About Steve
In this episode, we talk with Steve Persch. Steve is the Technical Product Marketing Manager at Pantheon, a WebOp platform for agile teams. Steve began his career in the marketing department of the Lookingglass theatre company in Chicago, managing their website and other digital marketing efforts. From there Steve became a developer working with WordPress and Drupal. After many years in the Drupal community, Steve joined Pantheon in 2015. After four years in Developer Relations, Steve just moved over to Product Marketing.
Project Pick:
The Internet Button:
Interview:
- Can you tell us about yourself Steve and the company you’re Technical Product Marketing Manager for?
- Can you explain what agile marketing is for our listeners?
- How is agile marketing different? What kind of performance can organizations expect compared to traditional or textbook marketing approaches?
- How does open source software play a role in agile marketing?
- Do you have any success stories you can share about how agile marketing has improved a team or client's performance?
- How can our listeners get started in agile marketing? What are the 1st 3 steps?
- What well-known companies can you think of who are having a lot of success with agile marketing?
- For organizations who employ agile marketing, how much success are they having compared to those organizations that haven’t invested in agile marketing?
- How do you see the practice of agile marketing evolving over the next 5 years?
Can you name one or two things that are critical to being a successful agile marketer?
That’s it for today’s show, thanks for joining us! Looking for more useful tips, technical takeaways, and creative insights? Visit mediacurrent.com/podcast to subscribe and hear more episodes.
Transcript
Mark Casias: Welcome to Mediacurrent's Open Waters Podcast, navigating the intersection between open source technology and marketing. I'm Mark Casias along with my plucky cohost, Bob Kepford.
Bob Kepford: How's everybody doing?
Mark: And Mario Hernandez
Mario Hernandez: Hello, everyone.
Mark: I was expecting some kind of reaction to calling you plucky cohost. Come on guys.
Bob: Just gonna let it go.
Mark: We need to work on our banter. We need to work on our banter. This episode, we will be talking with Steve Persch. Steve is the Technical Product Marketing Manager at Pantheon, a web ops platform for agile teams. Steve began his career in the marketing department of Lookingglass Theatre. It's a company in Chicago or is it The Lookingglass theatre?
Steve Persch: The Lookingglass Theatre Company
Mark: Yeah. Okay. See you knew I'd read it one way, mess it up a second way, and then have you correct me. He was managing their website and doing the other digital marketing efforts. From there Steve became a developer working with WordPress and Drupal, and after many years in the Drupal community, Steve joined Pantheon in 2015, after four years of developer relations, which I wanna know what developer relations means. Steve moved over to product marketing, which I wanna know what product marketing means. Welcome Steve is what I'm trying to say.
Steve: Hello. Hello. Happy to be here.
Mark: Cool. So as you know, we began the episode with what would we call the pro project pick or just the project pick we have yet to land on a full name on it. And we were wondering if you could give us what your, you would pick.
Steve: Sure. So one thing I've done a couple of conference presentations about over the years is this device called the internet button. And, and the reason I like presenting about is because it's not a terribly practical device, but it's a device that's helped me often level up my own developer skills through side projects. So like literally it's a small button, like about the size of a coaster and it's got four directional buttons up down left, right? And it has a ring of 11 LEDs. It can play monophonic sound, it can do little vibrations and, and it connects to the internet. So, you can hook it up to all sorts of internet things. The, the main thing I've hooked it up to is a continuous integration pipeline. Basically I've in my job, am partially or, or solely in some cases responsible for various repositories, personal repositories, Pantheon repositories.
Steve: And I really like those continuous integration build statuses, just like yellow or red. Did the nightly pass, did the nightly tests pass last night? Does Pantheon advanced page cash still work or did something break red or, or green? And I thought I could translate that to this internet button. So I, I first presented on it at, at MidCamp, 2017. And then again at the couple days this year, and somewhat unrelated to the internet button, I've got this online persona of fake Al gore. So at, at DevOps days this year in Minneapolis, I did a five minute lightning talk as Al gore talking about this internet button. And that was a lot of fun.
