How a Culture of Collaboration Fuels CJ Innovation
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Go behind the scenes at CJ Affiliate and you'll see that it takes more than a village to foster innovation in a modern tech company…it takes partners! Partnership Director Ronan Vance and Senior Engineer Liz Hurley show how a new approach to partnerships and teams has created a launchpad that fuels network growth. This session has such an important message for our clients that we're offering it on two days of CJU. You won't want to miss "How a Culture of Collaboration Fuels CJ Innovation."
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How a Culture of Collaboration Fuels CJ Innovation
- 1. T I M E 1:00 PM R O O M SA N TA YN EZ S P E A K E R S LIZ H U R LEY & RONAN VANCE HOW A CULTURE OF COLLABORATION FUELS CJ INNOVATION
- 9. Microservice? API? The language used to communicate with microservices Independent software apps that provide a specific service
- 11. WEARABLE TECH
- 13. THE EMERGENCE OF MICROSERVICES 1 Modern software development 2 Testing techniques 3 Deployment techniques microservices 1 3 4 2
- 14. circa 1998 circa 2005 2016 www.cj.com
- 15. Not just technology… http://cjdev.github.io/technology-radar HOW TO EVOLVE? CULTURE
- 17. AUTONOMY • Is motivation • Allows decisions to happen fast • Is optimized for collaboration
- 20. Partnerships Tracking & EngagementInsightsAd Systems Data Chapter APIs Chapter Front End Chapter
- 24. OUR LEARNING CULTURE What people think success looks like What success really looks like
- 25. • Community and trust better than structure and control • If failure gets punished, people won't try new things • Innovation > predictability • 100% predictability == 0% innovation NO FEAR LEARN
- 26. High performing teams: small experiments, learn fast • http://modernagile.org: • “Make Safety a Prerequisite” • “Experiment and Learn Rapidly” INNOVATION IDEAS CREATIVITY
- 28. “Failure is not an option”
- 29. “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” Elon Musk – Founder of Tesla and SpaceX
- 31. WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU? PARTNERSHIPS • Domain focused squads • Modular microservices • Collaborative influences INNOVATION • Controlled, targeted experimentation • Frequent deployment, rapid feedback • Self-service model => web-scale growth • The innovation of open-source: https://github.com/cjdev
- 36. CJ SOLUTIONS LOUNGE FIESTA ROOM 3RD FLOOR
- 39. THANK YOU
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon everyone and welcome. I just want to come clean If you take the title of our talk, and just list the nouns, you can see today’s talk is about Culture Collaboration Innovation Let me introduce myself properly - my name is ... Ronan introc SIXTH CJU prior to joining CJ in 2011 I was in the software industry. . . Focus: building relationships with companies that have technology and solutions that can help CJ grow the network. Liz and I are going to talk to you today about how a culture of collaboration and innovation with partners is evolving here at CJ and how it will create new opportunities for the future. Goal for Session: Provide you with a glimpse into how our product and engineering teams are structured and function, and the potential for us to enhance our partnership with you at a much deeper level.
- Now, although Liz and I have worked together for 6 years, we have known each other a lot longer. We have daughters that are the same age, and they play competitive tennis, now at rival high schools. And about 6 months ago, <click> my 15 year old daughter Ginger beat me on the court for the first time. That was kind of a proud yet ego-bruising moment. Although she is really good, it hit me that I need to get in better shape NOW if I am going to keep up with her. Get on a program . . .
- A lot of us are trying to stay fit and healthy, and that is driving a huge and fast-growing market in “wearable tech” for fitness tracking. How many people here are wearing one of these types of devices? Show of hands. OK, that is a pretty good number of people. For me, I just started with a Fitbit, and some other digitally connected devices. Beauty of these devices really starts with simplicity, right? As a standalone device, I can just wear it and it collects the step count for me.
- But the real value, as we all know is the connected nature of these devices and then sharing that data to apps, websites, and then other users. I effectively become a node on an interconnected network of Fitbit users that enables data sharing and social engagement, like encouragement from friends or competition.
