I've been known to be something of a cynic about tech conferences but yesterday at NEXT Berlin was rich in thought provoking ideas and different points of view about the stuff that's challenging norms and is likely to make a difference in the future.
One of the highlights from a day of sessions dense with inspiration came from Harper Reed. Harper was the CTO for the Obama campaign and so is no doubt in high demand on the speaker circuit right now, but his talk was warm, funny, and packed full of fascinating insights into the team that revolutionised the relationship between technology and poltics (read Alex Madrigal's seminal Atlantic piece on When The Nerds Go Marching In).
Harper was the ex-CTO of Threadless, who'd left because he'd acheived all the goals he'd set himself, and was then offered the chance to put Obama's huge campaign contribution budget to use in building a platform that would enable them to concentrate on the one thing that would fulfil the potential of that huge budget, but also the massive task that they faced: execution. There was some good insight into how they built an API that would enable them to execute and ship large numbers of products (over 200) fast, how they spent a month doing nothing else but 'testing failure' (practicing failure plans), and investing in user experience right from the beginning. I loved this: "the difference between functional and usable lies with the users".
But perhaps the most interesting aspects of his talk were around the challenges of building and running the team that would do the work. Politicians, said Harper, don't hire engineers. They don't hire hackers. The 2008 Obama campaign had four engineers. For the 2012 campaign Harper hired forty. He referenced Steve Jobs' belief that A's hire A's, and B's hire C's, and the importance of founders and team leaders selling the team's mission in order to get the best talent (sounds obvious, but I suspect is often poorly executed). With the size of the task in front of them, and the speed of delivery that was required (think about the comparison to the length of time it takes most coprorates to implement a large-scale IT infrastructure/Digital capability project) the way in which the team worked with other teams, built and shipped product was key.
Politics is hard. There was a piece of advice, given to him by John Maeda (who was quoting from Larry Bacow) which I particularly liked: 'Manage by your outbox, not by your inbox". Meaning that focusing on pro-active communication with stakeholders and members of the campaign team reduced the time spent on reactive communications.
He talked quite a bit about the relationship between tech and digital teams, the importance of establishing trust, but also how everything was guided by metrics in a way that reminded me of that Mark Pincus quote about how not using metrics is like flying a plane in a cloud with no instruments. Few things are that predictable. The team would bet on which email subject lines or content would get the most response - the Obama campaign had some of the best email/CRM brains in the world but even they more often than not couldn't second guess the results, which meant that the numbers were everything ("Groundhog Day is a movie about multivariate testing").
The campaign is renowned for it's use of microtargeting. At one point Tim O'Reilly advised Harper that instead of just using microtargeting, they should focus on microlistening - the idea of using the power of conversation within small groups. So hence their smart use of Facebook (what they called "targeted sharing") to facilitate supporters (600,000 of them) to encourage their friends to get out and vote.
When asked about whether the technologies they built should be open-sourced and made available to others (including the Republicans) to use, he made the point that the platform can only offer a competitive advantage for a relatively short period of time without the right people to develop it, which says a lot for the idea of advantage coming from agility, talent and approaches rather than secrecy and perfection.
The interesting thing about all that is how much it reminded me of the current work of the Government Digital Service, which as Tom Petty says "is defining how a government interacts with its citizens (it just doesn’t know it yet)". In his recent description of the work of GDS, Russell summed it up quite neatly:
1. The Unit of Delivery is The Team
2. The Product Is The Service Is The Marketing
3. Digital is Not Comms, And It's Not IT, It's Your Business