Mark: So you created the internet with this button.
Steve: Exactly. Yeah. Like Al gore did
Mark: That's awesome. Yeah.
Steve: That's the, that's how that works.
Mario: Yeah. We need to get one of those buttons ourselves. So, definitely gonna try that.
Steve: Yeah. I think you can expense it.
Mario: Oh, really? Okay, good. Yeah,
Steve: Definitely.
Mario: Before we get too deep into that, can you tell us about yourself and the company you're a Technical Product Marketing Manager for?
Steve: Sure. So I think the, the most easy, easy way for me to introduce myself and Pantheon is to talk like the first project that I put on Pantheon. So, we heard in that introduction that I came from a background of making websites, first theatre websites, and then all sorts of websites, eventually working for, a major Drupal focused agency in Chicago.
Steve: And in, in my time there, I went from an engineer on projects to eventually tech leading and the, the first time I was a tech lead on, on a project at that company, I was nervous about a lot of things going into the project. Like it had a particularly tight budget, a long list of requirements. It being the first time I was, I was going to be tech lead. Like I was nervous about the people I'd be tech leading.
Steve: Like these were some Drupal developers with, with big reputation. Some who had like, literally written the book on Drupal 7 and here I was acting as tech lead that made me nervous. It was the first time I was doing like an end to end responsive project. Like I had made my own personal website responsive. I done some other small responsive work, but this would be the first time where we're rebuilding a website entirely and it's gotta be responsive.
Steve: Felt like a new thing in 2012, 2013, be the first project where we were, we were doing agile. At least that's what we were telling ourselves. We had just gone through like an agile training. So we're gonna do this project with daily standups and user stories and sprints and end of sprint demos. And we're gonna do retrospectives at the end of sprints and it's gonna be amazing.
Steve: And then also it has a fixed budget, fixed timeline and, and those kind of in contrast to the idea that, that we were being agile, but we proceeded anyway. And then like the site itself felt complex. And like the last thing I wanted to be responsible for on top of all those other things is like, where is this website actually going? We, we tried as a company to like scope ourselves out of being responsible for the final production infrastructure.
Steve: That just wasn't our core expertise. So often that was another company, or it was like internal resources at our client, had the capacity to run the servers. And that's where we were starting from, with, with this customer. They had been running their Drupal 6 site for, for years. It was fine, but they also wanted to get out of the business of running production infrastructure.
Steve: So, Pantheon was relatively new at the time. It looked promising and within a few calls, a few conversations, our customer was totally on board with the idea of using Pantheon. I had tried it out for my own personal site and, and loved what I saw and it made the project go much more smoothly. It was one less thing to worry about. The, the idea of a dev test live deployment pipeline, which I had tried to do. And, and often was successful doing for any project was just there out of the box with Pantheon.
Steve: It was, it was pretty much the core feature that Pantheon started with the idea that I can push my, my well structured Drupal code to a get repository. And it's just going to work on Pantheon since then. Pantheon has added a, a lot more features that, that go beyond the idea of, of just hosting or, or just dev test live pipeline. But that was, that was the foundation, that's what got me hooked. And now you know, many years later I still enjoy talking about how, how developers and how web teams as a whole can be much more productive with Pantheon.
Mario: Oh, that sounds pretty neat. You mentioned agile there in your response and in the context of marketing, can you explain to our listeners what agile marketing means or what it is?
Steve: Sure. So, so agile marketing is, is kind of the confluence of, of at least two trends. So just starting with, with agile in general, it's this, this community of, of often technology practitioners who have recognized patterns in, in being more productive. So if, if we start with the idea that software projects like our inherently risky, especially at, at larger companies, like the, one of the existential risks you would have with any software project at a big company, is that it could just get canceled halfway through.
Steve: If, if we start from the context a lot of this thinking came out of the nineties where any software project of any significant scale is going to be measured in like quarters, if not years, and a risk is that the project could get canceled before any value whatsoever is delivered. The project could get canceled a year in, and you've seen zero value actually delivered.
