In early 2010 News UK (formerly News International) & the Times newspaper partnered with Apple to create an app for the new and yet to be announced iPad device. The Times would be among the first companies in the UK to have an app for the iPad.
A project to develop the app was launched in late February 2010. The project was run by Digital Solutions, a newly formed group inside News UK. Projects increasingly needed to be completed in weeks rather than years. Digital Solutions would create products rapidly and outside the constraints of the traditional Technology department.
The Challenges
We immediately faced some big challenges:
– Hard deadline – The agreement with Apple was that the app must be available when the iPad was launched in the UK in late May. The Times app would be advertised heavily as part of Apple’s campaign to promote the new device. It was to be a key part of Apple’s strategy to have big brand name apps available at launch.
– New Technology – For the first few months of the development process, we were building an app with a beta release of iOS and no iPad device. The technology was as far from known as is possible and was subject to constant change as we worked. The lack of a physical device came to be a big issue. Once we were given an iPad we discovered significant performance issues which were not made evident by the software emulator.
– New team & rapid scaling – At the start of the project the team was small and worked well together. We were tasked with scaling as fast as possible to deliver the app and create a development organisation that could go onto to deliver apps for the rest of News UK. This would go on to include the Sun and the Sunday Times.
– Lack of process – At project launch, there was no established process in place to develop software in the newly formed team.
– Dependencies – The project had a wide range of dependencies with other teams, suppliers and technologies. We would need to find innovative ways to deal with these in an extremely short time.
The Success
Our ultimate success came down to a number of factors:
– Talented and motivated people – We were fortunate to find and recruit a large number of extremely bright and motivated individuals. The high profile nature of the project and the chance to work with a new technology that was about to change the world was instrumental in this. With the best people involved and motivated to succeed, it would be difficult, but not impossible, to fail.
– Effective leadership – The leadership team of the Digital Solutions group were extremely effective at setting a vision and goals and keeping people motivated and aligned. The core leadership team were highly experienced and had skill sets that complemented each other very well. There was an inspiring leader, a technology expert and a process and detail person. Together they had every aspect covered.
– Scrum – The right process. Scrum was used from the first days of the project. It brought the right level of structure and process to what we were doing and set us up to succeed. Product Ownership and Incremental “Done” delivery via Sprints was critical to this success. We took an empirical approach and inspected and adapted to improve as we worked.
– Effective Product Ownership – Our Product Owner ensured we had clear direction and priorities. There were a huge number of conflicting stakeholders and priorities at play. This had the potential to completely derail the project. The Product Owner dealt with this complexity and provided clear direction on what needed to be done to the Development Team. Without this, we would have failed.
– Minimal Viable Product & Incremental delivery – We had only a few short months to develop the app. Rapidly changing requirements and technology added significant additional complexity to our work. By developing “Done” increments of potentially releasable working software each week/Sprint we significantly reduced our risk profile. Four Sprints into the project we had a minimal viable product that we could launch. After this, we continued to add new valuable features each Sprint. If we failed to add new features in a Sprint, we always had the previous Increment to fall back on and release at launch.
The Results
We successfully developed and launched the Times iPad app in time for the UK launch of the iPad on the 28th May 2010. Times iPad editions were published successfully each day after this and still are today.
The app was the highest-grossing in the UK app store post-launch and remains among the top-grossing 10 years later.
Whilst creating the app we successfully built a large team of wonderfully talented Developers. We scaled from 3 to over 80 people in 3 months whilst successfully launching a range of apps. Many of those people involved went on to successfully run App Development companies and lead the development of apps for other large organisations.
The success of the Times iPad app went on to drive the early success of News UK’s paid-for content strategy for the Times and Sunday Times. Things have changed a lot in the intervening years, but that is another story.