- connectivity to a whole new level, ADS Corp Step challenge promote fitness, wellness and team camaraderie. innovative health benefits company called Jiff, we participated in a team competition for individuals to track their steps over a 30-day period. Linking my Fitbit to their platform, and as quick as that we had over 2000 employees sharing fitness data and motivating one another to get more active. The Fitbit has also become a gateway drug to an exploding connected fitness environment. Not because of the device itself, but because of the data that is collected, and more importantly the sharing of that data and the ecosystem it creates.
- “Wearable tech” is essentially a subset of the Internet of Things phenomena where everyday objects become smart thanks in part to sensors. But those sensors would be somewhat useless if they couldn’t share the data that they are collecting in a flexible, meaningful way, which is where the significance of a microservices architecture and APIs can enable these devices to become smart and valuable to consumers.
- draw attention to… Microservices are independent software applications that provide a service for a focused, specific context. Examples: All these services are loosely coupled but independently delivered and deployed. The API is APIs / microservices used interchangeably But let’s try a little visual analogy…to further illustrate/explain
- Service -> microservice -> independent piece that can function by itself or as part of a suite. But it is independently delivered and deployed. But really, why all the fuss about microservices? If you rely on the internet to do business, then you definitely care about microservices. Microservices architecture is transforming the online space, resulting in faster innovation, massive scalability and competitive advantage for businesses across a wide variety of industries.
- So, applying microservices architecture and APIs to fitness tracking gives users like me an opportunity to connect multiple, independent and perhaps even competitive fitness tracking devices. I wanted to go beyond what Fitbit could track, and I found it easy to connect devices and sites that track different data points like my weight from my digital scale, geo tracking for runs and bike rides, nutrition tracking, and so on. Openness in the wearable tech space that allows a consumer like me to record and analyze data from a bunch of different sources and it is the APIs that ensure these connections are made intelligently and effectively.
- So, where I am going with all of this . . .This wearable tech example illustrates and important trend, how companies are using data and APIs to provide more personalized experiences to their consumers. There is an architecture and culture of collaboration that these wearable tech firms have adopted and APIs are the building blocks that create these new and limitless opportunities. There are parallels here for CJ and supplying our clients and developer partners the APIs and services needed to make valuable connections between platforms that will drive new and exciting opportunities in affiliate. But that all really starts with our product and engineering teams, and the culture required to enable that type of future.
- Fitness trackers, microservices, affiliate marketing, culture – what does this have to do with CJU? Believe me – they are all related. We can see this if we take for example microservices. The tech industry headlines tell us microservices are crucial to all our futures, so it’s worth taking a peek behind the scenes to understand how this came to be. Interesting fact about microservices: evolution – modern software dev. etc To illustrate this, let’s take a look at how engineering at CJ has been evolving as an organization – relate to this, applies to any team env
- CJ - platform with a long and glorious history … before there was this notion of microservices in the cloud. From an engineering perspective, not glorious – far from it If we don’t keep ahead of technology advances, and the tools and practices that are reinvented every few years, we’re screwed! As an organization, we had to figure out how to adapt, be nimble, move fast and keep changing.
- not just in technology hadoop ecosystem is awesome functional languages fascinating, Amazon web services are amaaaazing …: all that is important to us – tech radar –But I’m not supposed to talk about techonology here…. Of equal importance - to adapt and change and move fast is: culture - the philosophies, the principles that guide how we go about our work. Other companies -> outstanding technology success + significant growth and scale. Key source of inspiration for us, was Spotify.
- In 2009, a small group of employees -> do things differently than most companies. Expanding quickly -> company’s growth wouldn’t keep their engineering team from moving fast Developed: “Spotify” model of engineering culture. We adopted the Spotify model at CJ engineering late last year – and this is what is looks like:
- fundamental concept is “autonomy” - the engineering department - autonomous teams - specific domain of responsibility. With autonomy we get: motivation. With autonomy: decisions happen fast And autonomy is optimized for collaboration - across squads, and across the organization as a whole
- Bunch of autonomous squads off into the wild -> not ideal. No autonomy and no alignment -> nothing done, everyone is sad. Align the teams too strictly: dictating -> you risk limiting their creativity and innovative tendencies. The happy balance is here – autonomy + alignment –teams figure out with good deal of autonomy, but operating within boundaries. Too much autonomy can be a nightmare, and too little can be stifling. We need to balance the two.
