Today at Dreamforce, Rob Shilston, director of engineering at the Financial Times, walked us through what they are doing to set themselves up for the future and how Salesforce and Heroku enable them to do it.
He showed us an issue of the Financial Times and then continued to show the paper over 100 years. There was almost no change. In 2012 Digital became the subscription leader.
Quote: “In the evolution, you make mistakes.”
My notes from the session:
The share option doesn’t work all that well. Financial Times is behind a pay-wall, and the best option is the “gift article” option. It’s a disjointed owner issue.
He then went on to make the note that digital transformation must be more than just a change of the interface. It’s about creating two-way communication using your whole company.
How do you start rapid application development? Give control to the team … as long as they know where they are going.
In Financial Time’s journey, they started emulating loyalty programs. They then started to learn more about their users via journey maps. That included understanding who wasn’t a customer.
The How
There are two pillars to give control:
- Make sure you have engineering skills and data skills
- Clarity: give them product objects, an architecture strategy, know what engagement you want
- Key here is architecture strategy vs architecture review
- Change the language of stakeholders, what you want to achieve vs a feature you want.
In keeping with the loyalty model, they modeled their language of customers from bronze to platinum. Everyone could speak the same language.
Financial Times have a number of products that pulls content via an api. All of the products collect and report on what they are reading. The measurements can be used to improve user experience and to give insight to internal users.
To make all this, they created a set of components that each product can use. All built on node.js on Heroku. The website and other products are built on it. Alpha sites can be opted in and measured to figure out what works and what doesn’t. This goes into detail on key features.
He made a point that our responsibility is to innovate. It’s not just about customer input because they typically want you to make something better and not to revolutionize the experience. So combine customer input and your own ideas and measure the results.
Financial Times lets you toggle features from push, to buttons, to categories, etc. The development team then keeps an eye on what’s happening and who is using the new features. That drives the next set of releases and development.
What do they do now:
- 240 deployments a week
- 42 microservices
- consistent integration patter
- consistent monitoring
- dependency management
- Code release: figured it out
- Release notes are a challenge though, still have to figure it out with so many releases.
Summary
- Rapid development requires ground work
- Know your customer
- Know your outcomes
- Have the right tech infrastructure
- Give staff control
- Next FT is rolling out
- 5 % of the people are using it
- It’s about the data. Don’t keep it secret. Share it and act on it.
- Trust your team. Tell them what you want to achieve
- Know when you are adding value
- FT is about writing news
- Stop doing things you don’t do or don’t do well. E.g. Let Heroku public cloud provide services that a small or medium size company can’t do.
Question and Answer
Question: What is your subscription model?
Answer: Show the architecture slide. Highlight api’s and security. Financial Times created a paywall as a service. Authorization and session info is another service. You switch products and they still use those same services.
The subscription model let’s you pay per month, year, etc.
Question: Is MyFT from an account / subscription or is it free?
Answer: You have to create an account. That’s our business we create content and people buy it. MyFT is just the personalized part of that.
From an engagement perspective we measure based on a score. We prefer people to read content more frequently so we weight that vs once a month binge reading
Mobile: Over 50% of consumption is on mobile devices. Morning commute is heavy mobile. Desktop is used during the day. Weekend has predominantly mobile.
Question: For a long time, FT had no mobile apps. Why was that and what happened?
Answer: 2007 to 2008 we had a simple mobile experience. They built native applications on iOS initially but due to the nature of iOS, lost out on measurements and key data. Now have a web app that’s used as an app on Chrome, Android, and Apple. The measurements now work like they want.
Answer: Gave a story about getting the business to stop the 6 months of requirements and just sit down for half a day with the developers. Once they did that, the business realized that the tech’s knew the business and that they could crank out changes or prototypes fast.
Thanks for sharing!!