Who we worked with
Trade Me
What we did together
12-week programme
Key skills
Problem discovery, ideations, prototyping
Trade Me Jobs is the recruitment business unit of Trade Me, New Zealand’s largest Internet-auction website. Trade Me Jobs has approx. 50 staff who manage 100,000s of listings each year.
The Trade Me Jobs team had already successfully used lean and agile methodologies to create new features for the Trade Me Jobs website but wanted to learn methods that would allow the company to quickly validate new revenue streams with different business models.
“I knew Creative HQ had the infrastructure, training, and assets to teach our team this strategic approach. Creative HQ helped us get a far deeper level of customer insight than we ever had before.”
Martin White, Head of Business Agility, TRADE ME
How we did it
The Trade Me Job team required a partner that would provide a structured programme particularly suited to the development and validation of disruptive technologies and business concepts. The Trade Me Job team, led by Martin White, Head of Business Agility, was also interested in upskilling on the principles of Exponential Organisation (ExO). Following a decision to trial a new approach with our “ExO Builder Programme”, White and three other Trade Me Jobs team members moved into the Creative HQ working space to explore novel and disruptive business concepts over the course of a structured 12-week programme. The Trade Me team quickly identified a new, disruptive business opportunity and worked with our Innovation Specialists and mentors to validate and test the opportunity with real customers.
During the 12-week programmes:
- we helped implement techniques to create a more customer-centric Job Watchlist and Android App
- we helped gain a greater level of confidence when launching new products and features company-wide
- we introduced new topics of conversation around innovation that the company wasn’t discussing before.
The result
Since working with us, Trade Me has used aspects of Creative HQ’s structured approach and ExO principles on projects company-wide. The Trade Me Job team has not only used their learnings to gain a greater level of confidence through customer validation when launching new products but the team have also integrated new features on the Trade Me Jobs website based on the business opportunity they identified during the programme with Creative HQ.
Outside the Job’s division, Trade Me has used the principles of Exponential Organisations to learn more about what customers wanted while developing the new Trade Me Jobs Android App. “The functionality that we included in the Android App was a result of the Exponential Organisation methodology, and it helped us get closer to what our customers wanted,” says Martin White, Head of Business Agility.
