Last month mobile leaders and legends joined Urban Airship’s Mobile Roundtable to talk about the future of mobile. Two key themes really stood out so we put these videos together to share the conversation. Check out the teasers below or visit urbanairship.com/goodpush to view the feature films.
Brands Going Mobile TEASER
The Need For Good Push TEASER
Catch the whole conversation at urbanairship.com/goodpush
Urban Airship is ready for one billion smartphone users – are you? Do you have a mobile marketing strategy in place to help meet business objectives and drive revenue? There are new rules for real-time mobile customer engagement that will help enhance users’ experiences with your brand and app and we are going to share them with you.
Join us for a happy hour seminar at our San Francisco office on May 2 at 3:30 to discuss how you can win on the mobile battlefield. Special guest Airbnb will share its success story and we’ll dive into key lessons learned for driving successful and sustained engagement strategies in the exploding mobile app market.
Come hungry and thirsty because there will be plenty to eat and drink while you mingle with your peers.
Space is limited so register today.
Today is shaping up to be a great day, chock full news and momentum around Urban Airship’s mobile messaging and monetization platform. At Mobile World Congress we learned that Urban Airship was named one of the Top 25 Global Mobile Companies by tech news site Informilo. We’ve had countless meetings at MWC with future partners and customers, and we just signed another app development platform—Buddy—as a strategic partner that will offer our products to developers using its solutions. Topping it off, we just surpassed more than 14 billion push notifications delivered since starting less than three years ago.
Push notifications, as sexy as the name sounds, are ushering in an entirely new communications channel that couldn’t be more personal, immediate and effective. Messages appear on home screen of smartphones, whether the triggering app is open or not, offering an unprecedented ability to engage directly with consumers any time, anywhere.
Push messaging is a privileged opportunity because consumers must opt-in to receive them, and as such we’re happy to announce enhancements to our analytics and reporting services that will enable customers to better hone their messaging strategy based on mobile users’ behavior.
The new Unique Opt-In Report, available to Premium Plan customers today, offers critical analysis of the number of distinct users opting-in or out of your app’s push notifications over time. It focuses on the number of unique users versus aggregate totals to offer insight into which notifications produce the desired results and which don’t so that campaigns can be quickly adjusted.
With this new reporting capability, companies can focus on making every push a good push.
Startups are some of the most amazing organizations on earth. You come together with a group of people to create something from nothing. It’s stressful, insanely difficult and it consumes you completely. Maintaining momentum and focus, as well as keeping it all together during the good and the bad, is the role of culture at your company.
I’ve worked at a lot of different companies over the years and have seen a lot that has worked and quite a bit that hasn’t. I wanted to take a chance to talk a little bit about the culture we’ve created at Urban Airship.
In the Beginning
When Adam, Michael, Steven and I started Urban Airship we knew we wanted to build a company that promoted transparency. Where people worked hard because they love what they do and they have a fantastic time doing it. Our first office was a shared space with other startups and we occupied two desks. Yeah, that’s four people and two desks. To this day we don’t have any private offices and it’s one of the reasons we moved into the wide-open space of our current office last year.
Urban Airship founders Steven Osborn, Scott Kveton, Adam Lowry and Michael Richardson
Meetings: Stand and Deliver
I hate meetings just for the sake of meeting, but they are necessary. We have a couple of standing meetings but my favorite ones are the weekly Monday morning stand-up and the Friday Happy Hour.
On Monday morning at 10am the entire company gathers together for a five minute stand-up meeting. We talk about the week ahead, introduce new people, mention guests visiting the office, etc. This is a great way to set the tone for the week.
An engineering standup meeting at Urban Airship
On Fridays at 4pm we have Happy Hour (you have a keg at your office, right?!). Friday is a chance to look back at the week. We do this with ad hoc presentations from different parts of the company with video conferencing linking our PDX and San Francisco offices. Engineering might share how they are scaling push on iOS. Sales will talk about a specific deal and what it took to get it closed. Marketing might preview the latest campaign to drive new leads. It’s also a great time to talk about any general issues that might be surfacing. There isn’t a better time to share with each other than over a good Portland beer…or a PBR, as is often the case.
