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.

Model What’s Happening Now and Let Improvement Emerge

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.

A Year Later: SimpleGeo Acquisition, Investment and Development Partners

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.

Tools / Technology

We use the following tools and technology to power our Kanban:

1. The biggest baddest magnetic white boards we can find
2. The most powerful magnets we can find
3. Magnet pictures of our people
4. White board markers
5. Colored note cards (indicate different classes of service)
6. Colored markers (to indicate different work-item types (e.g., Minimum Marketable Feature, Bug Pack)
7. Polycom to power the video conferencing between offices
8. Google Hangouts and Skype for Zoom In video conferencing
9. LeanKitKanban – web-based Kanban board we use to help sync the SF and PDX boards. It also produces some great metrics and graphs that we use to understand what is happening across product development (e.g., Continuous Flow Diagram, Cycle Time per lane, per work-item type, etc., Card Distribution Diagrams, Efficiency Diagrams, and even a Process Control Diagram)
10. JIRA – we use it to track details of work-items and as the electronic record we reference in source control, etc.

For the Urban Airship flight crew, this was a great opportunity to grow relationships and find new talent to support aggressive growth plans, as well as to celebrate our work and progress towards integrating geolocation into the mobile industry’s leading cross-platform push notification system.

Conversations were richly nourished by Bacon Bacon SF and lubricated by a full top-shelf bar and kegs of Anderson Valley Boont Amber. In addition, we got to show off our ultra-cool mural by Alex Pardee that was recently featured by Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine.

Courtesy of www.juxtapoz.com

If you think you have what it takes to join the Airship, don’t wait for the next party to let us know.

In a world that’s more connected than ever, push notifications can expand our view, our insight and our actions beyond the 3-10 inch screen we religiously carry. Together with leading app developers and partners we are evolving mobile messaging to drive greater value for consumers and brands alike. We have sent more than ten billion push notifications for many of the world’s leading brands and mobile apps. Check out some of our real-world applications here.

We announced the acquisition of SimpleGeo at the end of October 2011. Since then we’ve been evaluating how to proceed in a way that benefits all parties involved: SimpleGeo and Urban Airship customers plus both companies. After many internal conversations and discussions with a variety of clients, we’ve come up with a new direction. To summarize that approach, here’s the email we sent out today to all SimpleGeo customers to let them know about our plans since the merger:

Dear Customer:

As you know, this past October, Urban Airship and SimpleGeo merged to combine mobile customer engagement with location and context-based services. Since then, we’ve maintained the status quo with respect to SimpleGeo’s products: Places, Context, and Storage. In the meantime, the newly combined team here has been busy speaking with customers about what services they would find most useful to deploy from the combined entity.

As a result, during the first half of this year we will introduce significant new features to Urban Airship’s high performance push notification services that allow our customers to take advantage of location and context to better segment and engage their mobile audience. As just one example, customers will have the ability to send push notifications to users on specific device types, in specific geographical areas, during specific time frames, e.g., iPad users who have been in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco within the past 7 days. The ability to fine-tune audience segmentation for push notifications will increase relevancy to users, provide new app capabilities which will lead to higher customer engagement and satisfaction rates, and deliver increased return on investment. We’ll share more with you in the coming weeks and months as we can.

In order to deliver on this aggressive vision in the shortest amount of time possible, we need to focus our product development efforts. So, after lots of internal discussion and customer conversations, we will wind down the availability of the current versions of Places, Context, and Storage over the next few months. We will do everything we can to minimize the impact to customers as we look to end the availability of these services on March 31, 2012. For more details on this change, see our FAQ document.

We have already lined up a partnership with Factual to provide continuity for all customers using the Places service. The folks at Factual are on standby to ensure as seamless a hand-off as possible to their services. We also have an additional list of replacement services in a migration path document on our support site. In addition, we will not be charging for usage of any of the Places, Context, or Storage services for their remaining availability period or for past usage to date, as a thank-you for your patience and understanding during this transition.

Because we want to continue our relationship with every SimpleGeo customer, we are offering existing customers of the SimpleGeo services up to six months of our Urban Airship Pro Plan for no monthly charge (see the offer details in the FAQ document).

We are extremely excited about the future of adding location and context into our mobile customer engagement products. We look forward to working with all of our customers to help them innovate with these new capabilities to make their mobile initiatives even more successful.

