Build the Deli, Not the Sandwich: Lessons from the Front Lines of Digital Platform Development
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Presented at Acquia Engage APAC by Luis Andrade, Director, Digital Experience - Global Marketing, UL. To digitally empower a large organization, broaden your focus and build the necessary supports. You’re not just giving your marketers and technologists a sandwich: you’re providing the tools they need to make their own sandwich whenever they need one. Creating a robust digital platform for building, deploying and maintaining online properties — it’s a lot like building a deli. Make sure you have all the right components to build the various sandwiches people want, over and over again. Bread, main filling, toppings, spreads: these are the items covered in your platform architecture and your digital style guide or pattern library plus your toolkit for rolling out new sites, including each and every component they can use. These components serve up your content types, your calls-to-action, landing page structures, translation workflows, personalization opportunities, and much more. Solve for your large, diversified and distributed organization’s digital problems by delivering a unified brand identity and experience to a broad range of audiences the easier way. Empower your marketers through a single flexible platform, including digital guidelines and best practices — this is your deli, which allows consistent-quality sandwich-making on a scale that can’t be done without all those disparate pieces in place. This prevents your whole organization from starting from scratch every time. This session will show how UL and development partner Genuine have used Acquia Cloud Site Factory and Acquia Lift (with Content Hub) to deliver a platform that reduces cost, time and effort to build and maintain online properties, freeing up staff and budget to focus on experiences that will result in an optimal user journey. Learn how we've leveraged each tool to deliver this platform, challenges we've overcome and lessons we've learned along the way. Learn how to build your own deli.
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Build the Deli, Not the Sandwich: Lessons from the Front Lines of Digital Platform Development
- 1. © Lessons from the front lines of digital platform development. not the Sandwich. Build the Deli, Luis Serpa Andrade - luis.andrade@ul.com
- 2. PLAIN TURKEY
- 3. COMPLEXITY HAPPENS Everything around you is a lot more complicated now
- 4. Brand presence and leadership UL MARKS APPEAR on more than 22 BILLION 3OUT OF 4 U.S. consumers are FAMILIAR with THE UL MARK of U.S. BUILT ENVIRONMENT AUTHORITIES trust and accept the UL Mark 88% GLOBAL CONSUMERS annually with safety messages 2 BILLION UL has supported a CENTURY OF INNOVATION from electricity to nanotechnology WORKING FOR A SAFER WORLD since 1894 products globally UL reaches more than UL WORKS TO PROTECT THE MARKET FROM COUNTERFEIT GOODS from life jackets to hoverboards, we assisted in seizures of more than 2.2 MILLION PRODUCTS bearing a counterfeit UL Mark
- 5. Science and global expertise UL operates in more than 143COUNTRIES 20 and across more than INDUSTRIES UL HAS ENHANCED TRANSACTION SECURITY FOR: 500+ banks 20+ payment schemes 60+ mobile network operators 50+ governments/ transport operators ORGANIZATIONS in OVER 10 INDUSTRIES UL software is used by 10,000+ 1,600 standards defining safety, security, quality and sustainability UL has helped to set MORE THAN UL’S SUSTAINABILITY CERTIFICATIONS are referenced in sustainable product specifications or purchasing guidelines around the globe900+ UL SERVES Fortune 500 companies OUT OF1 3
- 6. SUDDEN Over the GROWTH Last 15yrs NEW BUSINESSES ACQUIRED OVER FORTY FROM 7K TO over 14K employees >1 ACQUISITION A MONTH FROM 300 MILLION TO ALMOST 2 BILLION IN REVENUE
- 8. CONFLICT OF INTERESTS Our divisions went ‘rogue'...
- 9. CLEANING THE MESS WEBSITES 275 SOCIAL CHANNELS 140 OVER 200K WEB PAGES ACROSS THE ENTIRE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE 300 SUB BRANDS over
- 10. WHAT ARE YOU HUNGRY FOR?