- At CJ squads - cohesive business systems - responsible for one domain area. Read examples squad develops a firm understanding of their area - better positions them to respond to the changing needs of domain.
- Across all squads we have “chapters”: about technology - chapter members bring specific technology expertise to their individual squads Examples big data, or security, or apis, front end/UI dev. Something familiar about how things are lining up: what I said earlier: each squads has deep knowledge: a specific function – leading perhaps towards specific microservices? At CJ we are firmly committed to the idea that technology success lies in this emerging world of microservices – so much so that we are incorporating it into our organizational structure. This kind of engineering approach is what has enabled companies like Spotify, Netflix and others to scale and innovate like never before. Getting back to spotify….
- Headquartered in Stockholm - on vacation in Stockholm - naturally decided to pop in ….. Here I am outside there headquarters in downtown Stockholm. no-one was there – in true Swedish tradition they’d all left for 5 weeks of summer vacation....
- As Liz mentioned, we now have a product team dedicated to APIs and Partner Integrations and a chapter that supports API development across all of our product domains Those teams will determine what APIs, documentation and support we need to cultivate new developer partnerships. Continuing the study of Spotify, the culture that we admire and emulate also creates fertile ground for partnerships, which have been vital to Spotify’s adoption and growth.
- Spotify entered the US in 2011, deal with Facebook to share user preferences and playlists into Facebook profiles /user feeds. Good for Spotify ->access to Facebook’s huge daily active users base. Facebook ->a music service. Starbucks, the music experience which has always been part of the Starbucks culture is now powered by Spotify. Spotify is integrated into the Starbucks app for in-store music discovery, creating stickiness and a cool factor for the 10 million loyal Starbucks app users. If you are a user of the voice-activated Echo speaker from Amazon, Spotify has partnered with them so you can make verbal music requests to Alexa without lifting a finger. And prior to your next Uber ride, you can connect your Spotify account and playlist right into your Uber driver’s audio system so you control the sounds and mood of your ride. That is cool! None of this happens without a culture of innovation and an openness to share and collaborate to create new opportunities. That is one thing that you will see coming at CJ as well, an emerging culture focused on new customer-types that will yield new and exciting opportunities and successes for CJ and its clients.
- Some great examples there of companies driving innovation through microservices and shared ideas. Let’s take another look behind the scenes to see how our culture can foster that precious commodity – engineering innovation. As we innovate, from time to time, in spite of our best efforts, mistakes happen. But, given our product is made up of several independently delivered, loosely coupled microservices, if a change does introduce a problem it will only impact that specific area – it has a limited “blast radius” if you like. This is comforting – both for those of us that support these systems and hopefully for you, our affected clients! But our responsibility to deal with mistakes does not end there. We have to make a point to learn from our mistakes. And here are some values that help us to do that.
- Environment without fear - People who live in fear cannot function well. Read slides AND - best way to avoid short-term failure. Google “People Operations” - 2 years interviewing and assessing -> formula for stellar team: Example: one PHD, javascript guru etc …. voila – you’ve got the ideal high performing team! They were surprised to find that who was on the team was less important than how the team members interacted. Number 1 influence was: psychological safety. make mistakes without feeling insecure, embarrassed, threatened?
- High performing teams need the courage to do lots of small experiments and learn really fast, instead of wasting time trying to predict and control all risk at the outset. Modern agile practitioners - embrace this no fear and learning – 2 of their 4 essential disciplines are these: Those are some ways in which we encourage innovation, nurture ideas and harness creativity.
- Does anyone know who this is? Ed Harris playing NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz in Apollo 13. Most famous line: “Houston, we have a problem”
- But the second most famous line in the story is <click> “Failure is not an option.” In that situation, with lives at risk, failure was not an option. But there is a widely accepted notion that at the fear of failure led to a more risk-averse culture at NASA and may have ultimately contributed to the decline of the space program.
