

Although there was pride in creating the product in the first place, there was power in winding it down, acknowledging that true innovation often necessitates a change of tact. As Phillips mentioned, “We felt really proud that we had the guts to say, ‘Actually, this is not the right thing for us anymore. We’re going to stop doing this, shut down the product.’”

What’s more, by making that decision, it enabled the team who’d been running the booking system to pivot to more valuable—and beneficial—work.

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Making Small, Big Changes

Reorienting where and how innovation is being made, whether that’s forward, backward, or somewhere in between, can pay dividends. And in Skyscanner’s case, it has.

Specifically, the team that worked as part of the booking system was made up of around 50 to 60 people. Further, tens of thousands of pounds—“if not hundreds of thousands,” Phillips elaborated—was spent on infrastructure and running it.

When the call to drop facilitated booking was made, it enabled peoples’ efforts to be redistributed, resulting in significant financial gains for Skyscanner. However, these wins didn’t stem from the substantial projects that are often equated with innovation. As Phillips recounted, “They pivoted and started making small incremental improvements to our products; they made lots of proofs of concept, lots of experiments. Most of them didn’t work, but some of them added 1% or 2% to our business—that’s multiple millions of pounds a year in extra revenue. They’re not the big, amazing projects that I think often people kind of hang onto, but they’re the things that give you the small gains that all add up.”

For Phillips, this speaks to how innovation is happening all the time at Skyscanner, though it may not be as externally perceptible. As he said, “Whenever someone says to me now, ‘Oh, are you innovating?’ I’m like, ‘You go and speak to anyone in various different teams, and they’ll be innovating in their area, innovating in their space.’”

Iterating on Innovation

Innovation is an inherently tricky thing. How far should a business wanting to scale swing in one direction? When is the right time to go further, or, on the other hand, pull back? When it comes to Skyscanner’s historic swinging of the pendulum, the oscillations have been borne out of necessity.

“I think Skyscanner has done this pendulum swing a lot,” said Phillips. “We had to grow, we had to do certain things, and I don’t—and I don’t think anyone—regrets the things we’ve done. But we had to learn when something had come to the end of its lifespan or run its natural course and pull back.”

Even for Skyscanner—a company that’s a point of pride for the Scottish technology sector, considering its successes—striking a balancing act proves difficult to this day, 20 years after its founding: “We haven’t found that perfect middle point by a long way,” admitted Phillips.

While that ongoing journey continues, Phillips’ talk on Skyscanner and innovation raised myriad valuable points, including the intrinsic non-linearity of innovation and the fact that it can—and does—take many different forms. It’s this latter fact that’s perhaps the keynote’s most inspiring takeaway: Innovation is happening everywhere, all of the time. We just don’t always get to witness it first-hand.