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Building a Unified Product Delivery Platform, part 2
Description:
Building a Unified Product Delivery Platform, part 2
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https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/913eb19c-94db-43ba-89b1-560faf4180f8/Platform Strategies 2018 - Building a Unified Product Delivery Platform%2c Pt 2.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=Zw6vTpXNwsXRgaIrgJKzPwtnPML8cFI0Zqc3ta1HRw0%3D&st=2024-05-05T06%3A33%3A51Z&se=2024-05-05T08%3A38%3A51Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2020-11-18T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Joining me onstage is Allison Belan and Daniel Griffin from Duke University Press, and they are here to do some things in real time, explain their process, but really walk us through the mindset of what product creation and ideation looks like at Duke. And I'd like to thank them in advance for being so game to come up here and do things, even just a little thing, live in front of a group like this.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So let's give them round of applause, and I'll see if you'd like to come up and start. We'll see how it goes.
ALLISON BELAN: My clicker on here. Let's see. Can you hear me? OK, great. So thank you, Jake, for the introduction, and for having us. So what I'm going to talk to you about today is product diversification that's happening at Duke University Press, and how being on the unified platform is enabling that.
ALLISON BELAN: So really quickly, a little bit about Duke University Press. We're a department of Duke University. We publish books and journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. We have about 25 e-books, a couple over 50 humanities and social science journals, and they are all at our platform at read.dukeupress.edu, which we launched in November of 2017. So it's almost a year old, and we launched it with Silverchair.
ALLISON BELAN: And just to set up some excitement later-- so this is what it looks like. This is the entry point to it, just a big search box that searches across all of our content. And I just want you to note that right now this, gender studies complete, is a page not found. And if everything goes well, by the end of this, that won't be the case.
ALLISON BELAN: So as a university press that publishes books and journals, we are like most of our peers in that way, in that the old story is that books made the reputation and journals made the money, and that journals revenues not only covered losses in other parts of the enterprise, but also, growth in journals revenue was absolutely critical to actually growing the press.
ALLISON BELAN: And so under that old story, our product model has been pretty simple. We have our books and we have our journals, and we sell them individually, in print and digitally. And then after a little, while when the times became what they are, we combined them into two primary digital collection products, which were essentially subscribe to all of our journals for a year, subscribe to all of our books for a year.
ALLISON BELAN: So the new story is that journal revenue growth is slowing, or ours is, at least. I don't want to speak for everybody. And what we're realizing is we may not be that far from every library that would want the products we have actually having them. So we had to stop and take a look and decide what we were going to do when we reached peak subscription.
ALLISON BELAN: And so our solution to that was to look at that set of content and to say, OK, we need to diversify our product set, with the hope being that we could appeal to more libraries, libraries who we hadn't been talking to, libraries who didn't want to talk to us, just anybody who would buy our stuff, potentially. And then also, a joint strategy is over time to strengthen our direct to consumer channel, as well.
ALLISON BELAN: And we knew that we needed all of our books and all of our journals in one place to be able to execute the strategy, because we're wanting to combine in different ways from within those two primary digital products and develop and deploy these new products quickly. And so in 2017 we launched the read site. And since launching that site, we've begun executing this strategy.
ALLISON BELAN: We began with new e-book products, which were aimed at providing more targeted, smaller, somewhat less expensive products that we could take to institutions who might have specialize in these areas, who may have institutes or departments that are very strong in these areas. So currently, we have for e-Duke book subject collections, and we have two more slated to launch in 2019. We also began experimenting with new licensing options around these products, so we're in the midst of this product diversification.
ALLISON BELAN: Up next, so past-- well, in 2019 and past 2019, we're actually contemplating trying to figure out how to do custom e-book packages. And that's where a customer chooses the specific titles they want in a single purchase, and we discount by volume. The more books they buy, the less they cost. And then also kind of around the bend, our first book and journal combined product, which would be gender studies complete, featuring 600 of our titles in gender studies and three journals with significant back volumes in that area, also.