- Contrast this philosophy with that of Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX. Current face of the space program. Accomplished innovator and entrepreneur, but despite all his success, we have seen him make and recover from some pretty visible and public failures. Elon Musk, is not afraid to fail <click> In fact, he believes that “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” I see that same belief system in our product and engineering system. That psychological safety that Liz talks about enables curiosity, ideas, and innovation.
- If you are going to try to land a rocket ship on a boat, you have to have some tolerance for failure it will be an attitude and culture like this that may just get a human to set foot on Mars in our lifetime.
- If you are with us and industry leaders who believe that microservices are transformative, then transformative partnerships: focus squads -> bring technical knowledge together with specific business domains knowledge. Each team -> microservices and APIs Nature of microservices - shaped by strong collaborative influences: collaboration between … Innovation: Modularized design -> change incremental, targeted. delivered frequently -> rapid feedback In this way, CJ and our partners can innovate together – building on each other’s ideas. Becomes open, self-service model-> web-scale growth – for businesses of any size -> massive scale right out of the gate. For those who become our partners … github And in the spirit of open-source/open-developer collaboration…
- Advertisers: What if we could stream ad conversion data in near real-time allowing your data scientists to pull this into your own data pipelines, paving the way for you to combine that data into your own machine learning algorithms. Publishers: What if you could stream new or updated ads, like ads with an EPC on the rise to increase your conversions. If you never had to log into the member area to get ads down to your website—if it was all controlled by APIs—I bet that would put some smiles on publishers faces. Exciting new partnerships that don't even exist in our network, because they don't want to log in and manually search for and find advertisers and ads using a browser based UI. If given the option to negotiate this through APIs, what apps might they be building? The potential for new relationships suddenly becomes very different. Longer term vision: build on that openness and collaboration with developers to create opportunities and an app ecosystem that adds a new dimension to your CJ experience. Liz explained, we have adopted a modular, microservices architecture for the CJ account manager, and you have probably heard us here at CJU referring to new CJ features in the context of “apps.” That is for a good reason. We are working towards CJ as a platform. We see what other market leaders are doing with app-based offerings . . . .
- . . . app stores like Salesforce.com’s AppExchange <click> the Wordpress WP Marketplace, <click> and app success stories from our client AT&T, and we like what we see. huge possibilities beyond what CJ has the capacity to hire, build and deliver on our own, and that bodes well for the CJ Network in a time of rapid change towards areas like mobile and cross-device personalization, insights and analytics, and omnichannel. We are going to lead in all of those areas, but we know we cannot do everything, or do it all by ourselves. That is where a culture and an environment that supports partnerships will become a critical part of your future growth and success with CJ.
- Getting closer to our clients through deeper understanding of the business need enables us to collaborate better to solve problems. We have been working on an effort to create an APIs and Partnership foundation to expose services that will improve how you do business with CJ. We have been in discussions with publishers and advertisers on data needs and the APIs that will evolve your business on our platform and in our network. We are launching a developer partner portal for advertisers, publishers, agencies and new third party developers—all are welcome—to work with us to get access to select APIs to create new solutions and monetization opportunities.
- Have conversations about what this means to you, we have product and engineering team members here at the event, in the Solutions Lounge on the 3rd Floor. We know this is a business networking conference, but, we know there are a number of attendees here that are product and engineering savvy, We would like to learn how you WANT TO INNOVATE WITH US – you will benefit from discussions in the lab with our product development and engineering team members
- If you can’t get up there, or you want to share this with colleagues that did not make the trip, Keep look out for some entries on the CJ Blog AND Subscribe to the CJ Developer blog, which is a great resource of what we are doing to innovate in affiliate. Take note of the address is at the bottom of this slide, to get the latest updates on our partner portal development.
- You could say, that Affiliate, combined with Partnerships gives us Innovation Oh – would you look at that: Tis an API! (stick to coding…)
- That is a great way to end it. You can all remember that one. We look forward to working with you on this exciting new opportunity. Thank you!