Steve: So how can we minimize that risk that, that we get no value whatsoever? And then how can we actually maximize the value we're getting? So, agile practices in, in general are, are often about delivering the highest value items, first structuring work structuring requirements for, for a software project, so that the most valuable things get delivered first, because there is that existential risk of the whole thing gets canceled.
Steve: And if it does, at least we've done the most important stuff first, as opposed to thinking about what, hypothetically, is the order of operations that will let us complete the whole thing in the least amount of time where often that, that guess that guess could be wrong. And you could be canceled halfway through having to delivered like a foundation with, with nothing actually built on top of it. So, so agile is, is proceeding over the past few decades, mainly with technology practitioners.
Steve: And then you also have marketers who through through similar cultural and business forces are, are also getting pressured to like deliver more value faster, sooner, and often working with technologists, seeing those trends, agile marketing is, is, is essentially the question of how can we minimize risk maximize value in, in the marketing space, I've been working more and more with Josh Koenig, our, our co-founder and head of product in my new role as Technical Product Marketing Manager.
Steve: And, and he is using the phrase "shipping" a lot, like in his main role as, as Head of Product he's concerned with how is Pantheon shipping features? How are we getting stuff out the door? And he is bringing a similar mentality to, to his working relationship with marketing, that there are marketing deliverables, blog, posts, webinars, all these tangible things that the marketing team has to deliver. How can we ship those tangible things faster? And agile marketing is, is one way we can think about shipping faster and more predictably.
Bob: You said a whole lot of things there, Steve. I was on skip, I was on skip there for a second in my brain. How is agile marketing different than say traditional marketing? And, you know, I, that's kind of an open question, but what kind of performance, I mean, maybe a way to think about this is what kind of performance can organizations expect when they compare the two, you know, the agile approach versus traditional?
Steve: Sure. So with traditional marketing, there's, there's often, the, the thought or the assumption that big releases or big launches are, are the centerpiece. They're the bulk of the work that for the company being marketed, there will be some new thing. If, if we just like restrict ourselves to the technology space, our tech company is, is going to release some new feature and the marketing team will need to market that primarily through a big bang launch, where on, on one day we'll release all these various marketing assets and we'll be dependent on those large, big bang launches to drive all of our metrics.
Steve: Like our number of marketing qualified leads, our, our net new names, our impressions, like whatever quantitative goals we have as, as a marketing team will be dependent largely on those, those somewhat one time big bang releases a team adopting an agile mindset as is going to think more in terms of how can we move the needle progressively one day at a time, one week at a time, one month at a time, rather than in this quarter, we're gonna do one big thing and it has to go well because our, our success is entirely dependent on that one big thing
Bob: That makes a lot of sense. So kinda way I'm understanding it just to make sure I'm getting it because I, it's a new concept to me actually. It sounds like you're, you're working towards more short term goals within a long term goal and mind still, but you're not putting all of your hopes and aspirations on this one, single basket of work towards your marketing goals, but instead you're, you're breaking it up into how we would do a software project kind of the parallel like waterfall versus agile.
Steve: Exactly, exactly. I think that's, that's a really good comparison. And, and if the, the agile community on the software side breaks down a waterfall project where there's one huge release at the end and says, we're going to do sprints where we have, or if you buy into the, the full scrum philosophy and, and the specifics of scrum, you'll, you'll get this idea of like, there's going to be an increment.
Steve: That's, that's the word that scrum uses at the end of the sprint, we'll have an increment of releasable work, and that's the thing we do it every two weeks or so. And that's, that's better than the one big release at the end of the year or at the end of the quarter or whatever, bigger unit of time. I think it's, it's trending even smaller than that for both software and marketing, rather than what are we going to release at the end of the sprint, some teams are getting to the idea of like, what are we releasing today?
Steve: What are we releasing this hour, especially with, with a marketing team where like the, the individual individual units of work are, are Tweet size, literally Tweets. A marketing team might need to be thinking day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. What are we tweeting? What do we need to be tweeting about? Because, the, the, the way that question is going to get answered will be dependent on things beyond your control. You can't answer the question, what are we tweeting about entirely a quarter in advance, or even we can advance or a day in advance.