ALLISON BELAN: So as I mentioned, we saw the platform as critical to being able to execute this strategy. And it has been a key enabler. Not only is all of our content in one database and providing a single user experience and analytics, as others have mentioned, but we also with the tools that Silverchair's platform provides, have the tools to ourselves independently, without calling Silverchair, to assemble these content packages as products, build a whole new site ourselves, associate the content and the product with the site, and then annually update them and launch new ones.
ALLISON BELAN: And this is good that we have these tools, because in 2019, just with the four base products that we've launched plus the two new ones, we're going to be building four new base products, two new sites. We're going to be adding eight annual top up products to the existing collections. We're going to have to update four of the sites, and we're going to have to add 10 new MARC products.
ALLISON BELAN: These are MARC records that support our library customers when they buy our e-books. So diversifying your products, adding more of them creates a lot of work, and so it's really critical for us to have the right tool set in place to do this. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to my colleague Daniel to talk about and show you a little bit about what that tool set is.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: Hello, everyone. Am I good? Can you hear me? I think when Allison said that we are going to be building these things, she really meant Daniel is going to be building these things. And so I'm here to show you how I would do this. I went through the effort of creating pretty quickly a gender studies complete site, and I'm going to basically walk you through what I did to do it.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: So what you're going to see here is me using Silverchair tools. There are three of them, product builder, which is where we set our entitlements. Site builder is where I build the actual site. And site master is where I administer it, and that's the main Silverchair tool, as well, for access and subscriptions. So of course, this is going to happen pretty quickly, but I need a lot of stuff in advance.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: I need what's in the product. And we start six months out for this-- product name, description, URL, logo, all these sorts of things. But what's really great about this is that I don't have to go to a journal editor who's busy teaching classes and ask them to submit something. The production step is completely out of here, which is great.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: We can keep all that in-house. We don't have to labor our editorial staff in building these sites. So the first step of this is that I just created a product. It's pretty simple. We match the code to our fulfillment system. We build it up. We construct a Solr query. I do pretty quickly a cut and paste, and there's the product.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: So we now have the product there. That's it. And then I move over to site builder, which is my next tool. This is where all of our sites are built. I create a space for it. I have to know the name of it. I have to know where the URL is, but we have a template that we use for most of this. The tool creates the space.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: It takes a little bit longer than that to build, but Jake promised to slip me a Benjamin if I cut down some of the loading screens. It's pretty easy. Then I upload the assets. I create another query to activate what it's going to search for in this particular product. It's right now an exact duplicate of what I just created in the product builder, but we're working with Silverchair to build Solr queries based on product codes so that I can just compose different products in the future without having to maintain those lists separately.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: So I'll just say I need the 2018, 2019, 2020 collections together, and just put them in here. And then I actually go about building the site. This is done in the XML files. This is me working off a template. We built the template. This is a good shibboleth. I can give this to marketing staff and to say, OK, can you edit this?
DANIEL GRIFFIN: And if they say yes, this is oh, OK, then you do it and I won't have to do anymore. But for now, it's just me doing this. It doesn't take very long. A couple of quirks, but this is where I put in the pages. I put in widgets. They're going to fill things out, and any downstream data deposits that may occur. From this point, I just upload those XML files and I can click publish the site.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: It puts it in a restricted live setting. So this is an area where our internal staff can look at it. It's right there. And I can see if the colors are lining up and if the logo's there and start building out the widgets. It's not going to be available to the general public at this point, but we're pretty close to that. From this point, I move over to site master, which is the general administration tool, and I add in my self serve content.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: We have a-- you'll see me here putting in a snippet of code for a hero image. The nice thing about this is that this site master tool is available to any DUP staff that we want. So I can at this point hand it off to the designer and say, go build the site how you want, add the colors you want, that sort of thing, and hand it off. And at this point, once they're ready to go, I really just need to click live.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: And so we're going to do that now. And it's going to be-- yeah. Are you sure? And so it'll start building. What's really nice about this is that it is relatively quick to do this.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: And this is the same process I'm going to use when I'm building out new journal sites if we've acquired a new journal. When I first started in this role, the process of doing that required a couple months of planning, involved a lot of different people from different parts of the organization, editorial, design, production, lots of scheduling going on. And now I can-- even an extremely, extremely attractive classics major such as myself can do this now.