- 11. Find a common thread “Branded” (shared / public spaces) (individualized / private spaces) “things” THE NETWORKED KITCHEN
- 12. THE NETWORKED KITCHEN Governance ONE UL Content centers: News & Events Knowledge Offerings Resources Help & Support Enterprise view Purpose driven channels: Regional (country/location) Topic (industry/theme) Audience (community) Activity (event, campaign, program, project) Experience (goal, action, journey) Targeted view Satellite sites Shared technology Amplifying Networks
- 13. Offerings News Events Resources Knowledge Help Tools C.A.P.E. - Create (once) Anywhere, Publish Everywhere THE NETWORKED KITCHEN CAPE
- 14. THE RIGHT MIX OF INGREDIENTS X How to design a modern kitchen
- 15. HACKATHON HEAD TO HEAD A very simple proof of concept
- 16. Cloud Site Factory LOCATION A vision for the platform Lift Content Hub
- 17. QUALITY Regardless of the complexity our approach is the same CRC Commercial Resource Center
- 18. CONFIGURE AN EXPERIENCE You know that you’re visiting a UL-owned experience
- 19. TOPIC AUDIENCE REGIONAL CAMPAIGN THE MENU Customization Different businesses have different needs, goals and experiences
- 21. NEWS Card Home Page Press Release Social 3rd Party Sites Print
- 23. The Sandwich Deli is Ready!
- 24. WE ALSO STILL HAVE TURKEY SANDWICHES!!
- 25. © QUESTIONS?
- 26. © THANK YOU! Luis Serpa Andrade - luis.andrade@ul.com
Hinweis der Redaktion
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 1 - A Plain Turkey Sandwich Imagine that your company's main product is a plain turkey sandwich. It is quite enough to support your mission to feed hungry people around the world. Now imagine that, after over 100 years with almost no competition, your sandwich is the most recognized product in your country and your brand is widely respected for its quality, consistency and integrity. You are the ultimate leader of your industry and certain of your success...
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 2 - Complexity Happens Yet nothing remains the same forever... In the past 20 years the world has changed at a progression and a pace unlike any other time in human history. It became smaller and more connected. It became more diverse and refined. It became more demanding and way harder to predict. In short, everything around you became a lot more complicated. And now, your simple Turkey Sandwich is... Just. Not. Enough.
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 2b - Complexity Happens (Introducing UL) In many ways, this is UL's story... For 120 years, UL has been working to make the world a safer place. Our safety standards test pretty much everything you see around you (the lights in this room, the furniture, the wall's insulation, clothes, phones, computers) and also a lot of things you do NOT see (like electronic transactions, wifi signals, water and air quality). (SHOW UL IN NUMBERS ON BACKGROUND SLIDE)
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 2c - Complexity Happens (Introducing UL - Continued) UL's 'Turkey Sandwich' has evolved a lot over the years but the challenges our clients face today are different and, to remain relevant in our mission, we needed to diversify our business even more. (SHOW UL IN NUMBERS ON BACKGROUND SLIDE)
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 2d - Complexity Happens (UL GROWTH) So, in the last 15 years we grew from 300Mi to almost 2Bi in revenue, from 7K employees to over 14K all over the world. We also acquired over 40 new business. In fact, we had 14 new acquisitions in a single year. That's basically a new acquisition announcement per month. Back to our sandwich analogy, you could say that (almost overnight) everything changed and we went from selling just Turkey Sandwiches to selling hot dogs, catering services, Food Truck Logistics Software and everything in between…
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 2E - Complexity Happens (UL GROWTH - EXPLOSION) Layering all of these new things and they get difficult to "stay together"
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 3 - Conflict of Interests This rapid expansion provoked a clash in between the Corporate side of the company (high governance, high control and centralized processes, with low tolerance for change) and the business side of the company (high flexibility and adaptability, focused on innovation, revenue and speed-to-market). Unable to achieve their goals through corporate options, our business divisions went 'rogue'. They built their own systems, websites and processes with little in common with each other.
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 3b - Conflict of Interests (cont.) Fast forward to the end of 2015. A new CMO comes to transform our marketing organization at UL. A new Digital Team is created and we were immediately faced with this challenge: Over 400 distinct digital properties, the majority of which had no relation or connection to each other in any way. Each site trying to represent some aspect of our portfolio of services, with more than 300 sub-brands. In our original audit, we estimated a total of 200,000 pages across the entire digital landscape, only 15% of those coming from our main ul.com property and half of them with no updated content in years. Just to give you a sense of proportion, at the time, we had about 300 people working in Marketing across the globe. That meant EACH marketing person in the company had around 1.5 digital properties w/over 600 pages (interns and contractors included).
