The Evolution of the Economist Content Platform (presented by Mark Brincat, CTO Economist at eZ Conference 2016)
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The Economist has been going through a major transformation. By approaching our web experience in a componentized way, we defined how we could leverage our entire technology ecosystem to deliver products faster and improve the reader experience. This talk will focus on the approach, challenges and lessons learned through the evolution of the Economist Reader and Content Platform.
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The Evolution of the Economist Content Platform (presented by Mark Brincat, CTO Economist at eZ Conference 2016)
- 1. Approach, challenges and lessons The Evolution of our Platform Mark Brincat, CTO
- 2. Who are we ? Smart Trusted Bold Global Well- written
- 3. Our Products The Economist Economist FilmsThe Economist App Global Business Review The Economist Espresso Economist.com The World In 1843 Debates Radio Social Feeds
- 4. What was Economist.com ? • Drupal based Website • Presentation was deep linked into the platform • Platform delivers more than just a content management system • Access management delivering access to our subscribers. • Grew organically over the course of the years
- 6. Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be John Wooden
- 7. Our Transformation Be Cloud and Mobile First Buy Commodity and Build Innovation Become Cross Functional and Product Centric Having an Agile Mindset Becoming Value and Data Driven
- 8. We set a vision
- 10. And at the evolution of aggregators
- 11. Agreed on what success means Better Global UX Faster Load Times Search Engine Indexability Free Progressive Enhancements Easier Code Maintenance • More people reading more articles • Leading to more subscription conversions • Increased advertising inventory • Faster Product Development.
- 12. Embraced User Centric Design
- 13. We set a design direction 1 2 3 4 Analysis Finishability Editorial Modularity
- 14. We Prioritised
- 15. Build Components not Templates • Deconstruct experiences into components • Introduced a component library • Assemble experiences and Reuse
- 16. We embraced a new front end “A declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.” • The “V” in MVC • Reduce Coupling and Increase Cohesion • Separated concerns
- 17. We tested our thinking • Page Load times to 1.5 seconds from 7 seconds • 46 page requests from 350 requests • Put in place the first version of our library
- 18. The New Economist.com • Built through the component library • New responsive design applied • Product Iterations and Released Continuously
- 19. We continue to evolve Curated Personalized Social
- 20. We Embraced Continuous Delivery Automate as much as possible Version everything Introduced tooling to support speed. Containerised our architecture
- 21. The Direction Introduced the Component Library Alignment and Consistency The Reader Platform • Apply the learning across products • Evolve a Platform for our Readers • Make Product Development faster 2015 2016 2017
- 22. Introduced Commodity Services Cloud based service bus to connect our landscape A Marketing CMS to enable campaign briefing A CRM to power our customer services An Identity Provider to handle authentication and authorisation A DMP to enable campaign targeting A Subscription and Billing Platform to enable revenue Reporting Dashboards to understand our KPIs Personalised Metering and Paywall Capability
- 23. Delivering Ecommerce • CMS Driven powered by eZ • Journey Builders to empower Marketing • Product and Campaign management
- 24. Introduced Sales Management • Powered by eZ • Less reliance on Third Parties • Better control and flexibility
- 25. Enhanced the Paywall • Configure vs Build • Enables the targeting of different audiences • Better control and flexibility
- 26. What about Content ?
- 27. We Introduced Microservices Autonomous Modelled around the business domain Small, does one thing, and does it well Owning build and deployment Integrates via well-known interfaces https://github.com/EconomistDigitalSolutions/goberry
- 28. The Result • Applied Golang to deliver a set of Microservices • Implemented through containers in AWS • An API Gateway that can be leveraged by multiple products
- 29. Redesigned our Content Platform Externals (Feeds and Aggregators) Blog ImagesArticles Micro Services APIs Content Repository REST/JSON Front End Experiences CCI OtherTagging Comment Moderation CommentsMetadata Distribution Engine Apps Marketing CMS Ad Serving
- 31. Lessons Learnt Ensure the cross functional team understands the roles and responsibilities Culture trumps Strategy Be ready to pivot on some technology choices – it’s ok Beware of spending time on non value activities Augmentation vs Project resources Have a clear vision and be ambitious but don't rush yourself in an unknown territory.
- 32. Lessons Learnt Co Locate as much as possible Create a product council Forward plan and come together as a leadership regularly Embed DevOps into cross functional team Make sure you find partners not suppliers Create steady state team early in your project. You can’t define it all up front. Ensure you complete an elaboration. Problem solving mindset, and force the team to work in this way. Don't give the team predefined tasks, give them problems.
