Richard Hewitt podcast transcript

Interview with Richard HewittSpeaker Key:
RT: Ronan Tighe
RH: Richard Hewitt

RT: Hi, I’m Ronan Tighe from Foviance, and welcome to our podcast series in Innovations in eGaming. This podcast was recorded on Thursday 9th April 2009. Today I’m joined by my guest Richard Hewitt, Mobile Product Manager at Betfair. Richard, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today.

RH: No trouble at all.

RT: First of all, can you tell us a little bit about your background and Betfair?

RH: OK, well my background is, I’m from a software engineering base, initially working for the European Space Agency, and then gradually moved over to do more business applications work, and then did the natural progression of business application developer through to a business analyst, bit of project management, management consultancy, and then eventually got taken on at Betfair, actually a bit of a step back to being a business analyst again, and then eventually I moved into the sports product team, and took on the role of mobile product manager.

In terms of Betfair, it was set up about seven years ago by a couple of City traders, Ed Wray and Andrew Black, they were fundamentally disappointed with the service they were getting from traditional bricks’n'mortar bookies, so they took their experience from the City and set up a betting exchange, which was a completely novel way of sports betting, so rather than the traditional risk book where someone like Ladbrokes or William Hills or bwin will take a risk against a particular position, so Real Madrid against Barcelona, those odds are set by the bookie and they will take a risk and a margin against those figures. What we do is we allow people to set their own prices, and bet against each other directly, and take a small margin from the winnings.

RT: The initial concept was extremely innovative – do you think that makes it easier or harder in your job now to be innovative?

RH: Innovation is core and fundamental with everything that we do here; the pioneering spirit’s still very strong in Betfair. I don’t think we could continue to operate unless we’re continually innovating. In terms of my role, it’s absolutely about innovation, it’s about bringing new concepts and new ways of getting products and services out to customers in novel ways.

RT: The more Betfair grows, especially internationally – does that make it harder to launch new products, to change the way you do things?

RH: I think in some ways it makes it easier, because we’re actually approaching different problems. What we’re quite keen not to do is take a model that works well in the UK, and try and shoehorn that into new markets.

RT: When you do launch a new product, how do you involve users in that process?

RH: It’s fundamental, absolute core to what we do. We’ve got two dedicated teams that look directly at what customers more generally want, so our customer intelligence team, which is essentially a large research department that will go out and look through the usual kind of Juniper Reports through to running home visits and running surveys, we have a feedback forum, we also have our standard user forum that’s an absolute goldmine for us in terms of ideas and feedback on new products and services, and once we’ve identified a customer need from our customer intelligence team, we have our user experience team who’ll bring people in, bring existing customers or prospects into our purpose-built usability lab where they’ll run interviews and user testing on wireframes all the way through to relatively well-developed products, all through the process, to make sure that we’re doing something that not only we believe is really good, but is actually servicing a customer need.

RT: And how important is that approach, and what are the benefits of that approach?

RH: The importance is that we’re serving something that the customers actually want, and I think there’s a very, it would be very easy within our industry to come up with great ideas that we think as punters and as professionals would really fly with the customers, that are absolute dogs, and that will just fall flat on their face, so making sure that we engage with our customers very early in the process means that we go to market with something that we have a high degree of confidence is going to be servicing either a need or a very easy sell for our customers.

RT: From doing that much user research, you must have a lot of ideas and a lot of features that you could put into development and launch – how do you decide which ones to implement and which ones to throw in the bin?

RH: That’s a very good question. As you say, we have a massive massive list of ideas in Betfair, if we could implement every single thing that we had in our backlog, we would have the greatest portfolio probably of any online company in the world. In terms of deciding what we go with, it’s all around strategy, so we’d look towards a headline strategy of our company, which areas we’re particularly looking to grown into, so for example, if we decided that football was our number one sport, we would look around products that specifically worked well for natural football betters, or fits into the user experience that a football better would like to have. Now, that may be not necessarily associated with football, it could be that we build a product around a community or around mobile phones that we know these potential customers of ours are likely to be using within their normal betting day or within their normal sporting experience, their match day, for example.

