It takes a village: Scaling your vision

It takes a Village: Scaling your Vision Rashmi Sinha & Jon Boutelle SlideShare

Began with a Vision
Share all presentations in the world
A free, truly useful service
Build community around presentations
Use YouTube as a metaphor / design guide
Hit the same gaming dynamics (the leaderboard game) & distribution channels (embeds drive new users to site)

Driven by Design
Founders believed in importance of user experience
Early engineers very UX-focused

Where Everybody knows your Name

What led us to Metrics
Becoming more disciplined about how to grow
Hard to scale by vision as team grew
Define a direction so team-members can independently execute against it
Launch of paid features

Metrics Version 1
Individual devs, individual metrics.
Built a web-based dashboard, with charting.
Highly configurable, inspired by Slide.
Highly visual: humans great at visual processing, pattern-matching

#epicfail

Why? Metrics

Metrics are not sexy

Metrics need a Social Context
Making sense of metrics takes time. No social process around iterating based on metrics
No person in team who was driving metrics
Developers often not right for this role. May see as distraction from code
Metrics also need iteration!
Developers may resist being judged by the behavior of users

We are all Spoiled now

Metrics Axed my Favorite Feature
Metrics make implicit prioritizations explicit. Some people (including founders) used to making decisions based on intuition
Reveal that some beloved features might be useless!

Event-Tracking FTW Focus on ratios of events to page loads, NOT absolute numbers.

Metrics Version 2
Email reports on a daily basis, showing numbers for a trailing range of days.
Everyone working on project gets in their inbox (data comes to you)
Lots of numbers (provide context). But one number identified as one to focus on

Social Process around Metrics
Weekly meetings for each team
Review what shipped, review impact / lack of impact on numbers, plan next week
Always one person in product manager role: i.e. deep in metrics, shallow on code

Email!

More Email! Edit data

Case Study: 4x growth of leads collected
For newly launched business features
One number the main focus. Other periphery numbers
Daily email reports worked well. Weekly meetings to plan for next week
Change paths every few weeks

Case Study: Metrics, Clean Code & Visual Design
Main page: Slideview page
Complaints of clutter, page load time.
Page performed well
Code underneath the page also fugly
Solution: periodic refactorings / design cleanups. “Clean it up without trying changing to effect numbers”
Visual tweaks while monitoring metrics
Balance: engagement vs. virality

Hitting Local Maxima
Stable metrics. Tweaks no longer lead to growth. Growth will come new ideas, directions, vision

Why Version 2 Works
Push rather than pull
One number to focus on
Social context and process around the metrics
Warning: REALLY EASY to drown in metrics

How to Frame Team Goals
Tasks: “Move this number using copy, creative, and simple design changes”
Use any means necessary
Success: Moving the number OR learning something interesting

Operational Metrics: an Interlude
Site uptime, average speed of page load
Conversion: Ave time for conversion for each document, ave wait time for user
Apdex:
Blended read of page load time
Page load time

Why not use this neat charting for real time user data?

Using Infrastructure as a Service

What Would we do Differently
Start in same way
Start paid services earlier
Hire non-engineers (who help drive by metrics) earlier
Nurture metrics mindset in team earlier

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It takes a village: Scaling your vision

by Jonathan Boutelle

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