Over the past year we've established a common understanding of the advantages of an in-house tech-department, that is not only a service to other departments, but a partner. So we won't develop that again. In this document we describe what, how and why we intend to build over the next month.
We actually have one requirement, that cannot be discussed: quality. We are selling something on the internet for good money, so we cannot make compromises when it comes to the correctness of facts, the beauty of language, the cleanliness of the design and a seamless interaction with our content (or us, or each other) for our readers.
We are going to build software for three groups of users:
- The reader, our customers, publishers, discussion partners. We have four channels to communicate with them (excluding all offline interactions):
- a website
- newsletters
- posts on social media (Twitter, Facebook)
- mobile app
- The journalist, editor, freelancer, corrector, AD, expert. They need:
- a tool to write, produce, publish content to the channels
- a tool to administer user-generated content
- to see the performance of the content (traffic, conversions etc.)
- The administration, responsible for customers, payments and subscriptions. They need:
- an interface to look into the customer-database, modify certain parts of it and send emails from it
It is important that we do not see this categories as rigid, but rather as overlapping groups of people with certain functions in the universe of Republik at a given time.
Next: For the reader