Mark: So you mentioned software, how do you think open source software, what kind of role does that play with agile marketing?
Steve: So probably the, the top level reaction, I think for, for people who are coming from the marketing perspective is, oh, I don't need to, to set aside a budget for this it's free. And I, on one level sure. Like that's, that might get you in, in the open source door, the idea that you can use a tool like Drupal, or, or WordPress and not have to pay for it. I, I think that's ultimately though, just like a, a fraction of the value, the, the main way I think about open source as it relates to, to marketers or, or maybe nearly any, any organization using open source is, is the question of what is, what is the thing that the marketing team needs to own most critically?
Steve: I come from the, the Drupal community by and large, and, and the Drupal community has, has for many years been grappling this idea with this idea of like headless Drupal basically what is the most important part of Drupal. Drupal as a piece of software tries to do lots and lots of things. Can we cut off parts of Drupal just to get to the most important part? And I think when you go to, to headless Drupal, you, you end up with like the content model, your, the content being managed by the content management system is the most central most important thing. And that is, I, I think, a lens through which marketers can think about, what do we need to use open source for?
Steve: What is the, what is the thing that we need to own most critically, if there are other areas, other areas of responsibility that the marketing team has that maybe are, are less critical to own, or, or perhaps could be more cleanly cut off then it, maybe it's okay to use a, a closed source tool. If, if we think of an organization that needs content most centrally, like your website, your content is, I think where many marketing teams, the most important thing, something like your marketing email list also really, really important, but perhaps can be defined in such a way where it's just easier, faster to say we do this part with MailChimp.
Bob: Steve, do you have any success stories that you could share with us about this agile marketing process and something maybe from your team or your one of your clients?
Steve: Sure. So, so one customer story that I've, I've been retelling a lot lately is the story of Coit Cleaning Company. This is a, a cleaning company. That's got franchises all over the country, and they're basically dependent on local SEO. And I needed this myself the past few months ago. I've got a toddler, a friend was over and like diaper cream ended up smeared all over this, this rocking chair we needed it cleaned. So like one way we could try and solve that is like Uber, but for cleaners, like there are companies with apps were like, that's how I get this chair cleaned. So another way you can get the chair cleaned. It's like, I Google upholstery cleaning Minneapolis. Some website is the top result or near the top results. It's easy to use, fill out the form. And I get my chair cleaned.
Steve: So, so that Coit Cleaning Company runs on Pantheon. They for years have had a website that got them SEO. That was good enough, got them, those form fill conversions, people landing on the website, filling out the form that was good enough for a while, but eventually they, they, they saw an opportunity to improve their, the value that their website was delivering. They worked outside agency that had expertise in, in the Drupal System that their website was using had expertise.
Steve: I think more importantly, in positioning the work around improving those results, identifying that really this website is, is about getting people to fill out that form or call that phone number. And if, when they started 2% of people visiting the website filled out the form, how can we move that number up? If that becomes the central question, you, you end up getting more, effective results than if the central question is this website's, Drupal 7, let's move it to Drupal 8, just cause it'll be better. Somehow if the central question is-
Mark: It's one better.
Steve: Yeah, exactly. That's that may not get you better results. You might just spend many months worth of time and effort and money, and then end up with the same number of people landing on the website, the same number of people filling out the form. And actually you might, it might be worse. Like if you rebuild the entire website, it might get worse. If you aren't essentially focused on making that one number better. So the, the combination of, of a customer with a, with a clear need and an outside agent C team that, that had the right expertise technologically and the right mindset got them results. They went from I think 2% of a conversion rate to 3.5%.
Steve: And that's, that's a huge bump, that's real dollars. I think it's important. Like it helps the agency. It helps the, the company and those are like, those are the kinds of stories that like, I just want as a person as, and as a citizen in, in this world going forward, like, there's, there's a potential future where those kinds of things are, are just fulfilled through like the Uber, but for cleaning. And I, I don't really wanna live in that world. I would rather live in the world where smaller groups of people can make effective websites and, and provide each other with, with valuable services.
