Zero-to-100: The Year of Muse
Intro
Change is hard. Winning users over to use a brand new tool is a challenge, no matter what product line or industry you’re in.
My name is John Laslo, and I’ve been a Product Manager at Business Insider with the Story Creation and Editorial Experience team since April of 2019. The team is dedicated to creatively empowering our users with a world class, cutting edge publishing platform. This platform optimizes speed and innovation, allowing our global editorial newsrooms to compose, edit, and publish stories for our readers.
Over the past few years, we’ve been in the process of sunsetting our legacy system while building a new product from scratch. In March of 2022, we launched the beta version of our next-generation content management system (CMS) called Muse to a small group of power users.
The early goals were to validate the enhanced user experience and stability with real business use cases. We wanted to strengthen the product while simultaneously converting as many newsroom members as possible to start using it for their daily work.
After several months, we needed to improve the low velocity of content publishing and user adoption. We knew we were going to have to transition the entire newsroom to the new tool someday soon. At the time, our early stages of development were slow and our projects were taking too long to complete.
In hindsight, these symptoms were natural, but at the time, they felt daunting.
Planning for 2023
Heading into 2023, we were up against some lofty goals.
We needed to grow the business value that Muse was generating, and we needed to increase the amount of users in Muse. How could we accomplish this knowing how difficult it is to change users’ habits? Do we try to build new and exciting differentiator features that sets it apart from the old product? Do we instill a deadline for switching to the new tool?
Regardless of the approach, we knew that we needed to continue porting over the core legacy tools to support as many editorial teams and workflows as possible. We believed that the more story formats we could support, the more users we could onboard and convert to working solely in Muse.
The Target
By the end of the year we wanted to help the team create and publish 92% of story content in Muse. To come up with this target, we did preliminary research to determine which formats of our stories produce the greatest amount of content from the newsroom. What we ended up including on the 2023 roadmap was:
- Contributor content — For attributing third-party stories we host
- Slideshows — Visual storytelling features and scroll experiences for readers
- Liveblogs — Presentations of live and developing event coverage
- Exceptional Storytelling, for premium content and deep investigative journalism
- Service Journalism formats, such as PFI stories, which support our commerce and affiliate revenue generating content
Taking a step back and looking at the aspirational roadmap in front of us, my first reaction was, “YIKES!”
The Challenge
The immediate challenge was our dependency on other software teams. Building in parallel was the only way we could realistically deliver all of this, and even with additional help, it seemed like a tall order.
Our Story Engagement team owned the Exceptional Storytelling and Liveblog format, and our Story Helpfulness team owned all Service Journalism tools. At the time, we had no working agreements. We had no solidified cross-team collaboration, UX design, or code contribution processes.
What if we couldn’t get their commitment to prioritize building their toolsets in 2023? Surely, they had their own objectives and initiatives for the new year. The rate we were delivering was slow, and further, we were dedicating half of our team to other technical debt deprecation initiatives for the legacy back end services.
“We’ll be lucky if we ship even 2 out of 5 of these formats this year,” I thought to myself.
Themes
The objective now was finding a way to scale process and architecture to receive contributions from the other feature teams. An old idea popped into my head, and it felt like the opportunity to prioritize it was finally upon us.
The concept gives the user the ability to select from a library of Story Formats where the writing space can change dynamically to provide them with the appropriate tools to create stories on the backend (CMS). We wanted these stories to mirror how the article would look upon being published to the front end of our website.
Additionally, it would help solve a pain point for our editorial users who had too many tools crammed into the same workspace and hidden away unintuitively.
In collaboration with our partners in the Story Engagement and Delivery & Distribution teams, we designed the architecture proposal for the feature and decided to name it Themes.
Throughout the first quarter, we worked through refactoring the story editor codebase to be conscious of this new architecture, while the Story Engagement team set forth designing and developing our first live theme in production: Exceptional Storytelling. We onboarded them, developed working agreements, and provided hands-on support as they learned the new codebases.
It was crucial for our team to complete the foundational work for Themes on schedule, and thanks to the flexibility and developer experience of our new codebases, our team was able to complete the work before the end of the first quarter. This laid the foundation to scale the development of story formats through the rest of the year.
The Multiplier Effect
Once Themes were live, they became the biggest accelerator to hitting our goals.
The original plan was to release the Exceptional Storytelling theme as the first official story format users could switch between, with a target of a Q3 production release. While this remained on track, our lead engineer, Chase Gruber, saw an opportunity for a story format that wasn’t even on the 2023 roadmap: Custom Pages.
In early July, Chase quickly developed a proof of concept template for producing and publishing Custom Pages in Muse using the Themes framework. Within two weeks, we were able to launch the first official Theme and onboard the portion of our newsroom responsible for building Custom Pages.
Soon after, thanks to the effective partnership and parallel development, our Story Engagement team launched the Exceptional Storytelling theme and onboarded that set of users. We now had 3 story formats fully supported.
Before we knew it, we were shipping new formats with ease. Our Story Helpfulness team prioritized the features needed to support affiliate revenue-generating Service Journalism content in Muse and were able to support more users.
We launched a total of 4 new story formats in 2023.
The Learnings
This team’s sudden and rapid success in 2023 was the culmination of all the years of foundational work that went in prior. It validated a major decision that the business made to pivot into building the next generation CMS from scratch instead of continuing to upgrade what we had in place.
If there’s anything I learned on this journey, it’s to try to remember the original vision, and believe in it.
Maintaining the legacy tool felt painful and fruitless, it wasn’t sustainable for the health and success of the company. A core value of the pitch to our leadership team was maximizing the developer experience, which in turn would optimize the quality and output of software we ship for our product. Building from scratch with a choice tech stack was the only path forward.
That said, building from the ground up isn’t easy. In fact, it’s by and large advised against.
You’re going to hit bumps. You’re going to put out fires. You’re going to hit difficult decisions and wonder if this was the right choice. You’re going to hear both affirming and painful feedback from your users, and from there you may try rebuilding an experience once, twice — as many times as it takes to get it right. The more time and effort you put into iterating and refining the product, the better product you provide.
And when the product is right, the users can’t wait to get their hands on it.
Conclusion
While there’s always room for improvement, we are optimistic about turning the page and looking toward exciting and innovative visions for our newsroom and business. We look forward to 2024, and the bright future of Muse, Business Insider’s new CMS.
Credits:
Engineering: Daniel Arita, Dawin Camillo, Frederica Chen, Graham Davidson, Danny Feliz, Corey Gahafer, Tyler Greenfield, Chase Gruber, Dasha Lary, Sarah Pai, Jon Peck
Design: Emily Wong
Operations: Tracey Robinson
Product: John Laslo & Kelly Filush
