Turning the Expedia SEO Team from Vendor-Reliant to Inhouse Powerhouse

Quantifying Vendor Support

To quantify vendor support we introduced the “effort metric” to the Expedia SEO team, a standard metric used at In Marketing We Trust. “Effort” is used to scope every single project at In Marketing We Trust. Effort became a top-of-mind metric on every request or initiative for the Expedia team. This ensured the team started thinking like an inhouse team where efficiency was more important than before.

Skills Mapping

To help Expedia build a more robust inhouse team, we conducted an exercise that included the most common requests performed by vendors and mapped those against the skills required to perform them. This way, we were able to map “effort” and skills and give Expedia a much greater understanding of their recruitment needs.

Project Management

Once the right team was in place, the team had to do a massive migration process to consolidate their entire workload in one project management tool, Jira. This provided the granularity and structure the SEO team needed to work in collaboration.

Now every ticket created in Jira includes the effort against it. This enables all managers to manage workload in a more efficient way and understand exactly what is being asked from their team. This also allowed managers to join different work streams and shared initiatives. By understanding the effort behind the initiatives, managers could prioritise work that was dependent on other teams’ efforts.

Jira ticket structure was standardised and for large projects ticket creation was centralised so that all tickets were created with the same attributes. Dashboards were also created within Jira to provide progress overviews.

Agile Framework

To assist workload management and better prioritise work, we introduced the agile framework. The entire SEO team was trained in agile methodology. We began working in 
2-week sprints, having backlog refinement and sprint planning meetings. This was a massive achievement for the team.

Team members who normally only communicated via Slack or Jira started to talk to each other, enabling them to empathise with different teams, providing better communication. Many of Expedia’s current processes were improved off the back of these meetings. Prioritisation is now based on cross-team support and not specific to one team.

Breaking Down Silos

Whenever you have a team of subject matter experts working remotely and spread across the world, especially when they have gone through many restructures, it is very easy to operate in silos. However, once the team has been consolidated and a shared strategy has been created, it is crucial to break down the silos so that the full benefits of having a solid team can be seen.

By facilitating cross-team meetings we were able to break down the silos and encourage conversations that didn’t occur on a regular basis. The team started to have more visibility of other team members’ problems and limitations and identify if they could support them, leveraging each person’s skills or knowledge. These meetings quickly became sessions where we would find solutions to problems that hadn’t been solved for a long time or where processes could be improved. Efficiencies and collaboration started materialising while communication became even more important. The team had underestimated the value of good communication and was now benefiting from it.