The document discusses how companies, particularly nib health funds, have modernized their digital product delivery to dramatically enhance speed to market through the establishment of agile, cross-functional digital factories. It highlights the transition from traditional CMS to more flexible, modular cloud-based architectures and emphasizes the importance of continuous deployment and experimentation in achieving a 10x improvement in deployment speed. Lastly, it reflects on the ongoing challenges and learning processes inherent in this transformation towards a more adaptive digital product development environment.

1. The Need for Speed
How Companies get Digital Products to Market Faster
Modernize 2018
Sydney, Australia

2. Trent McClenahan
Head of Digital and Emerging Businesses Delivery
nib health funds
@tgmcclen
Introductions
Paul Biggs
Director of Product Marketing
Contentful
@BiggsP

3. What’s on tap
● Paul: market trends for context
● Trent: nib case study on 10x-ing speed to market
● Audience Q & A

4. Who is Contentful?
Leading the charge to re-platform the CMS industry – to keep up with customers in the modern, multi-channel world

5. The market has shifted gears

6. We are in the midst of a massive market shift
Building _____________ has become building software.brands
engagement
conversions
new revenue streams
customer loyalty
lifetime value

7. Now, all companies are digital product companies
Companies are building more software than ever before to power
their customer touch points: websites, apps, kiosks, devices, and more.

8. The way software is built has changed forever
Cloud-based, modular architectures have become the standard for building digital products
On-premise Cloud
IT SYSTEM
Customization Interoperability
MONOLITHS MICROSERVICES

9. And this has completely changed market dynamics
What keeps
Digital Leaders
up at night?

10. The fear of getting disrupted… of getting Uber-ed, or Amazon-ed
Years to $1B valuation

11. To outrun the competition – or pursue new
opportunities – companies have to be agile

12. The innovators are building digital factories
Agility comes from the combination of people + processes + technology
Digital labs, accelerators, innovation centers -- these cross-functional initiatives have taken many names

13. Digital factories get you to market faster
“The best digital factories can put a new product or
customer experience into production in as little as ten
weeks.”
- Scaling a Transformative Culture Through a Digital Factory
“The goal is to get new products from POC to P&L as
fast as possible, into the hands of a P&L owner.”
- Comments between Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation
Research, and Shawn Mandel, CDO of TELUS Digital

14. nib’s 10x story

15. nib
Who we are
We exist to help
people access and
afford world class
healthcare when
and where needed.

16. nib
The need for speed

17. nib
Red Queen Racing Experiments
Healthcare provider
ratings and reviews
White-label
partnerships
Complementary
insurance
New health insurance markets:
● International Students
● International Workers
● New Zealand Residents
● Expat Health Insurance

18. At nib, it’s a Digital Delivery Workshop
An agile, cross-functional, product-oriented, experimental team
Full Stack Engineer
Front End Engineer
Quality Assurance Engineer
User Experience Designer
Product Analyst
Digital Performance Analyst
Technical Architect
Product Manager
Development Manager
UX Manager

19. Broad charter across the organisation

20. Phase 1
Siloed functional
teams
Phase 2
Cross-functional and
product-oriented teams
Phase 3
Holistic application management
and deeper product management
Operate
Digital delivery workshop evolution
From 2012 to present
Develop
Analyse
Design
MainHealthInsurance
Sales
MainHealthInsurance
Service
InternationalHealthInsurance
Sales+Service
AllHealthInsurance
Sales
AllHealthInsurance
Service
Providers+Non-HealthInsurance
EmergingBusinessX
PlatformServices
Providers+Non-Health
Insurance
Operate

21. Under the hood

22. A modern stack powers this agility
A reusable architecture that enables teams to quickly release new products and experiment in new channels
Core
Architecture
Account
Portal
eCommerce [new team]
Website App Website Voice [new product]
CENTRAL HUB
A reusable, modular tech stack
for launching new products
TEAMS & BIZ UNITS
Cross-functional teams
colocate and collaborate
DIGITAL PRODUCTS
Engage with customers, try new
technologies and channels, and
promote successes into the stack

23. “Speed-oriented architecture”
Lukas Edenfelt, Development Lead, TUI Nordic
API-first architecture
Decoupled architecture
Microservices architecture
Service-oriented architecture