DANIEL GRIFFIN: So now we should be good to go. It says public live. So see how fast AWS is at updating everything. And there it is. And that's it.
ALLISON BELAN: I'd just like to note how extremely generous I am to leave the wow to Daniel. It's not-- now I get to dive in and tell you all about the dirty secrets that are under the other hood, which is in the back office, back home at Duke University Press. But I will say that I think you can-- Jake promised-- well, I'm sorry. Jake did not promise. Jake mentioned that a benefit of a unified platform is instant site and product creation.
ALLISON BELAN: It's not instant, and it has a big lead up. It took Daniel a few sites to really optimize the process, but he does have it down pretty optimally now, and it's-- you said when you have everything together, it's maybe two hours. So that's pretty cool. And it's not wizzy wig, you know? You can't just throw it open to any of your staff. It's got some gnarly XML files in there.
ALLISON BELAN: Solr query is a whole language that nobody but Solr programmers really know, and nice people at Silverchair who are helping us with them. But it's also not rocket science, and it is well within our grasp. And I even have hope that it is well within, say, our marketing team's grasp eventually, once we're sure we know how to use it. So what I want to talk about is the other piece.
ALLISON BELAN: We were so eager to have these platform tools in our control that I feel like I was a little bit blindsided by where it turned out that the real challenge was, which is in our internal processes and systems. And so we are now building this infrastructure internally, to be able to assess new product ideas, plan the products, launch the products. So some of those processes include putting together a formal process assessment team, and in a way that we do this and a way that we can track things, and for the first time being able to bring in the technology team into the room at the same time in the early stages with the sales team and the customer relations team.
ALLISON BELAN: Another piece of this is once we know what the product is, it's not just about building a site on the front end. It's actually we got to be in our back end business system in our fulfillment and order system. And it turns out that that can require a lot of setup at the front end, a lot of manual touches. So we're looking at ways to use easy tools like Excel to try to put some of that work into the hands of non-technical people, and then we're also going to stay in close contact with our fulfillment system vendor about are we using your tool in the best way to do this?
ALLISON BELAN: Are there things we're missing, or can you build better support for this? And then also, we're learning to use our existing bibliography graphic database to support these products, both just in terms of organizing them, but also associating marketing content with them and being able to output title lists. And then really, the hard work is building our own knowledge of what practices we need to manage this greater set of products.
ALLISON BELAN: That includes-- we're hoping to if we set them up in the bibliographic database to some degree, to generate these Solr queries as data outputs from that database. That's not a natural thing. We're having to hack it together in Crystal Reports to insert all the Solr syntax, but it's pretty cool. And then a big one is just sort of the order of operations. OK, we're doing this.
ALLISON BELAN: What has to happen first? What can't happen until-- what are the contingencies? What can run in parallel? Where does it all have to come together? And then as Daniel mentioned, there's a lot to this, assembling a lot of stuff, and we want to be able to eventually share with other people.
ALLISON BELAN: And we don't want to be the heroes who the organization can't survive without, so we're building a lot of how to instructions, using our own internal department wiki to capture all of this as we figure it out. And then back to the platform side of things, one thing that we realized is once you start multiplying products, you end up with a lot of products.
ALLISON BELAN: And I'll just show you, I think we have some 500 products in product builder and maybe 60 sites. And the tools are great, but they're young. And there's not a lot of options, other than just sort of a raw search, for managing that whole list, finding things, grouping things.
ALLISON BELAN: So we've created sort of a wish list of what we're hoping to work with partners to accomplish. Like I said, we'd like to see more automation or more optimized use of our back end office systems. We're going to continue to manage our product lifecycle process better. And then from Silverchair, we're looking for more searching and filtering features in site builder and product builder, the ability to group products together and work with them as groups, the ability to create new products and sites by copying from an existing one.
ALLISON BELAN: Solr query generation, by just kind of putting in the fields you want from this date to this date, and then pop out a Solr query-- Neil. And then use a product code to connect the content to the site. Daniel mentioned that right now, these Solr queries are gnarly and you're putting the same one in two different places.
