Three Learnings for Business from the Corona Pandemic
By: Thomas Schroeter
Tags: Corona, Product Management, Lessons Learned, Germany

Most of us in business life in Germany recall this unique situation in mid-March: The Federal Government announced a lockdown. When looking at the business numbers the following days, all core KPIs were going only in one direction — down. Fast. And it got worse every day. Not a good place to be.

With a couple of months in hindsight, I would like to share some key learnings that helped us manage through this difficult time. Good news first: The KPIs recovered nicely, and our business managed well through the crisis. So what did we learn?

1.Working from home works.

If I am not mistaken, we were one of the first companies in the Berlin tech universe to enforce a mandatory work from home policy with immediate effect. I am still amazed to acknowledge how well this has worked. No hiccups, no breakdowns, no major struggles. And our output (marketing, product, tech, sales) was higher than ever. The reason? I do think that everyone was determined to make this work and doubled down on their efforts. And the results speak for themselves. So stay calm and work from home and you would be surprised to see how effective and efficient it could be.

2. Plan beats no plan.

Yes, I borrowed this expression from Timothy Geithner. But there is a lot of truth to it. The pandemic left everyone including us in a situation of highest uncertainty, and it was completely unknown what would be the right strategy. So we quickly drafted a strategy and plan to navigate the uncertainty — with three priorities:

Keep our employees safe and effective.

Keep our customers in the business and consumers happy with our products.

And keep the company running and creating value for our stake- and shareholders.

In hindsight, the plan worked, which is of course always good news. But irrespective of that, I do think that everyone needed this crystal clear plan and guidance to know what to do — even if it would have been the wrong thing.

3. There is some light even in the darkest tunnel. (I translated this German saying into plain English…)

I won’t bore you with the trivia that every crisis is an opportunity. The Corona pandemic is an unprecedented challenge with tragic consequences for millions of people. But — and there is a but — in some ways it has moved us forward as a company. With our new strategy at hand I was amazed to see how quickly our employees reacted and changed plans. We re-drafted our OKRs, changed our cycle planning and roadmaps, and started to deliver features to support our customers and consumers in this situation. Online viewings, free listings, a central marketing Corona hub, all completed within weeks or days. The crisis has strengthened our #makeithappen spirit and brought us closer together. In fact, we could clearly see in a recent internal survey that there has been a significant increase in the engagement rate, the pride to work at Scout24, and the determination to make something good out of this crisis.

I am sure we will learn a lot more in the next weeks and months. This crisis is far from being over. But we are positive about the challenges ahead.