No.03
Publishing systems at scale
Partner
NBC News Digital
Role
Account Owner, Strategic and Creative Direction
Year
2017-19
Impact
- +1M growth in incremental traffic across 3 sites
- 2-3x more video consumption vs. legacy sites
- 30% more users watching video on the homepage
Building and scaling a single publishing system to power NBC News, Today, and MSNBC's digital ecosystems.
I led Code and Theory's largest publishing project for NBC News, one of the oldest and most established publishers with over 80 years in the business. The brief was to revamp their entire digital ecosystem. We started with near news verticals and a small colocated team to build a design system that could scale to serve three major and unique brands: NBC News, Today, and MSNBC.
Over the course of 18 months we redesigned and relaunched these properties and built a new product organisation and practice that allowed NBC to spin up and deploy new properties quickly, going from months to weeks. As the account and strategic lead it was my job to ensure our team not only delivered best in class work but also enabled the colocated NBC teams to adapt to our fast pace of working.
Three editorial verticals, each with distinct identity and shared platform infrastructure
A flexible storytelling toolkit
Together we built a highly flexible set of storytelling tools that allowed NBC to focus on creating a strong editorial voice and bolstering confidence in their ability to deliver engaging and immersive original content to users, regardless of medium. Our projects and underlying system ultimately covered every digital consumer touchpoint including web, app, OTT, and social.
Editorial-first design: every component built for storytelling flexibility
The work was recognised with a Webby Award for Best News App. More importantly, it established a pattern I would carry forward: building platforms that serve both editorial ambition and audience needs, with design systems that scale without losing character. The interdisciplinary pod model we ran at Code and Theory became the template for how I later built teams at Zalando.
Ask me about
- Creating a single design system that scales across 3 distinct brands
- Enabling seamless and continuous user journeys to maximise visit depth
- Collocating at 30 Rock to build a net new product group with 60+ product managers, designers, and developers
- Building new responsive monetisation formats for publishing
- Casually running into and hanging out with Tony Hawk at 30 Rock
Next project
Richemont Cartier