case study

The New Statesman.com was a 15 year old website based on Drupal (a fairly old version of it) that was definitely not user friendly and often crashed due to it’s over-complicated system. Not to mention that the connections to third-party providers were not optimized, which contributed to the huge loading times of the website. On the other hand, the CMS interface was lacking important features, and was giving serious headaches to editorials.
All of this led to high churn rates, low user engagement and a lack of visibility, and serious problems with traffic rates.

Our goal was to create a best-in-class experience for the New Statesman’s audience, as well as an innovative, simple, intuitive, and effective content management system for our editorial teams, as well as to maximize our visibility through SEO best practices and work on increasing our audience to achieve the desired growth. This enormous duty was assigned to a talented team of product managers, of which I was a member.

Developing the core functionalities of the WordPress theme as well as migrating existing users from the current Drupal system to the new WordPress instance, was the goal of my role.
Working on the core functionality of the customer management system (CMS) provided a lot of inspiring opportunities and few challenges, considering the stakeholders were the incredible journalists behind the NewStatesman’s 110 year old newsmagazine. To fully grasp their user journey, we started conducting interviews. Properly documenting those, allowed for a full analysis of the pain points and finding the appropriate reliefs.
Worth sharing a detail – the old system required developer assistance on minor tasks, and journalists had very little freedom of action. We have build an impressive CMS that removed the necessity for a developer, the headaches, and eventually shortened the article creation & publishing time down with more than 30%.
We made the difference by strongly supporting the development of everything from scratch (in light of future scalability prospects), avoiding the use of ACFs or Gutenberg Blocks. As a result, the whole WordPress theme was built from the ground up, tailored to the demands of the business, and designed to allow for future expansion. This theme now supports both B2C and B2B publications, as well as subscription models, third parties, and SEO that adhere to the best industry standards.

What kicked off as a redesign of the NewStatesman.com turned into the creation of a best-in-class WordPress publishing platform that changed the game forever.

The beauty of it is the simplicity with which it was built as well as the freedom that comes with it.

As part of a dynamic product squad system, I was essential in the development of an innovative, user-friendly content management system (CMS) to elevate the New Statesman’s digital experience.

My responsibilities involved creating a strategy roadmap and working closely with key stakeholders and top-tier management, centred around user experience. Communication between teams, with a focus on openness and caring. Agile excellence, or in other words diving deeply into processes, teams’ velocity metrics, and overall execution, including promoting code excellence via tight collaboration with software architects. Coordination of the product’s go-to-market strategy with marketing and sales divisions to ensure a well-planned launch. Writing guidelines and making sure that all involved stakeholders would feel comfortable with the new system and their work won’t be disrupted by the change. Driving the creation of detailed documentation that would serve as a base for any new member, reducing considerably the onboarding period.

Related Projects

ClientSavvy’s Case Study