Mark: But seriously, I need an Uber of cleaning.
Steve: Right. I mean, it's convenient.It is. Yeah.
Mark: So, what, what would be the, the steps for our listeners to get started in agile marketing? What are the, like the first three things you need to do?
Steve: Sure. So, a couple years ago, I, I did a conference presentation called agile, your agile, that was more oriented towards technologists, not necessarily marketers, but I think the, the same idea applies. What I was recommending in, in that presentation that I did at DrupalCon London was basically, if one of the ideas of agile is, is that you have a backlog of stuff you need to do, and it's basically organized by priority.
Steve: So that the stuff that's going to give you the most value is at the top. A team looking at agile marketing could do the same thing for the agile marketing practices themselves. So if, if, if you read a book on agile and you see, I might get some value from having a 15 minute meeting with everyone on the team, everyone doing work, maybe that's a thing my team needs to do.
Steve: I might get value from having something like a con bond board. That's going to visualize the work that's in progress. The work that's needs review the work that's blocked might get some value from that. I might, I get some value from chunking my work into two week sections of time. I might get some value from doing regular demos. I might get some value from retrospectives. I think it's impractical to try and go from zero to 100% agile. I, I, I would not recommend anyone jump from not doing any of those things to doing all of those things in, in a very short period of time. What I would recommend is identifying what are the things that are going to be most helpful to your team and doing those first, you, you do have to, to benefit or, or balance that, with the idea that, if you go too slowly or, or you, don't, don't commit to this progression. Like if you just add daily standups, or if you just add a con bond board that that might be worse than, than making no change at all.
Mario: Steve, you mentioned before, is it Quake Cleaning? Is that the company you mentioned?
Steve: Yeah, C O I T. And I'll, I, I can, give you a link to a, a webinar we did with them recently.
Mario: Do you have other examples of high profile companies that have had success with agile marketing?
Steve: Sure. So I, I recently, was going through an agile marketing training and, and one high profile example came up, which shows the the Oreo Super Bowl Tweet from a few years ago. I think it was the, the Super Bowl that the, the Ravens were in and like the power went out. And somehow, I think it was the second half that was delayed Oreo had a creative team, basically on standby for the Super Bowl, waiting for something to happen in the Super Bowl that they could tie to Oreo cookies.
Steve: They very quickly produced a graphic. That was something like you can still dunk in the dark, still eat Oreos, even if the lights are out and that Tweet went, went viral. And that's the kind of thing that a big company like Oreo could only do if they had a room of people waiting for a moment like that.
Steve: It in, talking with other people during this training, I, I heard from people who worked at a, a, a much larger, like probably Fortune 100 company, their reaction was, oh, Oreo almost have like a, a really lax legal team that allowed them to, to Tweet out the Super Bowl without, without probably a, a ton of oversight. So, I bring that up because I, I think it's a, a clear example of like the kind of shift you can make.
Steve: If, if you have the right players on the field, the idea that you can near instantly respond to a market opportunity. One example that, that ties much more closely to Pantheon is, the ACLU the American Civil Liberties Union. They had moved over to Pantheon a few years ago, and at the beginning of the Trump administration there was the travel ban.
Steve: It was a big deal for the ACLU providing lawyers providing legal assistance, the ACLU was in a, a relatively short period of time able to, to raise millions and millions of dollars to, to aid their legal effort, opposing the Trump administration travel ban. And that's the kind of thing that they, they might have not been able to do if they didn't have a web team that was, was ready for it.
Steve: If their web op practices were immature, if they were concerned that their website would crash, if they tried to drive people to the website, if they were concerned just about, can we do a, a, a major campaign on our website in, in the span of a few hours or, or just a couple days, if, if they weren't confident in their ability to do that, they wouldn't have raised those tens of millions of dollars that were, you know, many multiples higher than their, their previous like annual online fundraising. They didn't just a few weeks because they had a web team who was capable of, of responding to a change that fast.
Bob: For organizations who are employing agile marketing, how much success are they having compared to those organizations that haven't invested in agile marketing?