ALLISON BELAN: And then if you go update the product, you have to update the site. So we see a lot of efficiencies to be gained there. And then eventually, the ability, each of those, that config file, that XML config file, there's one for each site. So the ability to publish global updates across all the sites at once is sort of a dream, also. But that's where we are.
ALLISON BELAN: It's been really successful for us. And like I said, the challenge ended up not being how do we learn to use these tools. The challenge ended up being how do we organize ourselves to do this thing that we've never had to do before. So thank you.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: OK, thank you. So we just published a website.
ALLISON BELAN: Yeah.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I don't know what the time code is for that, but if everyone could just code their time to gender studies complete for 30 minutes--
ALLISON BELAN: We're going to be working with you later today to take it down, because it's not a real product that is ready for prime time.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Look at it now. They might want it a few blocks from here.
ALLISON BELAN: Yeah.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Questions, questions from the audience for Allison or Daniel. I do have a question on the iPad, and that is how do you balance keeping your pricing model simple with offering flexibility to the customers without having the customers have to work really hard to figure out how and what to buy?
ALLISON BELAN: I really feel like that to my library sales manager, who's in the audience.
KIM STEINLE: Hi.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Come on up.
ALLISON BELAN: Kim Steinle is our library relations and sales manager.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Here we go. We've got a microphone for you.
KIM STEINLE: Oh, thank you. That's a hard question.
ALLISON BELAN: And we're wrestling with it right now around this custom e-book package, just trying to puzzle it out ourselves.
KIM STEINLE: Yeah. I mean-- I think what we're trying to do is say if somebody wants to buy something from us, I don't want to say no. But also, how can we-- when we put out a product, one of the things that we talk about in assessment, which Allison mentioned, is we need to be able to do it well. If we put 10 products out to market next year and we can't administer them very well, that's not going to be a good look for us.
KIM STEINLE: So we think pretty carefully. Our wish list is big, but we think carefully about what we're going to put to market and when. And it's hard, because we do have to say no to customers sometimes. They want to pick and choose. We don't have that yet. They want to do combos of things. We don't have that yet.
KIM STEINLE: So it's definitely a balance, and I think now that we have the tools to do things faster, we are going to have to figure out, as Alison said, how we're going to deal with this internally, because we have to be able to manage these things well, or the librarians are not going to be happy with the purchases that they made if we can't manage them properly.
ALLISON BELAN: And I mean, what we're experiencing literally Tuesday morning is a push and pull, a productive push and pull between Kim and me as he says, well, I don't want a minimum. And I say, but that makes it not a volume-based product. And in the early stages of what is the product, that balance of sales saying I want to meet any need out there and take advantage of it and product saying, how fast do we want to bring this offering and how confident are we that we can figure it out and support it?
KIM STEINLE: I liked whoever said-- I don't know if it was you, Jake-- but the tension is natural between sales and product.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I'm not taking credit for that. That was Jasper.
KIM STEINLE: OK. Well, Jasper, thank you for saying that, because I was like, yeah.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: One more question here in the back. Just on time, I think we'll just go one more, if that's OK.
SPEAKER 2: Oh, thanks. Well I was going to ask a question similar to the one that was just raised, but mine was more simple. How do you keep your customer service and sales staff from going insane?
KIM STEINLE: Me again.
ALLISON BELAN: Well, let me speak from a product point of view, because when they get frazzled, it hits us. When things go wrong, it hits us. And one thing that I really love is that in this product assessment process, I think it used to just be-- when it was a simple thing like all books, all journals, it was sales coming up with that, along with senior management.
ALLISON BELAN: And then they went to customer service and said, OK, let's set it up and let's sell it. Now that it's more complicated, in that product assessment room and figuring out all of this, it's sales, it's customer relations, and it's product. And then I also happen to manage the person who manages the fulfillment system. So it's also that person in there, as well.
ALLISON BELAN: So they may be thinking, this is going to make me crazy, but they're also in on the ground floor. They're contributing their expertise. They're representing what they know is going to come out from the customer, and they know from beginning to end how this is all supposed to work.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. Well, thank you again to Allison, Daniel, and Kimberly, for being brave and launching a site with us. Thank you.