Sincerely,
Scott Kveton
Co-founder and CEO
Urban Airship

Everyone at Urban Airship truly believes in the power of push notifications. We all work hard to deliver the promise of improved mobile engagement to our customers. So it is with great excitement that we announce the inclusion of push notifications in a new report by Forrester Research called, “The New Messaging Mandate”, which can be purchased here.

For the first time, an independent analyst firm recommends Push Notifications, along with traditional mail, telemarketing, email, social media and SMS, as a must have communication channel. Forrester has a great history in anointing significant technologies at the right time, and having them include push notifications in this report is very telling. Mobile messaging is becoming the most real-time, customer focused channel, but it is just really getting started, and push notifications are playing a very significant role. See the Press Release

Forrester has a real knack for timing as their report comes out around the same time that we see our 10 billionth notification sent since we launched two years ago. It’s exciting to see the path Urban Airship has taken over these past two years.  It was only a few months ago, in August, that we saw our 5 billionth notification. Since then we have seen an acceleration of new customers and users.

For fun, take a look at two fun graphics mapping our:
Journey to 5 billion notifications
Adventure from 5 billion to 10 billion

The introduction of iOS5 brought Newsstand, which made mobile subscriptions a reality for publishers. Now 8 of the top 10 publishing companies rely on our service to manage daily subscription content and send breaking news alerts to their users. Along with Newsstand came Notification Center, which created a better user experience for receiving push notifications. This improved experience has increased the number of pushes that users are open to receiving and brought new confidence to enterprise organizations that send notifications through their apps. In December when Amazon released the Kindle Fire, based on the Android operating system, they opened up a whole new audience for our Helium customers to message to.

Thank you Forrester for including us in your research.  Thank you customers and developers for trusting us to deliver on our promises. Thank you team for continuing to take Urban Airship to new heights.

As you wait in your hotel room or boarding gate, make sure to download CNET’s iOS app to have the top breaking stories from the week delivered to your fingertips. CNET’s editors will be picking the top daily stories that you absolutely need to know about and sending them to you as soon as they’re live.  This way you’ll stay connected to the biggest news, even while your other hand is tied up clutching that Yard-Long Eiffel Tower drink.

Pick up the CNET app for iPhone and iPad at the itunes store.

]]> http://urbanairship.com/blog/2012/01/09/customer-spotlight-cnet-brings-ces-to-users-with-breaking-news-pushes/feed/ 0 http://urbanairship.com/blog/2012/01/06/a-warm-ua-welcome-to-our-new-cro-christopher-dean/ http://urbanairship.com/blog/2012/01/06/a-warm-ua-welcome-to-our-new-cro-christopher-dean/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:08:57 +0000 kveton http://urbanairship.com/?p=4951 As things here on the ship continue to elevate, we are excited to welcome Christopher Dean (a.k.a CD) to the team as our Chief Revenue Officer. Before joining Urban Airship he was the Head of Business Development and Chief Strategy Officer at Skype. CD comes to us with 20 years of Internet and IP communications experience in the B2C and B2B markets and has consulted with the likes of Apple, Adobe Systems, IBM, Oracle, and Placeware (acquired by Microsoft). So we are confident that he is going to lead our sales and BD efforts to the next level.

When he’s not ruling the boardroom he spends time with his lovely wife and three kids at their home in San Francisco, and spends time making air-dried Italian sausages, cycling, skiing and traveling to Portland (amongst other places). Read more about Christopher here. Welcome Chris!

[Source: iPhone App Design]

Ubermind was acquired by Deloitte. An interesting move by Deloitte and a sign that they are making bets in Mobile to broaden their offering significantly. Read what Ubermind and Deloitte had to say about the acquisition.

Small Society, was acquired by Walmart Labs. Small Society will now be working solely for Walmart brands and we are sure they will be delighting consumers with their mobile innovations. Read what Raven and James from Small Society are saying about joining Walmart.

News around consolidation in our industry is nothing new or surprising. Mobile apps are a booming category with many players and we have seen plenty of consolidation amongst the playing field. What we find interesting about this news is that two great app development shops were picked up by big enterprise players.  This adds real merit to all of the talk around the growing need to invest in mobile apps.  Congratulations to these two talented agencies and to the companies who invested in a better mobile future – We look forward to seeing your continued innovations.