Unlike some of its contemporaries founded during the first internet boom, Lastminute.com, it appears, has worked out how to adapt to the ever-changing, and competitive, digital business landscape.

VP product and technology John Crosby attributes this to being skilled at understanding its customers, as well as taking new products to market as quickly as possible. “The ability to create sustainable competitive advantage is hard,” Crosby told an audience at the Retail Business Technology Expo yesterday. “Everything can be copied.”

He explained how Lastminute.com has whole-heartedly adopted the lean startup model, advocated perhaps most notably by startup man Eric Ries, where teams are autonomous and and outcome, rather than task, focused. “We focus on experimentation as opposed to elaborate planning, feedback as opposed to intuition and interative as opposed  to upfront design,” he says.

Competitive edge

The market is certainly a competitive one, with Lastminute.com not only challenging giant global platforms like Booking.com, which Crosby says has a $1.5bn Google Ad Words budget, to niche providers like Trivago, now majority-owned by Expedia, and even the hotels and airlines themselves.

As an exec whose role straddles both the underlying tech and the products themselves, Crosby has organised the teams at Lastminute.com around products rather than projects. Whether that’s something like flights or hotels, each team has everyone from product, marketing and trading people, which means they are all capable of end-to-end delivery. No more booking the designers in here.

Teams are tasked with bringing at least three customers into the office every week. “Our customers know better than us what they’re after,” Crosby says. “But theyre also encouraged to get out of the building. We got some customer feedback recently that made us make the buttons on our app bigger – all for the cost of a £3 coffee.”

From wearing lab coats to just asking

In the past, and like a lot of firms that are struggling with legacy infrastructure, Crosby says has has been part of teams that would spend six months building a product and then rush to get user feedback with just three weeks to go. That would even involve one-way mirrors and white lab coats. “If they didn’t like it, wed find every reason to say why they were the wrong person for the product. Its too late to test once youve built it.”

Lastminute.com has even taken the entire team out and put them in the native customer environment – a hotel – to speak directly with holiday-goers. Over the course of four days, the team whittled 300 ideas down to seven new products and their developers and designers were even able to iterate the product in real-time. “This is the kind of thing that in the past would have taken you months, if not years, to achieve.”

As well as speaking to customers, Crosby emphasises the need to have a rigorous understanding of the data. His team was tasked with trying to understand why average spend and conversion tailed off after 4pm. They realised people booking last-minute on the same day were never going to pay a fortune. So they changed the metric for displaying hotels at that time and coversion increased four fold.

Mobile = truly last-minute

And as the brand has moved onto mobile, the Lastminute.com name has certainly become even more of an accurate description of its use case. “Were a brand that’s absolutely made for mobile,” Crosby told me. “Just looking at the core business problems, whether youre a business traveller of a couple going to the theatre, it all perfectly fits the social, mobile and local world of the last five years.”

“The rapid explosion in mobile usage, whether thats smartphone or tablet, is very interesting because the user base also changes dramatically as well. The reality is – mobile is even more last-minute – in London we now see bookings literally being made at five minutes to midnight. The single biggest booking pattern is for same-day stays.”

“Its a trend we’re very happy about – the technology has finally caught up with the Lastminute.com proposition.”

Lastminute.com was founded by Martha Lane Fox, now Baroness Lane-Fox of Shoreditch and an activist on digital literacy. The company is now part of Sabre Corporation, also owners of Travelocity, which recently filed an S1 IPO filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.