Doing a lot with a little at Pitchfork

Transcript

1. Innovation
 on the inside
2. Hello • I’m Matt Dennewitz <@mattdennewitz> • VP Technology @ Pitchfork <@pitchforkmedia> • First full-time developer, now heading up product and engineering efforts
3. Pitchfork • Most influential music publication on the ‘net. • Founded in 1995, run from Chicago since ’99.
4. Pitchfork • Two music festivals (Chicago, Paris) • Pitchfork.tv, Nothing Major, The Dissolve • Weekly mobile app • The Pitchfork Review
5. This talk is about how we create a lot from a little
6. • In the beginning, there was 1 developer • No time for non-essential work. New features had to be essential. • From great constraint came great agility. • Had to grow the team(s) to survive, had to rethink what an online publication could be.
7. • Now 4 developers, 4 designers. • Hire weirdos. Don’t silo. • Invest in people, not products. Let people define 
 your products. • Continue to embrace constraint. • Constantly rethinking what an online publication can mean.
8. In three parts Things we’ve done with what we have
9. 1. 
 Defining what development and design mean to us
10. • Embrace that reading is a feeling. • Goal: understand and satisfy the reader’s
 need to feel.
11. • Embrace browsing as a medium. • Goal: build the tools necessary to remove the browser from the browser.
12. • The emotions we want to evoke are a by-product of combining of substantive writing, beautiful design, and solid engineering. • regardless of platform
13. • Principle: enable ourselves to focus on engineering, design, and content in equal measure
14. 2. Building tools
15. • We only build the tools we need, and put extra care into them.
16. • Use them to build the best features for
 our readers.
17. • Use them to build excellent tools for our staff.
18. • Do not build what you cannot maintain. • Build only what enables you to continue building. • Ex: Django’s admin is fine for basic work. We build tools for our staff to improve their workflow.
19. zineutil
20. zineutil • Set of reusable Javascript interaction and design components, broken into units of work • Each unit serves a single purpose (image fitting, video control, parallaxing). • Used in almost everything we do.
21. Next-gen content design platform longform
22. Problems: • Trying to do even basic custom design work within a CMS text editor can be a cruel joke. • Design and dev concerns need to be removed from editorial workflow.
23. Solutions: • We built a platform where writers build stories from pre-designed atomic elements. • Dev and design can quickly build reusable components to suit editorial needs. • Editorial focuses exclusively on writing and arrangement.
24. 3. Storytelling
25. Advance
26. Problems: • Wanted to offer pre-release streams to artists • Most pre-release streams do the music no favors • How can we put albums in front of our readers before stamping a number on it?
27. Solutions: • Give bands and labels a full-screen blank canvas, to be filled with video and artwork they make. • Give listeners a real chance with the music: 
 stream the album for one week prior to its release, and our scoring.
28. Outcome: • Totally immersive, distraction-free experience for listening to music. • Listeners engage with the music and artwork as they would a real album.
30. Cover Stories
31. Problems: • Craftsmanship put into our best writing wasn’t reciprocated by dev and design. • Not capitalizing on the potential a story has to be more than its words. • Need to sharpen the distinction between good and disposable content.
32. Goals: • Focus on new and innovative ways to showcase our content. • Amplify content with context: photography, video, and music. • Exploit powerful modern tech to push browsers as a medium for beautiful storytelling.
33. Solutions: • Seamless integration between media into content–words flow into video and artwork. • Use the whole team to create totally custom experiences tailored to each story’s subject
 and flow.
36. • We do what’s best for our readers and ourselves. • We do it with what we have or can build. • Every process is tuned for optimal
 resource usage, just like a web app • Our benchmark: we look back and see that everyone’s trying to interrupt a conversation we’ve already moved on from.
37. Let’s do some Q&A Thank you