In 2013, the average page load time across XO Group Inc.’s mobile sites was 12 seconds. At that time, a mobile-first strategy meant shrinking the e-retailer’s desktop site to fit on to a mobile device. XO Group’s CEO Mike Steib decided this couldn’t fly any longer.

Steib explained the changes he led over the past few years to optimize for mobile at the Mobile Marketing Association Mobile Marketing Leadership Forum this week in New York City. The project involved three retail sites: wedding site TheKnot.com, home site The Nest.com and pregnancy site TheBump.com.

“Our audience had become predominantly mobile, and our company hadn’t yet,” said Steib, adding that 55% of TheKnot.com’s website visitors come to the site via a mobile device, and 75% of TheBump.com’s audience does.

“What we were offering our customers three years ago did not live up to the experience that a modern millennial has,” he said.

Steib started with XO Group’s internal organization. He restructured the company to have squads consisting of executive business leaders, product leaders and tech leaders, from its previous model of having shared technology resources and only a few full-time product managers.

He also focused on hiring and improving the mobile talent at the company, such as hiring an in-house iOS engineer and retraining its entire team of hundreds of employees to learn the latest mobile techniques.

When hiring new developers, Steib looks for how a candidate solves a real-world engineering problem. XO Group has a panel of engineers who test candidates on their coding skills. XO Group also looks to see if the candidate is a good culture fit, is good at solving problems and demonstrates strong initiative and leadership. Steib also noted that there is a steady churn among engineers, since they are in such high demand, making it a challenge to keep ahead of the turnover.

Finally, XO Group did extensive user research to find out what improvements it needed to make to its sites to meet consumer needs, Steib said. The research showed, for example, that TheKnot.com, which previously provided content such as articles, images and vendor listings from its advertisers, needed more planning tools, Steib said.

TheKnot.com now provides a free wedding website that couples can customize themselves. The website also provides a list of tasks a couple has to complete and how soon before the wedding day each task should be completed. The list provides the average prices charged by vendors, such as a florist or photographer, based on the average cost of that service in a couple’s wedding location. For example, a bride who enters her wedding date, and location 10 months before her wedding will see on her task list that she should purchase her wedding dress and it may cost about $3,000.

One of TheKnot.com’s main functionalities—and sources of revenue—is linking brides to listed wedding vendors, such as florists and caterers. Instead of just providing the listings of the DJs who advertised with The Knot, the site needed to provide all of the DJ’s in that consumer’s area in order to help her plan better, he said. TheKnot.com links to at least 250,000 wedding vendors.

“We found every local wedding professional in America and put them into our map and onto our website, ,” Steib said.

After making these changes, XO Group’s unique visitors grew 27% year over year, he said.

Another new planning tool The Knot provides is online live chat with a customer service agent. Brides can ask a question and a human being responds. The feature is like having a personal, on-demand wedding planner for free, Steib said. This is currently only live in one market, which he did not identify, and he is not sure how the service will scale.

What is Steib looking to invest in next for mobile? Artificial intelligence, chat bots, virtual reality and location-based services, he said. For virtual reality, for example, a bride could put on a headset and see a wedding venue without having to go and check it out, he said.

“It feels to us that virtual reality is going to be important to every industry,” Steib said.

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