Welcome to the Metro Product & Technology Blog
Welcome to the Metro Product & Technology Blog. The voice of the teams behind The Age, The Australian Financial Review & The Sydney Morning Herald.
We’ve set out to share insights from our journey over the past few years, and the transformation we’ve undertaken.
As one team spanning Product & Technology disciplines, this blog will cover everything from product & research strategy through to technical topics such as Kubernetes controllers for the spot market. Things that have gone well, and hopefully some salient lessons for those that did not. We hope to do this with passion and humility in sharing what we have learnt. Learning is central to our culture, and this blog is an open diary of our desire to do just that.
Over the past two years, we’ve undergone a profound transformation as a team. A wholesale reboot of our products and the technology landscape. A rare opportunity for a large business, faced with an existential question to commit willingly to rebuilding itself — consciously choosing to “disrupt from within”.
This scale of change mirrors much of what has occurred within the industry as a whole. What makes our experience more unusual, is the way in which we’ve attempted to use it to our advantage, to not resist or blindly defend. Starting from a ‘clean slate’ we’ve aimed to rebuild our product and publishing landscape from the ground up. This blog is what we have learnt from this exercise.
This change has been tumultuous. The modern media landscape for publishers has been about survival. With the right strategy, team capability and a strong open culture, we believe it can be a compelling journey of reinvention and adaptation.
It’s my personal view that there’s no greater time to be involved in media than this historical period we’re living through; an industry with few barriers to entry that adjusts and embraces the challenges ahead of it.
I’m immensely proud of the team we’ve formed and the achievements we’ve delivered.
Hopefully, you can find something to be inspired by, as I am, in this blog.
Damian Cronan
Chief Technology Officer
