Some of the responsibility for the failure of this should fall on the marketing managers and their lack of knowledge on what decent online advertising looks like.
I worked in AdLand for a while and remember the agencies impressing clients with bullshit results and pure vanity metrics.
Nothing about actual business results, just another thing marketing managers were seen to need to do.
When I worked for an ad agency I was specifically told not to add event level tracking to campaign sites because we knew engagement was awful. We could easily give the client some great vanity metrics on things like number of visits but the moment you dug into conversion rates it all went to shit.
I feel like I must be on crazy pills for suggesting that the designer's deliverable should be something like UWP XAML documents. I wouldn't necessarily expect them to do any fancy data binding, but they should be able to at least lay things out and maybe manually fill in some dummy data.
Shameless Plug: I've recently been involved in writing a book on Continuous Deployment, which covers many of the points Instagram are writing about here (but in greater detail).
I've got ~1,000 printed copies to give away. So if anyone wants one, go here: http://madete.ch/1S3OGvl and follow the link on the left hand side and we'll mail a copy to you.
It was originally a content marketing experiment. We thought we'd rather have 100 people receive a free printed copy of the book and love us for this, than a 1000 people receive ebooks and end up in their trash.
The ROI from the 100 trial worked well, so we decided to try and scale it out to more people. TBD whether we'll see a good ROI from 1000 people, but we hope people enjoy it and like us for sending them a free book!
Hey, I'm currently also writing a book on automating deployments (https://deploybook.com), and if you're interested, I'd like to chat about your experience with writing and publishing this book.
Please drop me a line moritz.lenz@gmail.com. Also, looking forward to read your book :-)
CD doesn't have to mean 'push every green build to prod'. It's more about the ability to push new functionality when asked by the business, than the fact of always pushing it by default. You may be doing CD well already, knowing just what you have said.
My preconception is that what you said is exactly right, but the idea that one maybe should push every green build to prod -- and the fact that a lot of big-scale companies are doing that -- is really intriguing.
Strange, I'm not from the US, (I'm from Serbia) and it says I can't even buy the book on Amazon (I was hoping for the kindle edition). I did apply for the hard copy though.
In the next version (1.1) coming in about a week we are going to include:
-Clear upvotes and comments number from the main feed
-Quick access to comments from the main feed
-Quick upvoting for posts from the main feed
-Switch to auto-delete posts viewed and only show them in the "Viewed" tab
-Collapse comments
-LogIn improvements
-Commenting and posting bug corrected
-Follow users to receive push notifications when they post something
Version 1.2 (some more weeks):
-Dynamic text: adjust text size as you want
-Different fonts: we will add in addition to the current Avenir, Open Sans, Proxima Nova and Helvetica Neue
Stay tuned for more updates! As we said, Boreal is a client build from users FOR users.
IMO - the 'best and brightest' people should focus on making things, fixing real problems and generally doing good. If they make lots of money whilst doing this, then good on them.
There have been some interesting startups emerge in Finance Services, which look to be doing real good, but for the most part, it currently seems to be full of people skimming of the top to make a quick buck.
I've followed their business for a few years and the rate of growth has been incredible.
I think a big part of it is down to the quality of their products. Booking.com is fantastic to use, I book every hotel trip through their site and the experience keeps improving. Their SEO & PPC approach works well, they seem to rank #1 for every destination. Their conversion process from landing on site through to booking is great.
Would love to know more about them, wish they published details on their approach, growth engines, engineering etc.
I worked in AdLand for a while and remember the agencies impressing clients with bullshit results and pure vanity metrics.
Nothing about actual business results, just another thing marketing managers were seen to need to do.