Open house party at our new San Francisco office
Transparency…for Real
I’m going to say it even though I realize it’s beyond cliche. We’re pretty damn transparent. Tell me this, do the people at your company know about the different parts of the business and how they work together? Do they understand how leads fill the pipeline? The relationship between marketing and sales? The challenges with scaling infrastructure? Current revenue? Burn? Cash on hand? Outstanding shares? From day one we worked hard to do just that and I share all of this and more during our weekly Happy Hour meetings.
There is No Fence
I’m sure you’ve worked at companies before that have a fence. Maybe it’s a fence between product and Q/A. Sales and marketing. Finance and the rest of the company. Yeah, we don’t really do that here. A really good company knows that all of those parts of the business have to work together in order to be successful. There’s no “well, that’s not my job” attitude at UA. You roll up your sleeves and get done what needs to get done. If something is broken like a process or we have an outage, we address it in a way so as to learn from the mistake.
How do we accomplish this? I think we make it clear across the board that we’re working as a team here. While I may be the CEO, I still take direction from the board, our advisors and the rest of the team. Same goes for product, marketing, sales, business development, ops, admin and finance. A well-oiled team that collaborates effectively can move mountains and we do everything we can to continue that trend.
Free Friday
Once a quarter we do something called “Free Friday.” Steven saw Atlassian’s success and we decided to mimic it.
Free Friday starts on Thursday at 4pm and employees are encouraged to work on anything they want. Seriously. Anything. The only requirement is that you have to be prepared to share what you worked on starting at 4pm the next day (and yes, this maps conveniently to Happy Hour). You can work individually or in groups. The entire company is invited to participate and we witness everything from building games to building out new features for the platform. Some of our best new ideas for features came because of a coding spike done to prototype something. My personal favorite was what I worked on during the last Free Friday–the Urban Airship BBQ. That totally counts.
Know the KPIs
What are the real Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business? For a long time we thought it was the number of notifications we were sending. While interesting, and certainly an indication of growth, we view the total number of pushes being sent as just one of the KPIs.
We have a big board in both of our offices (inspired by the one at Panic just down the street) that displays our real-time KPIs across the entire company. This is more than just up-time and number of notifications, but metrics like revenue, pipeline, incoming leads and average time to close that show we are on target with our plan. These are real KPIs and they live on our big board which everyone passes by several times a day.
As a joke back in 2010 I got a custom engraved bell that hung near the sales team. It says “Urban Airship – ring in case of sale.” We put it up and rang it from time-to-time but then it actually became something that we did for big deals. It was about closure for a sometimes hard-fought deal or one that was really going to move the needle. Now when people hear the bell ring the ENTIRE company knows that we just won a significant deal that will continue to move the ball forward.
Don’t Skimp on your Office Manager
We have Barb. Barb kicks ass. Barb joined the company early on (employee #7, I believe) and she came in to handle all of the little things. That’s pretty early considering it was me, one inside sales guy and a handful of engineers. I know people that wait much longer to make this hire but I’d never recommend that.
Akasha and Barb keep the airship flying high
A good chunk of the executive team travels and having someone that is there every single day with their finger on the pulse of the team is critical. There are countless times when Barb has said “the boys look a little stressed out, we should do something nice,” which then leads to an off-site, a scavenger hunt, impromptu parties and a general continuity that is so important to stress-heavy startups.
When we acquired SimpleGeo, Barb migrated to SF for two months to get the office in order and to help integrate the new team members into our culture.