RT: And are there any key areas of focus at the moment that you’re looking to develop more into?

RH: I’d say we’re looking to a certain extent more internationally, we are still very much regarded as a UK-based company. We’re looking to extend our portfolio of product on the site itself to start tailoring a little bit more towards the broader audience, I think we know currently that we service very well to our high-end customers, but maybe don’t appeal to the larger base of fans of other sports. In terms of particular areas, mobile’s very big for us, we’re very big on extending the experience of sports betting through to people, not just selling the sports product, but selling a sports betting product rather, but selling a sports betting experience to people, so that would include, we would hope, things like community-based products, social media – this kind of new craze for things like Twitter and microblogging and this kind of thing. So we’re looking to keep ourselves at the head of that curve of technology, which is where we’ve come from as a company.

RT: You, of course, are the Product Manager of Mobile – how important is it to Betfair to engage their users, both online and on mobile?

RH: I think that’s absolutely key to where we are as a business, and to where technology is going, and we have a lot of very savvy guys here from the technology side of our business. You can see that mobile is not only a growing space, but it’s very likely to be a significant channel for us, certainly in the next three to five years. Servicing our mobile customers with more than we do currently is definitely a target of mine, naturally as a product manager I want to get more good product out there, and engage with as many customers using the various channels of mobile as we possibly can. In terms of this taking over or replacing the web, I don’t think that will happen, I think we will always want to serve both our fixed web customers and our mobile customers, but we’re consciously aware of the fact that these are two different experiences we need to tailor to, so the punter who’s out and about is going to want a slightly different experience from the punter who’s online. Although we’ll maintain the same brands and there’s no real feeling that we’re going to move away from our exchange model quite yet, we’re definitely going to maintain an online and a mobile presence moving forward.

RT: Are the people who use online and mobile different, or are they online customers who then want to use your mobile product when on the racetrack or at the football ground?

RH: Up until now, our mobile product has largely been a cross sell, and it’s interesting, it ranges right across our customer base of people who use mobile, which fits in with, I think, what we know about mobile, which is they’re a group of early adopters at the moment who are using their mobile in a particular way that transcends other kinds of segments, so they may be high rollers who are largely casino players, but they will also like a bit of a flutter on their mobile phone, through to the guys who are maybe football supporters on a weekend, and they want to get their £5 bet on when they’re down the pub, and there’s cover of the full gamut in between the guys who are trading in and out of positions, down to the guys who just want to put £5 on the darts or the football of a weekend.

RT: Do you currently try to acquire users directly from mobile?

RH: We’re not currently doing that, it’s something we’re going to be looking at doing relatively soon we hope, our iPhone product does allow people to register, and that’s proven to be very popular, we’ve been very surprised by how many people are actually registering via the iPhone, so we now have a core of customers who may have never actually seen our core website, and maybe never associated us with a fixed web presence, which is really exciting for us.

RT: How are you currently measuring the user experience on your mobile sites?

RH: We use a standard metrics, I guess – we’ll look at hits, we’ll look at percentage growth across when compared to the main site, we do qualitative research, so we do bring in our customers from the mobile customer base and run interviews with them with our usability team who will sit there with their handset, and take them through their betting day almost, and say, “Right – what were the pain points here? What are areas that we can look at improving for you”, and that works very well, our Java standard’s been transformed since we started doing that.

RT: Yes, you’ve got a number of different mobile products, it might be worth talking us through them?

RH: Right, OK, I guess it’s a function, as anybody in mobile will know, of the fragmentation of the mobile space, so initially our primary product was a J2ME, a Java download that largely mirrored what we had in the main exchange – that’s our core product at the moment, it’s fantastically popular, it turns over staggering figures and it’s something that I think we’re very likely to continue offering for the forseeable future; I don’t see us ever moving away from having a Java download.