24. Digital Delivery Workshop’s previous stack

25. Digital Delivery Workshop’s current stack

26. Putting it all together
Getting to Continuous Deployment was the key fundamental change
BUILD
experiments
MEASURE
metrics
LEARN
pivot or persevere
baseline
hypothesis
analyse
Continuous Deployment
Customer Business
Technology
ExperimentationProduct Management

27. A missing piece of the story

28. Digital products and experiences all have content at the core
A content hub, a
system of record
for your content

29. But, traditional
CMSes don’t help
you ship digital
products faster
Let alone build
a digital factory
(or a Digital Delivery
Workshop like nib’s)

30. CMS:

31. How the market sees it:
A headless CMS or API-first CMS… is still a CMS
#Headless CMS
How developers see it:
#BigHead CMS

32. Hacker News agrees – so it MUST be true!

33. Content infrastructure: the missing layer of the modern stack
Don’t think CMS. Think PaaS, for building digital products -- websites, apps, and devices.
Specialized cloud
platform services
simplify development
PaaS and laaS lay
the foundation for
building websites
& apps
ExperimentsSMS + VoiceEmail Content
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

34. Content infrastructure isn’t a better CMS. It’s different.
All-in-One Solution All-Star Stack
vs.
Build a stack of best-of-breed servicesBuy one solution that does it all

35. It’s the new way to power content in digital products
Structured content
FLEXIBLE
Context and language agnostic, for
existing apps & those yet-to-come
CONNECTED
API-first and purpose-built to
integrate with other services
FAST
Accelerates your software
delivery & editorial pipelines
Cloud native Agile iterations
{ API }
JSON

36. One key piece that sets content infrastructure apart from a CMS
Integration with your
software delivery pipeline
& product launch process

37. Dev environments let teams quickly spin up new features & products
Development environments are how digital teams collaborate on large projects,
to launch faster, iterate quickly, and experiment more often.

38. Content done ‘just right’
In our quest for speed
Content in Code
(Git)
Traditional CMS
(Sharepoint)
Content Infrastructure
(Contentful)
Developer sadness
Dominates ecosystem
Restrictive reuse/adaptation
Non-technical authorship
Reasonable speed to market
Developer happiness
Compliments ecosystem
Flexible reuse/adaptation
Non-technical authorship
Fast speed to market
Limited developer happiness
Fractured across ecosystem
Restrictive reuse/adaptation
Technical authorship
Poor speed to market
1 23

39. The importance of specialised PaaS components in the stack
Contentful as an example
● All the benefits of SaaS and PaaS
● Does one thing well
● Developer-friendly
● Easy to introduce and integrate
● Allows for steady expansion
● Versatile for the problems of today
● Flexible for the problems of the future

40. And, modern stacks do more than help you go fast
How do developers
assess potential jobs?
(Stack Overflow’s 2018
Developer Survey, from
over 100k developers)
Another benefit is to improve recruiting and retention for digital teams

41. Results and lessons learned

42. Key improvements - 10x explained
In our quest for speed
Deploys / month 504
Speed to deploy
<
1hr
5d
Security response
<
1hr
7d
Unit cost $$$$
Experiments / year 305

43. What we learnt during our transformation to a digital factory
1
Do not underestimate the task of transitioning
to a new way of working and a new stack

44. What we learnt during our transformation to a digital factory
2
Software delivery mindset changes for
everyone with experimentation at the core

45. What we learnt during our transformation to a digital factory
3
Taking a modular approach allows for tech
stack experimentation too!

46. Reality check
Building an optimised digital factory is an adaptive challenge.
You are never done.
You just keep learning and making progress!

47. Looking forward
http://toobworld.blogspot.com.au/2017/03/saturday-comics-pinky-and-brain.html
Building for ‘moments of truth’

48. “One thing I love about customers is that they are
divinely discontent. Their expectations are never
static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t
ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being
satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a
better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes
today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement
happening at a faster rate than ever before.”
- Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, 2017 Annual Letter to Shareholders
(released 18th April, 2018)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
Why this relentless need for speed?

49. Audience Q & A
Any questions for Trent or Paul?

50. Thank you!
For more stories on going faster, read our eBook to learn how:
● The British Museum ships digital products 4x faster
● Nike brought their digital experience in-store
● Optimizely integrated content creation + experimentation
● And more: ctfl.io/modernize2018
Twitter: @BiggsP
To learn about opportunities to 10x with nib’s Digital Delivery
Workshop across Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland,
visit: https://careers.nib.com.au/
Twitter: @tgmcclen