Amounting to half a dozen posts over the last five years is beyond embarrassing. It doesn't matter that I do keep another blog for bed time tales (www.themailthread.com/tales/) or that during this time I completed my masters degree (and wrote a significant number of essays for school) and have been faced with increasingly difficult job challenges. It is unjustifiable, but it is a fact.
Working twelve hours a day to help the late Canwest (now Postmedia) launch their redesigned newspaper sites back in 2008 should have still left me with enough time to squeeze a line or two. I could have shared a lot about the incredible group of developers working on the project, the amazing designers, and the inspiring collaborative process we employed to work in much needed features even after the scope was locked down.
Mea culpa... the sites were launched in November and are still one of my proudest accomplishment (even though we weren't able to launch a mobile version until almost a year after).
Check them out if you haven't:
www.windsorstar.com
www.ottawacitizen.com
www.montrealgazzette.com
www.edmontonjournal.com
www.calgaryherald.com
www.vancouversun.com
www.theprovince.com
www.starphoenix.com
www.timecolonist.com
www.leaderpost.com
Yes, some tweaks have been added over the past three years, but the sites are by large still carrying some of the blood shed during those months of re-invention (okay, I may be dramatizing a bit, but it was hard work indeed).
Having to return to work early in 2009 to marathon-rebuild www.canada.com in under 30 days shouldn't be an excuse either. I wanted to do some really creative things with this site (including an amazing header redesign from the hands of one Josh Franco), but we settled for repurposing the work we had done for the newspapers. Alas, not my proudest accomplishment but still one for the records.
And when I lifted my head to catch a breath we were hit with porting our entire video infrastructure (which we had just rebuilt for the newspapers and canada.com), moving away from the now defunct Maven into thePlatform for media. Talk about being under the gun! We had thirty days left in our contract to change hundreds of video players across Canwest Publishing and Canwest Broadcasting online properties.
Some doubted the feasibility of hitting our deadline, but begrudgingly we all got to work and got it done. And while it wasn't pretty, we managed to come out ahead and planted the roots of what today is one of the top premium video destinations in Canada: www.globaltv.com
This effort earned me a promotion to lead video platforms for Canwest, and I put my head down to figure out how to sell a broadband video strategy to a broadcaster and a group of newspapers. In the summer of 2009 I took a break from video to help launch the mobile version of all the newspaper sites (a legacy project that I was asked to spearhead and where I actually ended up having to write some code because no resources were available to help -pardon me if you hit a dead link-), and came back in September full force to begin concocting a massive overhaul of our GlobalTV.com video centre.
For the first time ever I was able to run a fully staffed project from inception. We brainstormed, wireframed, sold to stakeholders, developed a comprehensive business requirements document, functional specifications, technical requirements document, and put together one ground-breaking video destination, full of new advertising opportunities and boasting a 720p video player and up to 2.4mbps in adaptive streaming.
Audiences loved it... the industry loved it (garnering incredible advertising opportunities), and even pundits decided this effort deserved an award, nominating the GlobalTV.com video centre to a Digi Award in 2011.
But by the time we had finished, online was no longer the new frontier. The new game was no other than the sexy iPad. So, we went at it again (pause here to relaunch the www.showcase.ca video centre using the GlobalTV.com template. If you haven't visited Showcase, please do. There is amazing video content in this site) and began architecting another extremely proud product: the Global Video App for iPad.
At the time we weren't able to stream content to iPhones due to our licencing agreements (which I will not cover in detail due to non-disclosure policies with my employer), so we focused on the iPad, confident that its larger screen would justify our decision. Coming from an extremely successful project makes one believe that replicating processes will yield the same level of success. Unfortunately this is not the case in real live.
We spent a lot of time coming up with requirements, waiting for a business requirements document to be written, arguing timelessly about do's and don'ts, and by the time we got to start coding, we had to remove some key features on personalization that would have made us miss our target launch date. One could argue that the product was (and still is) a great success, but a committed product person always sees the things left aside and worries that time will go by and these ideas will never see the light of day.
Being the first video app we ever launched, we never anticipated delays with the Apple store approval process, compounded by the fact that the app was submitted around the American Thanksgivings. Every day at the office was filled with tension, an eye always on the Inbox hoping for the 'Yay' from the Apple gods who would make us or break us. The news finally came after five days of anxious wait, launching to top the charts for a while amidst extremely positive reviews (and some negative, but after years launching publicly available products you realize every one of them has lovers and haters, and the latter are more avid to complain than the former to give praise).
It was a Merry Christmas in 2010, accentuated by our recent admission to the Shaw family resulting from their acquisition of Canwest's Broadcasting assets, a happy occasion for a group of innovators and developer who have been doing the best they could without proper funding. And at this point I should have had a chance to write a line, but I took up the challenge of expanding my role to oversee online video across the board, and take up the exciting http://vod.shaw.ca property.
The rest has been mere laziness. I mean, I could have written as my role got expanded even further to look after all our entertainment products, or when I put my hand up to help with the Shaw WiFi initiative.
I am just a terrible person, but as the year nears its end I have found it in me to write a few lines and bring the world (ha, optimism) up to speed. I make no commitments to write regularly but I really want to involve one more stakeholder in our product development process: you.
Yes, you... if you are reading this you either know who I am or what I work on, and I want to know what you think about the products we are developing. We have built amazing products in the past and want to make sure the ones in our labs are benefiting from diverse opinions from the outer world.
One post you can count on will be later in the week to report on the outcome of the Digi Awards (http://www.thedigiawards.com/), where we have three nominations. Talk to you then!
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