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 4 - What are you hungry for? We needed to solve this problem, but it was clear that following the traditional corporate conventions was not going to bring us any closer to the solution. So we decided to look at it from a different angle… What if, instead of trying to put that genie back in its bottle, we embraced our own complexity? What if, instead of combining everything back again into a single website (the definition of insanity anyone?), we found meaningful ways to connect them and let them target their users experiences without fragmenting our brand? That's when we realized we needed to move our marketing people away from managing sites and into authoring content. We needed to stop them from caring about designing pretty pages so they could care more about creating better content. In short, we we needed to build a whole system of distributed gourmet kitchens where our stakeholders would be free to create any sandwiches they could ever imagine.
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 5 - The NETWORKED Kitchen But first we needed to understand what our Stakeholders were using their sites for and try to find a common thread or pattern across all of our digital properties (official or rogue) and understand what was the real purpose behind each one. For that we spent almost a year talking to different business stakeholders and hearing the stories and strategies behind each channel they built or maintained. The resulting view was amazingly simple and easy to plot on a simple scale based on their main strategic goal or purpose: Content was either very generic, talking to broad audiences about our company as a whole (our brand, our mission, our approach and thought leadership) or very segmented, talking to very specific audiences about a very specific 'things' (an industry, a persona, a region, etc). Everything in between lacked clear purpose and, not surprisingly, many did not provide any real ROI.
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 5b - The NETWORKED Kitchen (Governance) (Indusrial, Pop-up and food truck) We also realized that no matter how much we tried, we would never be able to move all of our marketing stakeholders away from “owning” sites so we needed to defined a new approach for site governance based not on central control but on strategic purpose and distribution. An approach that could promote the right behaviors and incentivize our Stakeholders to focus their time on content creation. This led to a governance model akin to real state, with rules and policies based on zones according to your main use of the property (like residential, commercial and industrial zones). Targeted sites would have light governance, following corporate guidelines and supported by common templates and patterns, but free to adjust their experiences to serve their users needs in the best possible way. (Narrow & Deep) The Enterprise Site would be centrally controlled and highly governed, aggregating all content across our targeted sites and presenting it in a uniform and strategic way. (Broad & Shallow) Industrial kitchen, Gourmet kitchen and our satellite views which are like Pop-up kitchens or even food trucks
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 5c - The NETWORKED Kitchen (CAPE) The next (and hardest) step was to define a full set of standards for content syndication, with relationship rules and shared taxonomies. To help explain these ideas and gain agreement from executives around the globe, we created several videos and presentations selling our vision for a new Digital Experience Platform. A platform where Marketing content could be created anywhere and published everywhere in our landscape. We called that CAPE.
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 6 - The Right Mix of Ingredients <LUIS> With the vision defined, budget secured and enough supporters drafted, it was time to make it real. and we knew that to realize this vision, we needed a mix of all of the best ingredients available in the market and, more importantly, we needed to get the right cooks to design our kitchen… and that’s the team we built over the years for just that at Corporate Marketing
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 6d - Back to the Deli (Transition Slide) In order to walk you through how we went about operationalizing this vision, I’d like to take us back to the deli. Hold onto your hats, we’re really going to hammer this analogy home... Let’s think of our marketers sandwich artists to borrow from a company that has a pretty good handle on the sandwich market. What we wanted to do is provide them with the quality equipment, tools, floor plans, branding, well-sourced ingredients and even signature sandwiches to successfully serve their customers.
- One of the first things we did was to head to a test kitchen and develop a very simple proof of concept. In this case, we wanted prove out our content syndication model, which was a key component of the vision. To do so, we partnered with a development group to devise a hackathon where we pitted 2 development teams against each other to develop solutions that would target existing UL sites (many of them on Wordpress) and scrape structured data (content) into a centralized “aggregator” for viewing. After 3 days of development, the teams demoed their solutions to us, neither of which became the foundation for the solution we ultimately implemented (more on that in a second). But the value of the hackathon was that it really set the tone for the two years that followed: Namely, a spirit of partnership that was built on a willingness to think differently, experiment together, and approach things in new ways.