In addition to that, we have a browser-based product called Lite, Betfair Lite, which is a content-light browser-based solution that works, it’s been optimised for mobile phones – that works very very well, people tend to use it more when they’re out and about, rather than at home, whereas we often find people will sit and use the Java applet at home, we tend to find people use the browser a little bit more when they’re out and about.

Our third product, and our recent star addition, is our iPhone product, which is a browser-based application, and that’s showing huge growth, it’s literally doubling in size every week, which we believe is largely down to the viral effects obviously of the iPhone and a simple centre of friends in the application itself. If you look at the figures, you can see it’s just growing almost exponentially, it’s huge.

RT: When it came to developing the iPhone product, what was the motivation behind that? Did you know that a lot of new users were coming to your site with an iPhone? – or was it something that you knew the iPhone would grow, so you wanted to get ahead of the game?

RH: It was a combination of the two, we were picking up through the logs that people were browsing to Betfair on the iPhone, again through the forum we had a number of threads started with people asking or demanding that we put something up for the iPhone, and Betfair Lite did work on the iPhone, but it wasn’t an iPhone experience, and I think that’s one of the fundamental things about the iPhone is that it offers just the highest quality of customer experience, and offers an interface for you to develop things in such a way that are massively compelling, and above all else I’d say it was the opportunity to provide a very very compelling customer experience on a particular handset, and the bubble around the iPhone was just great, and it’s continuing to grow. I think eventually it’s likely to level out, but we’re doing very well on the back of it.

RT: What other innovations do you see in your area that’s going to change the experience for users?

RH: The innovation? – I’d say the big innovation in the past year is LBS (location-based services), this has been the Holy Grail for mobile for a long time, it’s always been well known that mobile is something by its nature and implicit in the name, that it’s something that’s moving around with you, it’s something that’s location-based, and actually providing services now via a mobile phone that are location dependent, and location aware, is massive. If you look at the most popular downloads for Android, the most popular downloads for Apple, they are largely around location-based.

RT: And how do you think a site like Betfair, or other gaming sites, can take advantage of that?

RH: I think again this comes round to what we were saying earlier about the gambling experience, what gaming companies need to do is start understanding that what we’re offering is a range of services to people, we’re not often necessarily just offering the opportunity to bet, what we need to offer is a range of opinion, of community, of a feeling of belonging, and this kind of thing, and by making applications or building applications around the location of an individual, it allows you to really tailor what they’re experiencing to their absolute environment, so if we can directly know when someone is sitting at Stamford Bridge, for example, we can send them content that’s absolutely relevant to that, so we can send them team news, we can send them information about the nearest pub, about how many opposition fans are there, this kind of thing, and if while they’re there they feel like placing a bet, then that’s good, but for me, and particularly around mobile, it’s more around actually leveraging on the experience, and leveraging on where they are, and how that environment influences the way that they’re feeling about things.

RT: Do you think gaming sites at the moment are currently competing on the basis of innovation and the experience they’re offering, or is it still simply a case of the better odds will always win out?

RH: It’s interesting, my understanding of this is that people aren’t necessarily quite as price sensitive as sometimes we traditionally think, there’s a degree of loyalty, there’s a degree of tradition, particularly between the online and the offline punters, so there is a tradition of guys on a weekend going to the races and they go and see their favourite on course bookie, or they are football punters, and they go to a particular shop on the way to the match. In terms of other companies that are doing similar things? – it’s difficult to say, I think there are other companies out there that offer quite good experiences on gambling, particularly around poker, but in terms of sports betting, obviously I still think we’re the best.

RT: Richard, thanks for giving up the time to participate in this interview, it’s really appreciated, and I’m sure your advice and insight will be well received by our listeners.

Thanks again to you all for listening, please come back to Foviance.com shortly to download the next podcast in our Innovations series.

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