Beyond the ask
Shifting a web publishing platform into high gear
When I joined Verizon Labs in 2016, many of the innovation initiatives around me needed polished websites to help them gain traction with leaders in my technology group and their commercial product peers who owned go-to-market.
All of those sites were made from scratch in HTML5, Angular and other frameworks. None were reusable.
So, in early 2017, when my director requested website publishing velocity accelerate from months to weeks, I knew I was sitting on the solution.
My small but protean team had inherited a basic Drupal CMS used for early products, like FreeBee Data.
But it lacked the technical integrations required for such ambitions; and, moreover, it wasn’t robust and modular.
Yet.
A fast lane to scalability
To meet the challenge head-on, I expanded my team with three critical roles — web developer, UX designer and product manager — and negotiated a professional services agreement with Acquia.
The combined Verizon-Acquia development team quickly got to work standardizing content modules and deployment practices, inching my group closer to efficient reuse across web development projects.
Together, this bi-costal team churned out enhancements in content management, user roles and site-building workflows, ensuring the nascent web development platform could simultaneously support multiple projects.
To ensure smooth technical integration, the team also supported Verizon’s SAML-based authentication workflows for secure and cohesive user experiences, and it addressed Verizon’s stringent DNS mapping requirements, so future sites wouldn’t have to stress over domain configs and compliance.
Surpassing expectations
The first litmus test, a site we’d recently mocked up for Verizon’s cloud platform for running micro-services in containers, was developed in two weeks time.
So briskly, we added a few extra days of system, unit and smoke testing to ensure there were no velocity-induced imperfections before showcasing the results.
The cloud platform site and the operational story behind it received VP acknowledgment, reinforcing the value of the newly beefed-up platform.
Our agility continued to pass future tests.
Multiple templatized websites were stoop up in rapid succession. Standardized workflows, modular practices and adherence to technical constraints helped increase time-to-launch and decrease operational costs.
By translating leadership’s ask into an opportunity for scalable innovation, this initiative established a publishing platform that not only met immediate demands but also delivered enduring impact.
Technologies
• Drupal 8 • HTML5 • CSS • RESTFUL APIs • SAML • Travis CI • AWS services (RDS, ELB + Lambda) • Apache • Crashlytics/Fabric • Zeplin • Sketch • Adobe • Git • Madcap Flare • Markdown