Steve: Sure. So, because agile marketing is, is still very much an emerging field. It's, it's hard to say quantitatively, how much better it is. For me, the, the more compelling thing is, is qualitatively, what benefits are we getting? And, and, and often what failures, or what kinds of failures should we be avoiding with these approaches?
Steve: I think one of the, the worst case scenarios for a marketing team is putting a huge amount of effort into a campaign that delivers nearly no value. Like one pattern of, of request I've I've seen at Pantheon or, or, or elsewhere is, is a request coming in from a stakeholder for marketing, let's say, someone from sales or, or someone from the product team who has a big, compelling idea. That sounds good that it could be, a landing page with lot of supporting content. And it's often pitched as let's do this big thing, it's going to drive results.
Steve: I think in an agile marketing organization, the natural response will be to try to scope down any huge idea. So if the idea is let's put together a giant ebook with 10 different stories, the way an agile team would often scope that down as saying, like, let's try and tell one of those stories through a blog post, see if there's a reaction, see if this is the kind of content that people respond to.
Steve: If, if you're working say in two week sprints and two weeks is basically the biggest thing you can bite off that, like that's a natural way of, of restricting those giant requests that are, are inherently more risky. If someone's asking the marketing team to do one huge thing, that's going to take months and months of work. If, if the response is always well, let's reframe this in a way so that we can get, give you some value, next week, rather than making you wait three months to get all of the value all at once. We hope.
Steve: That being said, I, I think there is still a place for waterfall mindsets, even within marketing. For, for Pantheon, we know DrupalCon North America is coming up in May of 2020. We know that that is basically our, our biggest in-person event for the entire year. It makes sense for us to, to take what is essentially a waterfall approach for something like that, where it's happening on a specific date, we can work backwards, plan out what we need to do to be ready for DrupalCon North America. And it is essentially a more traditional marketing effort.
Mario: Given the success that you are seeing with this practice of agile marketing, what do you see the future looks like for this within the next five years?
Steve: Sure. For, for the next five years, especially related to, to websites. What I'm, what I would love to see is the end of the website relaunch. And, and I say that largely as, as a Drupal developer who spent most of my time relaunching websites, like for, for most of my career, my way of operating was working with a company, some kind of client who had a website. And I rebuilt it in the newest version of Drupal, whatever that new version of Drupal happened to be at the time.
Steve: And I crossed my fingers that the, the customer was getting what they needed. And often that, that customer had that client had a Drupal site already. They had a Drupal 6 site, Drupal 7 is out, we're rebuilding it, hoping we keep all the parts they liked. We're hoping we fixed the parts they didn't like. We're spending a significant portion of their budget, delivering that new version of, of the website and, and hoping that it, it is what they need as we go from Drupal 8 into Drupal 9 more, more smoothly.
Steve: My hope is that for the Drupal community and the WordPress community, and really, even beyond those, we get, we get past this idea that websites are, are changed primarily through relaunching. If, if we can instead think about we're slowly, well, maybe not slowly we're in small changes, evolving our website towards the direction it, it needs to go then, then I think there'll be more, more of a recognition that completely rebuilding completely relaunching the website is one of the riskiest things we could ever do.
Steve: And, and, and one of the, the ways I've been thinking about lately is as I've, I've asked myself, especially around Drupal 8, like what was really compelling, those big relaunches in the past 5 to 10 years, I think there's, there's a perception among technologists, especially, that the pace of change is always increasing that we get a new JavaScript framework every day there's, there are three new JavaScript frameworks since we started talking.
Steve: I don't know if that's really, I don't know if that's really true anymore. I, I think the pace of change might be slowing down. If, if I think about the pace of change that that was present 10 years ago with the iPhone coming out in 2007 and basically requiring everyone to rebuild every website so that it worked on desktop and then it worked on the iPhone. That was a huge change. Every website had to get rebuilt so that it had an m.sub domain or nearly every sub, every website. And then just three years later, we get the iPad and people realize, wait, are we gonna have mobile.example.com for the iPhone? example.com for the desktop? And then are we gonna have tablets.example.com? Are we gonna force the iPad to look like the iPhone website? Or is it gonna be like the desktop website?
