Continuous Lifecycle London: After the launch: the difficult teenage years

— 2 minute read

In 'After the launch: the difficult teenage years' Anna Shipman talks about how she created a digital strategy after the launch of the new Financial Times website. Check out my notes if you want a quick overview but you should probably do yourself a favour and check out Anna's notes and follow up article.

Checkout the video here: https://youtu.be/EkfqgQXfEv8

After the launch: the difficult teenage years

Notes

  • The FT use an engagement score RFV (Recency, Frequency and Volume). Hitting over 18.2 will mean you’re likely to resubscribe. This means they can focus their attention on things which get users engagement above this value.

  • The FT experimented with running an A/B test to slow down the site for some users to see what impact that had. This allowed them to create compelling data for improving performance.

What were the difficult teenage years?

  • Lack of clear vision
  • Tech drifting off track
  • Things not communicated as well as they used to be

Strategy

What does a good strategy consist of?

  1. Diagnosis
  2. Vision
  3. How to get there

Vision

  • What does good look like for your project?
  • Might be that vision after launch is same as for launch
  • The FT brought on an external facilitator to help with the FT.com product vision because there were a lot of people involved who had ownership in the new site. Big discussions need facilitating.
  • Vision is crucial and you’ll have to work harder to defend that vision after launch
  • Use the vision to communicate where we are heading

How to get there

  • Identify the highest impact areas to work on
  • Tell people what the next steps are
  • You must communicate the vision. You must communicate your tech priorties. It will be new to someone every time you say it
  • You can have the best vision or strategy but if no one knows about it it’s worthless