DO NOT SKIMP ON YOUR OFFICE MANAGER. Sure, you could get somebody cheap, fresh out of college to help with AR/AP, keep the fridge stocked with drinks and greet people at the door, but don’t bother. Go the extra mile and pay a little extra to get someone that knows how to run an office. Your office manager should be the right-hand person to whoever is running Ops or to the CEO.
Perks Don’t Cost You All that Much
We started catering lunches over a year ago. We did two days a week to start and now do three days a week in the office, which still leaves time for our team to explore their love for the PDX food cart scene. Meals are healthy, diverse and always include a vegetarian/vegan option. Sales mingles with marketing, who mingles with engineering. This is a good thing, and while it costs us $10/head/meal it’s well worth it. Let’s do a little math.
UA Lunch Timelapse @15fps, sound from Steven Osborn on Vimeo.
In our Portland office we have 53 people. Lunch is served promptly at Noon and people are usually back at their desks by 12:40pm at the latest, and they aren’t rushed at all. Twenty minutes x 53 people is 17 hours of saved time a day. The cost for that meal? $530. For the week we get:
$530/day x 3 days = $1590/week
20 minutes x 53 people x 3 days = 53 hours saved/week (or 1 hour saved per employee per week)
That adds up and while this is a “perk” for the team it happens to turn a fantastic ROI for the company, both in real dollars and especially culturally.
We don’t have a vacation policy. It’s something we borrowed from Netflix. You take the time that you need when you need to take it and you put it on the shared calendar for the entire company to see. People know when you’re going to be gone and we can plan accordingly around gaps and releases. If people abuse this policy (and no one has) then there are bigger issues to be dealt with.
Play Just as Hard as You Work
Luau party. The People of Walmart party. The all-day scavenger hunt scouring Portland for all things geeky or otherwise. Hiring a choreographer to come in and teach the team the Thriller dance to do during our Halloween party. Getting a REAL Santa to come in for the kids of the company. They are fun, they create culture and they bind the team together.
Urban Airship Zombie Ball Dance from Jason Grigsby on Vimeo.
The blueprint for our day off in PDX
Airshippers on the road
You’re going to spend a full third of your life working. Why not do it at a place that challenges you with hard problems, let’s you have an insane amount of fun and has a real business model in a burgeoning space? While these are the tactical elements that make up the Urban Airship culture I think the ethos of “work hard, play hard” is at the root of who we are. If you get a chance to stop by the UA offices in SF or PDX I’d be happy to show you what it looks like in practice and you’ll see for yourself that Urban Airship really is a special place to work.
Oh, and we’re hiring. 
The crew is on the ready, the flight plan is set and the blueprint for a SXSW experience you won’t soon forget is coming to life. Over the next month you’ll be able to follow along in our journey as we bring Urban Airship’s Mobile Roundtable to the streets of Austin for SXSW; it’s beginning to take shape.
Last week you learned that we really are planning a mobile, mobile leadership event. With round-trips jumping off from The Screen Porch at W Austin, and a secret, ultra-cool way station, a few of you will have the opportunity to mix and mingle in small group discussions led by mobile, marketing and developer luminaries.
People like Andrew Mager, Chief Listening Officer at Spotify, and Chris Messina, Developer Advocate at Google, will spark a wide variety of discussions, from how mobile is changing content, marketing and consumer behavior, to how industries can adapt to seize new opportunities.
Head on over to our event site and submit your email address to get updates on how you may be able to hitch a ride with us in Austin.
This is the first in a series of posts that explores some of the things we’re doing behind the scenes in Urban Airship Engineering. Over the next few months, members of the engineering team will offer insight into how we operate, lessons we’ve learned, open source projects we have created and some of the challenges we face serving hundreds of millions of instances of apps connecting to our services every day.
Culturally and from a process standpoint, Urban Airship Engineering is focused on learning and adapting through continuous improvement. We wish we were smart enough to have invented these techniques, but luckily we didn’t have to. The way we conduct product development day to day is an adaptation of ideas in various books including the Poppendieck’s books on Lean Software and David Anderson’s Kanban.
