Dog food is not the only option
When we first thought about setting up a blog for our product and engineering teams, the obvious solution was to publish on our own platform. Eating your own dog food, as popularised by Microsoft and adopted by Google and Facebook, forces you to see it from the user’s perspective, or so the theory goes.
As a news publisher with over 30 national and regional websites, we have a CMS that can handle everything from words and pictures to videos, polls and live blogs. We also have a framework that supports multiple sites with their own branding. We can publish stuff on the interwebs, no problem.
So why didn’t we spoon our dog food into an extra bowl?
First, all our systems are designed to run at scale. Across our sites, we publish upwards of 1,000 articles per day and serve over 100 million unique browsers each month. I’d be surprised if this blog gets to 1,000 posts over the next 10 years, so putting it on our platform would be like buying out Pedigree to make sure your puppy doesn’t starve. We’d need to remove functionality from our standard framework to run a blog as small as this, and that’d take some work.
It’s nice to give something back to the product and engineering communities through this blog, and it helps people get a feel for our team if they’re thinking about joining us. However, our focus is on supporting the growth of our digital brands. It’d be hard to prioritise designing and coding our own blog when we can use Medium for the cost of finding a header image and spending half an hour in the Help Centre.
We’ve chosen to let people write as individuals, using their personal accounts. That means someone might leave and choose to withdraw their posts, but that’s okay. We’re trying to start a conversation, not create a publication of record. Given the pace of change, it won’t matter if this post doesn’t exist in five years’ time.
Finally, using our own CMS wouldn’t teach us how our editorial teams use it. We’re not journalists, writing under pressure, trying to make sense of rapidly evolving situations such as the terrorist attacks in Belgium. We aren’t repurposing an article from the paper, optimising for SEO, checking with legal or writing a second headline for social. Conversely, we understand what’s going on behind the editorial interface, so things that seem exasperatingly illogical to the writers make complete sense to us.
To understand our users, we can’t use the CMS as we’d use it; we need to sit with them, watch how they work and ask careful questions to understand how they use it. That’s much more informative than stealing their food.