- 33. Lessons Learnt Build towards contracts Reduce Dependencies between tiers Ensure Content is reusable Beware of state – create additional events and data to create a stateless system Don’t underestimate the transition to continuous delivery Spike Technology Choices Ensure Engineers understand the business impact of any decision. Balance Quality Control with Output
- 34. The Road AheadProduct Platform ContentPlatform Consumer Platform Engagement Platform B2B Commerce B2C Commerce in Place Standardized Ad Offering Content Authoring and DAM Content Platform Redesigned Content as a Service Marketing Automation and Personalization Reveal Data Analytics Visualization Environment Data Science: modelling, scoring prediction A/B Test Product Features Regional Launch of Consumer Platform Personalised Paywall and Metering Capability Unified Technology Platform for Edition Products Component Based Development of Products Curation and Personalisation New Personalised Product
- 35. In Conclusion • We have transformed our culture and strategy to enable digital transformation. • We enabled continuous integration so we can iterate, adapt, test and learn • We embraced a best of breed approach to our technology landscape focusing on buying commodity and building innovation
- 36. More Information? Mark Brincat markbrincat@economist.com The Economist Group 20 Cabot Square London E14 4QW Twitter : @mab38400
Editor's Notes
- Smart guide to the forces that shape the future Trusted, finishable filter on world affairs Advocate for progress A global perspective Quality content & premium pricing
- The Weekly Economist Publication and The Economist App available on a multitude of platforms Economist.com our web presence providing a means for subscribers and non subscribers to recognise the value of our content. Economist Films launched last year and focuses on delivering high quality short form video content such as Futureworks a series of documentaries exploring future jobs such as Drone Rangers and E-Sports Superstars, Global Compass exploring topics such as the right to die or health without wealth. Espresso our daily shot at news preparing for the day ahead with 5 topical stories and a round up of the news in brief The World In a yearly publication, app and website looking at the year ahead and exploring the different factors to look out for in the year ahead. The World If a companion product that explores how the world would react in the event of certain scenarios. As for 2016, the year can be summed up in three words: woes, women and wins. Go to TheWorldIn.com to find out more. 1843, recently launched and provides a publications focused on culture and lifestyle available as a print publication, website and app Global Business Review a monthly edition of content and our first bi-lingual product available in Chinese and English Debates is our debating platform hosting topics such as LBGT Rights and Online Pornography. Social Feeds we are now available on LinkedIn, Facebook, Line and soon to be available on Google AMP and Snapchat
- Inflexible and complex making development and product delivery slow making it difficult to provide different consumer proposition Aging landscape making it difficult to get resources on the ground to effect change Multiple Dependencies with core knowledge is in the hands of our third parties providing inhibitors towards improving the customer experience and transforming our existing business models resulting in increased cost. Tightly coupled resulting in complex deployment reducing the ability to introduce new features. Data in siloes providing missed opportunities in targeting our audience and getting understanding of our consumer resulting in revenue leakage.
- Analysis – Our particular way of looking at and understanding the work Finishability – An essential collection of what matters Editorial – no add complexity to editorial Modularity – We produce as few modules as possible and make them resuable
- Facebook has continued to open source further components of their React stack, including a new Flux implementation (read: Controller-Views of MVC) called Relay, and the data query abstraction layer GraphQL. Relay collects the declared data requirements from each React component on a given page. It aggregates the queries and performs a single request via the GraphQL (Graph Query Language) schema (shared between client and server), returns the data to the relevant React components, and caches the results to avoid re-requesting data. GraphQL offers a unified interface to the mid-service tier. It abstracts the minutiae of data transport and resolution away from front-end developers and into declarative data requirement "fragments". The reduction in number of queries and data size will decrease load times, especially on high-latency and low-bandwidth connections.
- Next we will be introducing Blue/Green Deployments
- Introduced the Component Library Build once reuse across multiple products Reduce time needed from idea to market Component iteration benefits the entire platform Alignment and Consistency Consistency across the products Resources/talents sharing opportunity The platform becomes more efficient the more products get connected The Reader Platform Reader engagement Decluttered user journey Lessons learned via UX and data analysis are shared across the platform
- Align short term solutions with the long term vision. POCs are good for elaborating, but involve the people responsible for the system in the elaboration. Leverage the knowledge of the internal teams and make sure they are aligned and engaged with work they will inherit. Anticipate change. Elaborate. Document the approach, the considerations and assumptions. Understand these when refactoring and make a real-time assessment of the cost, disruption and risk involved in re-solving the problem differently
- Build towards contracts that include standardized output (schema.org etc) to reduce dependencies between tiers and ensure the content is reusable, not specific to the needs of one consumer. Get both tiers together, establish a contract as a mock object and build to making that real. In a tightly-coupled system, functionality often depends on the state (user login state or which page is being loaded etc). That code needs to be refactored. We must create additional data points and/or events to support a stateless system. Review the core business logic to ensure those dependencies are known and incorporated into the project. 1) The best approach to embark in something as big as this project is to approach it in an iterative way. The World If model is the best solutions imho. 2) Force yourself in a problem solving mindset, and force the team to work in this way. Don't give the team predefined tasks, give them problems. 3) Don't over-engineer. Engineers must understand the business impact of any decision, if they look at problems only from an engineering perspective they will most likely over-engineer. 4) Make sure that you balance quality control to output. There is a tendency to create an awful lot of test coverage with hardly any output. Tests produce more tests. Bugs are acceptable if they are not disruptive. It's more important to be able to fix quickly a bug that have something that alerts you of a bug but your system is slow to react to solve it.