Steve: And then quickly enough the industry saw, no, we need this called responsive design. So that compelled everyone to rebuild their website again. I haven't seen that large of an external motivator to completely rebuild a website since then. And I think for the Drupal community that that should shape how we think about, like, why, why aren't people adopting Drupal 8 more quickly? Well, maybe people only adopted Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 because it was the latest, greatest thing that would let us rebuild the website for the iPhone or the iPad.
Mark: Then there's also the, the thing of, one of the great things about Drupal between Drupal 8 and Drupal 9, is you can get that update because all you're doing is losing deprecated features. So you're not gonna have, do the big rebuild like you do from 7 to 8, to 6 to 7, 6 to 8, whatever. So that's definitely one of the cool things that's gonna be coming down the pipe for Drupal 8 or to Drupal 9.
Steve Yeah I'm really optimistic for, for the Drupal community realizing value getting new developments. That that can only happen when, when we've been on the same system for long enough, if we're in a mindset of, well, we're rebuilding everything every five years, anyway, there's certain levels of values that we're just never gonna reach.
Mark: Exactly. So one of the things that, you know, we've worked with at Mediacurrent with Pantheon is for, you know, clients like Manhattan associates to help expand their global business over the last couple years. Can you kinda speak to some of the things that agile marketing has helped through in our works together as at Pantheon and Mediacurrent?
Steve: Sure. So, so Manhattan associates was, was a case where they were really benefiting from that, that shift towards a two week sprint cycle. Like in, in my personal experience, it's incredibly clarifying to know, I need to be able to show something tangible next Friday, because the sprint is over, like going back to the very first project I put on Pantheon that really, really helped me shape my work and, and know that what I was doing was directly beneficial to my customer because I had to show them that it was beneficial either this week or at the very latest next week and Manhattan associates, I think, I think was another case where, where that kind of value was being realized. And, and another pattern I've heard with, with agile marketing in general and, and Manhattan associates specifically, is that when everyone on the team aligns themselves towards the, the metrics that you're attempting to, to move forward, it clarifies a lot of things.
Steve: And at Manhattan associates was, was a case where their, their six month roadmap got clearer because they were focused on, on those top level metrics. And, for, for the role that, for the role that Pantheon plays, we, we see ourselves as, for many web teams, stabilizing what what's being done. I think one of the, the big risks for any web ops team is that fear about instability can, can lead to a sort of paralysis.
Steve: If you're not confident that you can quickly make changes, then any change, regardless of, of what the, that change is, is going to feel fraught, there'll be hesitancy that the team is, is going to, to lose momentum. Like just the idea of, of deploying every two weeks or, or faster feels unrealistic. If, if the, the team doing the work doesn't trust their tools, doesn't trust that, on a moment's notice they can push changes from their local to dev to test, to live, and on and on.
Steve: And, and that's, you know, that's where, where Pantheon shines, basically making sure that that teams are comfortable with their tools are comfortable with their workflows. We want web teams spending as much of their time as possible, optimizing and improving those, those measurements. We know that to do that, like you need to be able to get changes out the door. You need to be able to review and release your changes. And below that you need to be able to anticipate and protect against the, the threats your, your website faces.
Steve: You need to make sure you're not gonna get hacked. You're not going to, to crash if, if your website gets a traffic spike and it's very easy for, for a team to get consumed by those lower level concerns consumed by the concern that the architecture or, or infrastructure is unreliable, lose all of your time to just getting changes out the door and have no time left over for actually looking at and asking, did this change actually provide any value? So, we want to, to maximize the amount of time web ops teams have available to measure and improve the site.
Mark: Awesome.
Mario: Well, that's, that was really insightful there, Steve.
Mark: Yeah. Thanks. That's it for today's show. Thanks for joining us. Looking for more or useful tips, technical takeaways and creative insights, visit Mediacurrent.com/podcasts for more episodes, and to subscribe to our newsletter. Thanks for playing.