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 6d - Building the Deli (Choosing a Location) suffice to say since we’re here at Engage, UL ultimately chose to go with Drupal and Acquia -- and it really was a no-brainer. There were a number of things that really drew UL to Drupal and Acquia, but I think most importantly to the project, two of Acquia’s products aligned extremely closely with UL’s vision for the platform. Our platform is being built in Drupal 8, using the Acquia Cloud Site Factory product and using Acquia Lift for both personalization and to power content syndication through Acquia Content Hub, which is bundled with Acquia Lift. We were drawn to site factory because it enabled the digital experience team to build, deploy and manage sites at scale from a centralized dashboard, addressing a HUGE pain point with the current set-up. And, with the ACSF JumpStart workshop offered as part of the subscription, soon after all the contractual fun was worked out, we spent 2 days with Renee Stephen from Acquia tackling a whole host of architecture questions to help us chart a path forward. And, because content syndication -- the CAPE model that I outlined -- was so critical to the platform, we also needed a way to achieve that at scale. And it turned out that Acquia Lift, which packages up Acquia Content Hub met the majority of our needs. With content hub, every site on the platform automatically publishes content to the Content Hub. Then individual sites can “subscribe” to specific content on their site and that content will then be syndicated to their site, retaining canonical references, etc.
- So every good deli needs quality equipment -- deli case, refrigerator, slicer, etc. For our platform, beyond the Acquia products I mentioned, we needed to align on a standardized set of tools and equipment for our platform. This ranged from the basic site building blocks like CTA banners, image carousels, sliders and related content views; to more complex integrations with best-in-breed enterprise tools like Marketo and Cloudwords, and even integration with other internal UL systems like our Commercial Resource Center and our Tradeshow Management application. Regardless of the complexity, the approach was the same: build the functionality in an abstracted manner that lives at the base level and then can be customized and configured (depending on governance decisions, etc.) at the individual site type or even individual site level.
- When you walk into a Jimmy John’s or Subway, whether in Anchorage, AK or Zeeland, MI, you’ll know it. In the same way, we wanted to ensure that no matter which digital property in our ecosystem a user visited or how they got there, it was clear that they were visiting a UL-owned experience. We knew that we wanted to enable consistent yet flexible design patterns and theming so that a marketer building a site, or a section of the site, could configure an experience and build out their content in the best possible way to achieve their particular business objective. In other words, we wanted to allow them to focus on optimizing the journey while still ensuring the consistency of experience that protected our brand. In order to enable this, we worked closely with the UL UX and design teams to align on a consistent set of patterns and theming from fonts and colors, to card and button styles, to universal navigation that would be enabled at the base level of the platform. Then enabling a degree of freedom and flexibility to alter/modify these patterns at the site type or even the individual site level through sub-theming. The result is an experience that looks and feels consistently UL, regardless of where you are in the UL ecosystem. Graphics: Show elements of the pattern library? Maybe an animation of scrolling thru it? Because of our distributed model, we needed to enable this at the base platform level, so certain
- One more key element that no deli would be complete without: The menu. Picture this: 2 customers come in at the same time, the first customer orders a Reuben on wheat instead of rye holds the sauerkraut, and the second orders a Reuben as listed but with extra russian dressing. Now, we can debate whether the first order is still, in fact, a Reuben, but the point is, the customers had a starting point from which to customize their sandwiches. In our platform, the equivalent is our site types. We knew that different business needs and experience goals would, by their nature, necessitate a certain set of feature and functionality, so we defined a number of site types -- in our platform that would serve as a starting point for further customization. Site Types (the menu) - BACKGROUND IMAGE: Giant Reuben Sandwich; NEED IMAGE OF THE PLATFORM SITE TYPES/Architecture Diagram
- Another key building block to any successful deli, is sourcing the right high-quality ingredients - and it’s important that the ingredients aren’t so specialized and specific that they can only be used in one sandwich. We had a similar mindset when we architected the various content types for the platform. We wanted to create content types that would be consistent throughout the platform -- something that was essential to our content syndication vision, but that also provided the flexibility to the content owner to communicate their content as they saw fit. This took some trial and error. As Luis mentioned before, we adopted this notion of content domains based on user needs (knowledge, events, etc.) and, at first, we got really granular with the content types -- 3-4 different news content types for example -- but we collectively came to the realization that that approach might prove to be too difficult to manage and maintain as the platform evolves and grows. Instead, we chose to use Drupal Paragraphs extensively on each content type to give marketers the flexibility to create individual content items exactly how they wanted. The result is 1 content type per content domain with a minimal number of required fields to ensure content syndication can be achieved platform-wide, and then a whole bunch of freedom and flexibility per content type for individual authors to deliver their content as they see fit, while remaining on-brand. Content types (ingredients) - IMAGE: Stacks of meat/cheese (maybe images of 2 very different pages of the same content type?)
