Nobody wanted to believe that people would stop taking taxis
This spring, we quickly realized that it was possible to go home
But emotions did not come home, and we are all used to going out, meeting each other in the evenings, coming up with new projects, businesses, whatever.For me, these were always the most important things in the day.an hour or two, when the last meetings in the office ended, and the moment until you found yourself at home, because it was at this moment that all the most important things happened, meeting new business partners, coming up with new services, discussing with someone after work over a glass of wine. And then bam, everything disappeared.
We knew that taxi service could drop by 50%, but we didn't want to believe it.What happened in Israel means before usit may not come. At first it wasn’t scary, but then it became worse: people stopped going to the airport, trips disappeared to almost nothing in a few days. Then we ourselves released the news that Yandex was going remote. All companies are also going remote, people stop commuting to work, going anywhere in the evenings, traffic jams have disappeared, the city is becoming empty.
Every day you open the taxi service schedule and get depressed... I even blocked myself at some pointaccess to statistics, because if I started the morning with this schedule, then I could not work for three hours. These are emotions that are difficult for someone to understand and experience, you look at what you have been doing for the last few years, and you see that it is crumbling before your eyes.
Four rules that were invented for themselves in the Yandex.Taxi service during the pandemic:
1. We should do whatever it takes to provide more rides. On the other side there are millions of taxi drivers who make money. A few extra trips equals better earnings.
2.We help our partners because, in addition to taxi drivers, there are also taxi companies and restaurants. When one small taxi company with 100 cars comes and says to the leasing company: “Can you defer my payments?” - this is strong. But not so much when Yandex comes and says: dear bank, our partners need help, let’s defer leasing contracts. And at this moment it becomes easier.
3.The people who were responsible for each of the businesses received an absolute vote. They could not negotiate anything with anyone, they decided everything on their own. In essence, democracy was gone and fell apart a bit for 3-4 months.
4.All production functions: marketers, developers, analysts and people responsible for the first two points can come and pick up any resource. They agree among themselves who can take what part. This is where the big bosses got involved.
At that moment, new trips began to appear: we took doctors to their points.Interestingly, when doctors travel by taxi, you canto visit many more patients per day, because we have algorithms for this and there is no need to drive an ambulance, of which there are already few. There are fewer of them than needed when such a collapse occurs. There are enough doctors, but not enough cars, we carried tests, carried parcels, boxes, whatever we carried, we ourselves invested money in it, collected money from various charitable organizations. These trips had to be quickly looked for everywhere and switched to them.
Rule number 1: Every trip is important, even just one.Then we remembered that we are at the end of the pastyears have launched several business ventures that can be summed up in one word "logistics". Not only people can be transported by car, this is how delivery appeared on various kinds of trucks, gazelles and smaller cars. It seemed to us that the service was growing cool, last year we made more than several thousand deliveries a day. In October, there was an incredible growth - 50 times.
We served a car, and she could take anything in any city in Russia.And these are more than 700 cities.This was quickly noticed by all retailers and businesses who did not wait for something to happen and changed on the fly. They quickly changed their process and restructured. Likewise, cities quickly adapted.
How to save restaurants and supply everyone with buckwheat
Restaurants are closed, which means the only revenue they can make is delivery.Let's move on to the second rule:help our partners. For a whole year we have been preparing a large project called Super up. In April, we rolled out a version, although we weren't ready yet. There were so many bugs, and I was so ashamed that we rolled out this, but decided to do it, because it gave more orders to restaurants. You can give them plus 2-3 orders per day, and this was very important for them.
We launched Yandex.Lavka in May 2019, when the very first outlet appeared in Khamovniki, and now there are already 250 stores."Yandex.Lavka turned out to be an excellent service, it’s growing, the graphs are crazy, but then 2020 happened, and you yourself see huge growth. It’s very difficult to live with this when you sit down in the evening and think, tomorrow you will grow by 30%, or 60%, or 20%, or 10%, and how to ensure that there is something on the shelves. For example, I know that no one ever eats physalis, when there was nothing on the shelves, there was physalis anyway, everything in the fruit was empty, you opened it, you bought everything, and the physalis was there. These are unnecessary berries. We are an IT business, we need to solve the problem of always having buckwheat or toilet paper on the shelves, about which there was hysteria in March, April and May. This is far from trivial. This is quite easy when you are already a large retailer, like Magnit, X5, when you have already built all the supply chains. But even for them it sank for several days, you can solve it, but when you are just figuring it out, it is, of course, complete hell.
Every service runs to solve all problems. Because so much happens every day that you don’t have time to keep track of it. Your reaction speed to everything is crazy, and we remembered that in the neighboring company we learned how to carry everything.
And we launched it in the shop, then several days or weeks passed, and we remembered that this can be done not only in the shop, and 130 cities were launched in Yandex.Eda.
There was no need to sign anything with restaurants or look for couriers, we simply created a landing page with super access and zero commission.You just fill in the pictures, press "Ok" and withsites you get an order. So they started to scale very quickly. I offered a night shop, they turned me down, there were a lot of tasks, but the next day we launched it to work, a very quick solution, we discuss it very quickly and move on, but in fact the project is of incredible complexity. At first, the shop was carried on such mopeds, which are terribly inconvenient, so everyone switched to bicycles. And here it is already night, everyone is asleep, why make noise with mopeds, taxis, but the most difficult project of mankind is to deliver watermelons. Can you imagine what it would be like to deliver 800 watermelons in an hour? To ship watermelons in August, you need to start doing the project in March. Your service grows twice every week, there are no couriers, there is no buckwheat, and you already need to make delivery for August, otherwise they will not be available at all, but we all remember that at that moment the borders were closed, half as many arrived in Russia for the first half of the year. Therefore, there were separate problems with this, whatever they came up with, the watermelons are big, and the warehouses are small, they need to be stored somewhere, they have already figured out that we will store them in "Drive", in cars. Because "Drive" was not working at that moment, and you remember, in the next service, in the shop, everyone is running, they are tall, everything is fine, but in "Drive" the guys are depressed, most of the trips are simply not allowed.
How Yandex didn't go crazy because of the pandemic
one.We held meetings every evening with all direct reports, with the chiefs of services. And I asked exactly one question: "What else is needed?" No long-term construction, projects that are six months or a year, just bye, they are prohibited. We have a very fast movement, quick changes, where you can change, where you can get an extra pack of buckwheat, ask such a simple question every evening, every day, coming up with something new. We will move on, despite the fact that the largest service showed -60%. At the same time, we did not forget about two big ideas: that Yandex.Lavka will have its own trade mark and that Super up will appear, and that Yandex.Taxi will be branded in Yandex.Go
2. We learned to socialize in a new way.It's very difficult to have a party when you are at home, but we still tried to come up with something and hold these meetings every day, the guys played CS in the evenings. I wrote a post, first every two days, then once a week, about what was happening in different parts of the company, I spent two hours a day on it, but due to this, each of the employees understood what was happening, because when you are in office, then you can look right, left and find out what you have there. We were generally lucky, because most of the team has been working for the past many, many years, the core of the team is very close-knit, which we have never experienced together, so it was super easy for us, the most important thing is to laugh at each other.
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