I’ve been working in online media since 1997, when I took a job as Site Editor of Interactive Investor. Since then, I’ve worked on a number of things (you can see all the details on my LinkedIn profile), but all my work has really been about combining content with technology and commercial opportunity. Essentially, I call myself a “product manager”.
My two most significant employers have probably been the Guardian, where I worked for five years and rose to become Deputy Director for Digital Publishing, and Yahoo, where I had two separate stints: one as director of product development for Yahoo UK and Ireland; and one as Head of Sport, News and Finance for Yahoo Europe.
At the Guardian, I ran a team of product managers, developers and user evangelists. I essentially operated the delivery function for the site’s editorial and commercial teams, and worked very closely with Emily Bell and Adam Freeman in their respective roles. During this time, the Guardian became (and remained) the number one British newspaper website, and in 2005 I was lucky enough to pick up the Webby in New York for Best Online Newspaper.
At Yahoo, I also ran a product management and delivery function, managing a team of producers and developers. When I took over as head of news, sport and finance, I also head P&L responsibilities as well as having overall control of the product development roadmap.
This page is an attempt to synthesise what I think are the most interesting and relevant individual projects I’ve had a hand in.
guardian.co.uk redesign
Like many newspaper websites, guardian.co.uk (or Guardian Unlimited as it was then) found itself at a crossroads in 2002/2003. The technology it had used since launch was creaking, and many of the assumptions about how people would use the Web in 1998 were no longer true. Plus, the Guardian wanted to expand on its great success and become a truly global online brand. From an initial paper called Guardian Everywhere which I co-wrote with CTO Stephen Dunn in 2003, we pushed for two years for a major strategic reinvestment in the underlying technology of the website, and a new sharper focus on mass-availability, which we characterised as PAD – Permanent, Accessible and Discoverable. We secured board backing for the project in 2005, and the project kicked off with Thoughtworks as the technology partner in the same year. I left the Guardian to return to Yahoo in 2006, and there remained a huge mountain of work to get done before the site could begin to relaunch in 2007 onwards, but the work we started in 2003 laid the foundations for guardian.co.uk’s enormous success today.
Yahoo! UK and Ireland
In 1998, when I joined Yahoo! UK and Ireland, the site essentially consisted of a search engine, a directory and basic news services in sports, news and finance. Three years later, when I left, we had launched the richest portal of services in the country, including Mail, Shopping, Classifieds, My Yahoo, Auctions, Messenger, Message Boards and Groups, as well as dramatically improving the news, finance and sports services with new features. It was the most intense professional period of my life, and the enormous speed with which we delivered new services, combined with the breakneck expansion of the team, made for a tremendously fluid and exciting time. What happened subsequently at Yahoo may not have been quite so urgently productive, but at the turn of the century it was the most amazing place to work in media.
Yahoo Eurosport
During my second stint at Yahoo I was business and product owner for Sport, News and Finance across Europe, with overall P&L responsibility for a business worth almost £20 million a year. During this time we were approached by Eurosport with a proposal: to merge the Sports offerings of both companies and create a single sports destination for Europe. The deal was done and the sites delivered in less than six months, a huge testament to both teams, and the final results were compelling, combining Yahoo’s web technology and online community skills with Eurosport’s broadcast and sales expertise. I negotiated the contract and was also ultimate product owner for the rebuild.
Grazia website
In 2008, I was asked by Bauer to consult on a Grazia web project. At the time, Grazia’s web presence was essentially just an email sign-up form, and the editorial team wanted to extend their print success into 24/7 digital content, but without a major investment in new staff. There was also no significant technical resource available to build a new platform for Grazia. After interviewing stakeholders, I recommended that Grazia build a blog-based environment using existing Bauer technology. This could be done cheaply and quickly. I also worked with the editorial teams to show how the work they were already doing could efficiently supply compelling content to the new website. The site launched successfully only a few weeks later, and is still a creative and successful online experience today.
Tony Blair websites
In 2007/2008, when my partner Andrew Levy and I were operating our company MessyMedia, we were approached by Tony Blair’s office to work on a set of new websites for Blair’s political projects: specifically, the Faith Foundation and the Sports Foundation. There was no significant budget for these projects (which also needed to include an email channel), so we successfully built some attractive platforms in Movable Type as a cost-effective and just-flexible-enough content management solution. As budgets increased, these original sites have now been superceded.
Channel 4 Future Media
In 2009 I was asked by Jon Gisby, then head of new media at Channel 4, to act as consultant on the restructuring of Channel 4′s new media and information solutions divisions, to create a new Future Media department. This was done at a time of great uncertainty for the channel, with a major redundancy programme running alongside the future media restructure. We successfully merged the two divisions and also created a new product development function to guide future investment in digital properties.
