Top 10 Defining Moments at giffgaff

For this top 10 post, I’m listing my 10 favourite defining moments at giffgaff over the past 10 years. Here’s a bit of giffgaff history for you:

1. The Origins. Many great decisions were made before I joined giffgaff in August 2009. My top picks are Gav Thompson’s mission and values, keeping us in a separate office to other Telefonica businesses to help develop our own culture and the attempt to bring diversity and hire non Telco leaders like Kylie, Vincent or myself.
2. Technology leadership. I was one of the 14 giffgaff originals and was invited to create my job title when I joined. I decided to go for “Brand Champion”. It didn’t take long to realise though that if giffgaff was going to survive its first year that was going to be thanks to Technology. Most of our Engineers at the time were based in Barcelona’s Telefonica Digital hub and I was often asked to help facilitate comms between both. Although my experience was limited, by the end of 2009 I found myself responsible for eCommerce, UX, Content, Conversion Optimisation, Web Analytics, SEO and Digital Media, so in only a few months my job description changed completely and my job title changed to eCommerce Manager. How I remember the first year at giffgaff is working days and nights in our office in Beaconsfield’s Old Rectory chatting with the Engineering teams in Barcelona, creating experiences in PowerPoint slides and HTML Content in Excel. I was spending my weekends and holidays up-skilling myself on all the above disciplines. 10 years later we are over 200 employees, the majority of them Engineers and we are still recruiting for 20 more! giffgaff has always been a Technology lead business.
3. Mutuality platforms. giffgaff had a community before a mobile network. Our Member Get Member journeys were released a few days after launch. We’ve optimised both platforms over the years but they are not wildly different to when we launched them 10 years ago.
4. goodybags. giffgaff launched the 25th of November 2009 with basic tariffs: 8p calls, 4p texts, free giffgaff to giffgaff calls and texts and, wait for it, “Free Internet Browsing”. The truth is that we hadn’t figured out how to charge for Data at the time but it didn’t matter as nobody was using data on their phones 10 years ago! Remember the days? Gav believed simple tariffs would beat a range of bundles. Not true. Our members demanded bundles from day one, bundles which our creative agency Albion named goodybags. Our first 4 goodybags launched in April 2010. Nigel, our CTO, appointed me as Project Manager. We were still 14 at the time so he didn’t have much to choose from. Our sales doubled after launching goodybags.
5. The iPhone4 crisis. In June 2010 Apple launched its iconic iPhone4 including a new SIM size, the MicroSIM. We were not ready for it and our SIM distributor told us we would have to wait at least 6 months to get hold of a batch of giffgaff MicroSIMs. They had more important clients to deal with. As a SIM business, this meant giffgaff’s chances to survive our first year had only got slimmer. Fortunately, the community stepped in to save the day. Members started cutting SIM cards down with scissors to fit the iPhone4 SIM tray, they created a templates to help others cut down their SIMs and developed a site called Microgaff where members could order SIMs cut down to MicroSIM by other members of the community. I have no doubt we wouldn’t have survived our first year without the power of our community.
6. The Big Bang Theory sponsorship. We survived 2010 by the skin of our teeth. We missed our targets by 85% but we were starting to show signs of growth and our community thought we were great. We have a lot to thank our community and stakeholders at Telefonica for their confidence. Our presence in Digital channels helped us expand further and by the end of 2011 we had a base over 250k members and a prompted awareness of 20%. It was clear to me that we had to go Above The Line if we wanted to scale quicker but we were facing resistance. I remember having to fight the misconception that Digital businesses should only have a presence in Digital channels. It may seem obvious now but it wasn’t as much back then. We were exploring TV sponsorship opportunities with our Media Agency ARM when Ieva, my wife, told me about The Big Bang Theory, an American show that had just replaced Friends in Channel 4. A show nobody wanted to sponsor and was being offered at a low price. We started sponsoring The Big Bang Theory in April 2012 and ended that year with a base near 800k members and 40% prompted awareness.
7. giffgaff sales Phones. 2012 raised the bar for us. Survival was no longer in question and we started to ask ourselves how big could we get? Up until 2013 giffgaff had been a SIM business but we knew the majority of UK sales included a phone, we also knew that Phones was one of the main reasons members were leaving giffgaff. At the start of 2013 I was appointed to lead the Phones project. The way we launched phones in November 2013 was very different to everyone else. In line with our values, all handsets we sold were unlocked. We partnered with RateSetter, a Peer to Peer lender, to offer phones on loans but we decoupled loan monthly payments from goodybags. you could buy a phone from giffgaff and not be on the giffgaff network. You could cancel or change your goodybags anytime. You could pay for your phone upfront, over 6 or 24 months. You could change your loan payments at RateSetter anytime too. Flexibility everywhere. We refined the experience with 3 rounds of research and announced the phone launch at our first Open Day.
8. The Joyous Republic of giffgaff. At the start of 2016 the business was in a great shape. We were about to reach an active base of 2 million members and wanted to make a big deal of it. Marc and Tom from Bipolar, came up with an idea that would change giffgaff’s culture forever. 2 Million is the population of Latvia so why don’t we create our own fictitious country with its flag, passport, National Day and Ministries? Our Ministers of Development, Health & Wellbeing, Sports, Good Deeds and Parties and Good times have been leading most of our cultural initiatives since.
9. Level Pro Experiences. Our NPS was in the low 50s in 2013 and through continuous optimisation we managed to get to 61 by the end of 2017. We had won uSwitch Network of the Year both in 2016 & 2017 and had been Which? recommended provider since 2013. By all possible measures, we were #1 on experience for Telcos, but at this point we stopped comparing ourselves with other Telcos. I remember seeing this presentation and thinking, Netflix has a NPS of 68, Amazon of 69 and Apple of 72. That should be our reference for Level Pro experiences and Goal for our 2018. When we presented this Big Hairy Audacious Goal at a company team meeting in November 2017 dressed up as Steve Jobs many told me I should be realistic. We do not have the budget or resources to be at the level of The "FAANGs”. We ended 2018 with an NPS of 68 and realised the power of Ambitious Goals.
10. Lean and OKRs. 2019 has been a year of transformation. We had spent all Q4 2018 delivering the capability for us to move from 2 week cycles to daily deployment. But as Uncle Ben says “With Great Power comes Great Responsibility” so we invited Jeff Gohelf in January 2019 to help us realise the potential for what we had just created. Jeff got us running Build-Measure-Learn cycles in half a day and ended a week with a Science Fair where teams would present their learnings. Science Fairs have been part of our culture since but the transformation was unsettling for a few product teams impacting our mid year Gallup’s Q12 Engagement score. After Analysing the results with Gallup, we realised that our main challenge was that the team “Did not know what was expected of them” so we dived into Goal literature and embraced a Quarterly OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework. To land the message, my team delivered a presentation on the Power of Goals for Halloween dressed up as mystical characters. I was Gandalf and used case studies from Harvard “Graduates with clearly defined goals end up earning x10 more than those with no specific Goals” or Deloitte’s 2 year study “No single factor has more impact on Engagement than clearly defined goals that are written down and shared freely. Goals create alignment, clarity and job satisfaction”. Thanks to a focus on Engagement in general and goals in particular, our Q12 engagement score for December has been the highest in our history.