“Value Stream” is a term that originated with Lean Manufacturing meaning to analyze and design the flow of materials and information required to bring a product or service to a consumer. The whole idea is to drive out waste, deliver fast, build quality in, and engage all of the people involved in the value stream so that great products emerge. Urban Airship has had a lot of success with Kanban and Kaizen. Don’t let those words scare you off if you don’t speak Japanese, they just mean “billboard” and “change for the better,” respectively. This post explores our high-level history in applying these concepts and how we’ve begun to scale our process across our SF and PDX offices as necessitated by bringing Urban Airship and SimpleGeo together as one company last October.
We started with Kanban and Kaizen when I joined Urban Airship in October 2010. The engineering team at the time was following an adaptation of Agile/Scrum and while it was producing results, it wasn’t working as well as we wanted it to in serving all the needs of a venture-backed startup. We adapted our operating model to a starter version of what is described in Anderson’s Kanban book. A great thing about Kanban is starting is easy; you just model the value stream as it is and define work-item types that are meaningful to the team (e.g., Bug Pack, Minimum Marketable Feature, Business Enablement, Refactoring/Technical Debt). Each work-item that is in process, planned, or recently completed gets hung up on a physical board with lanes that indicate the current value stream.
Every morning we have a Product Development Boardwalk. This is a standup style meeting where we walk through every work-item on the board in no longer than 15 minutes. We rotate the facilitator of this meeting every day to keep it fresh and make sure that everyone knows the process well enough that they can lead the team through it. This establishes shared context for everyone on what is happening in the value stream. It’s amazing what smart people can achieve together when they have the same context! Physical Kanban boards are still unrivaled for enabling this.
We tweaked our value stream a bit here and there as we learned from successes and failures. We introduced new work-item types, changed WIP limits, added exit criteria, added lanes, split lanes etc. We broke out a separate board right next to Product Development for Customer Development & GTM (Go-to-Market). We made these changes based on insights from our monthly Operational Review & Retrospective and from 5 Whys from production incidents and other defects.
In October of 2011, Urban Airship acquired San Francisco-based SimpleGeo, took on a new round of financing and executed some major business agreements that would cause the company to grow even more quickly than it was already. In order to keep work-items flowing, it was time to begin to scale our value stream.
Urban Airship is a very in-person company. In order to make our value stream work across offices, we decided to replicate it in both locations. To achieve the same feel we had when it was just PDX, we now alternate facilitating offices every week. Individuals in the facilitating office also rotate every day. We’re still working out the kinks to be sure, but it’s working and is a lot of fun.
Our Kanban board was showing it’s age even before these events occurred. We had grown engineering four-fold and with that it was getting harder to see everything and achieve shared context. In order to address this and begin to scale into small sets of focused teams, we introduced horizontal lanes for each major part of our product line. We have kept the meeting wide open to anyone who wants to participate or observe, but now just the engineering leadership team (leaders of functional areas, program managers, product managers, tech leads, team leads, etc.) attends the Product Development Boardwalk every morning. Many of these leaders maintain what we refer to as a “Zoom In” Kanban board, which is focused on a specific functional area or work-item that rolls up to the main Product Development board.
The Product Development Kanban board in PDX (left wall) and Polycom unit with the replica board in SF
The SF Polycom unit displaying the PDX Kanban board
A real live Product Development Boardwalk meeting with Wade Simmons from SF facilitating via Polycom
The SF Product Development board (notice the glare from the warm California sun)
An example “Zoom In” Kanban board (far wall) in our Messaging Feature Room in PDX
Looking Forward
Change is constant at Urban Airship. As we continue to grow our team, scale to a billion devices using our services and build new features and products, we’ll keep making adaptions to how we operate in Urban Airship Engineering.
We use the following tools and technology to power our Kanban:
Urban Airship Engineering hires people with opinions who care deeply about their work, technology, the products they build and making a huge impact on the market. Every person on our team is asked to be part of the solution and to contribute a ton.