- Another key building block to any successful deli, is sourcing the right high-quality ingredients - and it’s important that the ingredients aren’t so specialized and specific that they can only be used in one sandwich. We had a similar mindset when we architected the various content types for the platform. We wanted to create content types that would be consistent throughout the platform -- something that was essential to our content syndication vision, but that also provided the flexibility to the content owner to communicate their content as they saw fit. This took some trial and error. As Luis mentioned before, we adopted this notion of content domains based on user needs (knowledge, events, etc.) and, at first, we got really granular with the content types -- 3-4 different news content types for example -- but we collectively came to the realization that that approach might prove to be too difficult to manage and maintain as the platform evolves and grows. Instead, we chose to use Drupal Paragraphs extensively on each content type to give marketers the flexibility to create individual content items exactly how they wanted. The result is 1 content type per content domain with a minimal number of required fields to ensure content syndication can be achieved platform-wide, and then a whole bunch of freedom and flexibility per content type for individual authors to deliver their content as they see fit, while remaining on-brand. Content types (ingredients) - IMAGE: Stacks of meat/cheese (maybe images of 2 very different pages of the same content type?)
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 7 - Recipe for Change INGREDIENTS: 4 QT of Vision & Strategy 3 Tbsp of Executive Support 2 ½ Cups of Sliced Data 1 Full Guiding Coalition 5 Ounces of Short-Term Wins 1 Pound of Communication Flexibility, Cut to Taste A Pinch of Good Luck DIRECTIONS: Stir your vision & strategy for as long as you can, mixing it with Executive support. There's no wrong at this point so put all you have into it. Pour data and heat it up to create enough sense of urgency. Add a full guiding coalition of stakeholders and partners. Stir well to keep it from losing steam. Spread short-term wins during the entire process to keep general interest and support. Combine communication with as much flexibility as needed. Sprinkle good luck if available. Serve while still warm! _____ More notes: Obtain Buy-In Early taking a critical look at not just the current landscape, but the underlying behaviors that contributed to arriving where communicating comprehensively Reduce complexity at every possible juncture. Always approach any need – whether UX, design, or functionality – with the simplest approach first The more complex the approach, the more limited the solve Solving for a single instance runs the risk of reverting back to an “individual build” mindset Define, implement, release, and then iterate Expect, and plan for, change. Treat the platform build as an organic task. Requirements will change as the project matures, and opportunities for optimization should be continually embraced Expectations must be set early on that initial deliverables approved for a platform (design comps or wireframes, for example) are likely to change over time
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 8 - The Dinner Deli is Ready! That brings us to today… So how did we do? Well, the jury is still out. Our 'Deli' platform is ready for use and "cooks" across the entire company have started to play with it, creating their content and solutions on it. Early feedback is positive and we even had the biggest possible proof of our approach and vision: A month before the launch of the platform, we had a major reorganization in the company. Our 3 main business units were mixed together and combined into 2 new BUs. This changed the structure of all of our Divisions and impacted all of our stakeholders. And, still, we had less than a week impact to our platform development, since its architecture had already been designed for flexible, distributed and always changing business structures/taxonomies. ____ The work we did allowed us to be flexible and serve the needs of the organization. For all of you insipired chefs trying to build the perfect menu, my last point is that it is worth taking the time to think your solution for the long term.
- OUTLINE DETAILS - STEP 9 - Still the same Turkey Sandwich AND WE ALSO STILL SELL TURKEY SANDWICHES!! It is now AI assisted, customized on order via app, 3D printed locally & delivered to your house by drones…. But, you know, the same old Turkey Sandwich… ;-)