Come join us: http://urbanairship.com/company/jobs
Today App Design Vault chose Urban Airship as the #1 tool on their 32 Top Resources Mobile App Developers Should Know About list. We are thrilled that the folks at App Design Vault feel so strongly about the services we provide. We love our customers and hope that they find value in this list.
[Source: iPhone App Design]
Swirl, an established online sample sale site created in partnership with DailyCandy, wanted to grow its already successful email based flash sale business by adding an offering built for mobile. They created an app to host daily flash sales and utilized push notifications to deliver alerts each day to notify users when new sales begin.
This new daily call to action, sent directly to customers’ mobile devices, resulted in a significant increase in traffic and sales and also added new life to previously slow weekend and holiday time periods. Swirl’s daily Push is driving a 60% increase in mobile traffic and a 20% increase in total mobile orders. Push also drives a 40% higher conversion rate than email driven, mobile browser.
“We don’t want our customers to miss out on a great deal. So we need a stable
platform that we can rely on to engage with our customers on a daily basis.”
-Janis Leahy, Senior Product Manager, Swirl
We are thrilled with the success that Swirl is finding and hope that other retailers can find the same success. With the holidays right around the corner, there’s never been a better time to explore what Push can do for retailers.
Download the Swirl app in the itunes store here or visit the Swirl site.
Want us to share your Urban Airship success story? Contact us.
As a marketer, it’s exciting to see companies large and small using Push Notifications to drive business goals. The customer case studies we have produced over the past few months make it clear that Push is a powerful tool for business. We’ve seen them deliver a daily dose of learning for Dictionary.com, make radio social for Jelli, and drive commerce for Swirl. But like Peter Parker’s uncle Ben used to say, “with great power comes great responsibility”.
In the changing media landscape, it’s important to remember that the mobile user is in complete control of his/her experience. Unlike radio, TV and print, mobile users will not tolerate broadcast advertisements sent to their mobile devices. Misusing Push Notifications to serve only the needs of the app, ahead of the needs of the customer, is the quickest way to get turned off. Follow these recommended practices of Push to assure a long lasting relationship with your users.
If our recommended practices aren’t for you, make sure to follow the terms of Apple’s iOS agreement.
“You may not use the APN or Local Notifications for the purposes of advertising, product promotion, or direct marketing of any kind (e.g. up-selling, cross-selling, etc.), including, but not limited to, sending any messages to promote the use of Your Application or advertise the availability of new features or versions.”
At Urban Airship we believe the future of mobile will largely be driven by real time alerts and updates, based on personal context like location and preferences. We are excited to welcome the SimpleGeo team and are dedicated to building products and services that will deliver our vision and ensure the success of our customers.
Push notifications and location updates are proven engagement drivers for mobile apps so there is strong incentive to maximize opt-in rates. Like it or not, most users will not give you a second chance open these valuable lines of communication. Asking for permission to send push notifications and to track location is a pretty big ask for most people. This is why every app developer should consider taking a look at how their app treats the opt-in moment and upon seeing the request, answer these two questions.
Airbnb is a great example of an app that is optimizing the opt-in moment by building trust and creating a compelling value exchange. For those who are not familiar with Airbnb, it is a community marketplace for unique apartment and home rentals. After downloading the Airbnb app, users can view a walk through of how the app works, explore rentals in their current location or search locations. When they find a rental property they are interested in they can either book it or contact the owner but first they have to log in or create an account. After a user has signed in to their account, they receive a message stating that Airbnb would like to send push notifications. They also explain what to expect from the notifications and where to configure them. By this time the user has had a chance to experience and find value from the app, making them more open to accepting opting in to receive push notifications.
Improve the way you Push. Learn more about the opt-in and more by checking out our new white paper.
Get it here: Guide to Push: Five Ways to Engage and Maintain Your Audience
