LADbible Group’s in-house innovation engine

People Changing Enterprises
Jasmin Guthmann: [00:00:00] If there's one constant in the world of social media, it's change. And nobody knows that better than the social media publishing giant LADbible Group. There's a lot more behind the viral videos and trending articles than you might think. Today, they share a remarkable story of technological reinvention, not once or twice, but over and over again.
Harrison and Tim, the dynamic duo leading LADbible Group's tech evolution, share how the brand shed their technological debt and created a culture of continuous innovation. We recorded this episode live in LADbible's offices in Manchester, and I can tell you, the energy of this team is electric.
This is a story of digital transformation done right, and I can't wait to share it with you. You're listening to People Changing Enterprises. I'm your host, Jasmin Guthmann, and please enjoy this episode with Tim and Harrison from LADbible Group.
Harrison: I'm Harrison. I'm the head of software engineering for LADbible Group. I've been with the company for just under six years. My responsibilities are looking after two teams. So we've got our web team that is responsible for everything you see, LADbible, Sport Bible, et cetera. And our CMS team is responsible for our custom integration to Contentstack.
Tim Barrett: I'm Tim Barrett. I'm the head of product at LADbible Group. I've worked here for five and a half years. My responsibilities are the engineering roadmaps for the CMS team, the web team, and the UX team, and it's mainly project delivery, project scoping, stakeholder engagement, and all the fun admin stuff that the tech needs to support. We were primarily a social media publisher that started off on Facebook 12 years ago and branched out into having our own websites and pushing traffic to those websites. We've since then expanded into each of the social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. We have a global following of 480 million or 485 million at the moment. Across six primary brands with websites, and we also have hundreds of different social channels. We get over a billion engagements a month, and all of the content that we produce that hits our website is written and published via Contentstack.
Harrison: Those are big numbers. And it's obviously, it's quite an interesting engineering challenge to start with the biggest kind of product I've ever worked with in my engineering career. And yeah, keeping everything running, keeping the lights on whilst managing that kind of scale, yeah, it was an interesting challenge.
Jasmin Guthmann: Oh, absolutely. And in a business like yours that is so heavily dependent on technology, not just working, but making the process better, making the result better, not being a blocker for what you're trying to achieve.
Harrison: It's a culture of constantly evaluating what you're doing, making sure that you're delivering the best experience for the users. So whether that is the technologies we're using, whether that's the experience that we're delivering on. We've got a culture of A B testing. When we get an idea, or we think it might be good, we always A B test it. And then use those measurements to determine whether it's the best idea.
Tim Barrett: Because our audience is so engaged and so big, we want to make sure that what we deliver to them will really resonate. So, it goes through a multi-tiered testing process and feedback process before it hits live. Historically, we just published article content on the websites. And that's been our primary content offering for years now. What we've been able to do is to test the waters and to test our audience's reaction as well as prototype brand new ideas. We get feedback from our editorial stakeholders and commercial stakeholders as well. The IT teams provide their own suggestions because they're more familiar with what the system can do than we are. We've had our tech teams and our CMS teams suggest the ideas of conducting polls and adding quizzes when creating live articles, and each one of these, we've been able to test and build a prototype for without having to go through a full production build, without having to get everything set up and create a working prototype that our stakeholders can look at, try out, and give feedback on. And we were able to test that as well before we even got to an AB test.
Jasmin Guthmann: But that also means you don't have to get approval for your cool idea. Like immediate, because that's what usually happens, right? You have the best idea since sliced bread, but you're a junior social media manager. I'm just making this up, and then you present it to your boss and then the answer is maybe later we can add it to a roadmap or whatnot. So that's not what's happening here. You're meeting in a group situation. Somebody has a great idea. And then what happens?
Harrison: I mean, to speak to the engineering side of things, we've built a pipeline workflow that means that anybody, any of the engineers can kind of like spin up a feature branch with their idea, get it out into an internal kind of like testing group, whether that's their peers or stakeholders across the business. Demonstrate that idea. And then that can be kind of fed back with ideas for changes and then maybe end up on the roadmap. I think wider across the business, there's a culture of constantly thinking about new ideas.
Tim Barrett: The company never sits still. Everyone's coming up with new ideas, not just in their own areas but across the business, and how we could present new formats to new audiences in different ways on different platforms. It's a very fast-paced business, and the engineering teams that we look after are just as engaged in that process as you mentioned. In a typical organization, the tech would be seen as the support, and I've worked in those organizations before, and it's great, and it works for those companies. Here, it's a very, very different, a very collaborative environment where the engineers can put forward suggestions. We were actually the drivers in the tech team to onboard a new CMS system to recognize the need for it. To present ideas of how we could diversify our content and not just stick with here's an article with a few adverts on, there you go. We want to expand. We want to grow. We want our audience to grow with us. And the tool set that we have and the culture we have in the company has allowed us to do that.
Jasmin Guthmann: Tell me more about those digital needs and how that influenced your decision to go composable.
Tim Barrett: For us, it was a requirement out of the gate because of the scale of which we work and we operate, we decouple everything. So, we never have the website seen straight onto a CMS. Headless was always the way we were going to go. We gathered requirements from our editorial teams, but they were relatively light. They'd only ever produced article content before and only used the tools that we had in a very old legacy CMS system. So if you ask them what they want to do, they'll give you the list of what they currently do. And that was the list of requirements we had to work from. It was actually the engineering team who put that experience first in the vendor selection process. The engineers and the tech department road-tested a number of different solutions, all headless. And it was the developer experience that brought us to make our decision.
Harrison: I can speak a little bit about an experience that I had before that, which was actually our acquisition of Unilad. So, when we acquired Unilad, we inherited their WordPress site. And as many engineers know, it's not fun to work with WordPress. It doesn't allow for the same kind of agile, move quickly, and be able to deliver the kind of functionality that your editors need. As well as being able to scale to the kind of volume of users that we have. And I think that experience of using WordPress within the group just kind of solidified the need for a headless. We had a bit of an experience with headless with our own internal CMS system. And I think that probably added to the need to continue that headless journey, but in a managed way, so we can concentrate as engineers on what we want to do, which is deliver value to our stakeholders internally and allow somebody else to take on the responsibility of SLA and keeping things running and providing us with a really stable environment to work in.
Jasmin Guthmann: Well, and then you're producing your own data set to actually show the benefit. So you made the decision to go headless. That's a huge, impactful decision to make. Tell me how you got there and how difficult it actually was to get to the good place that you're in now.
Tim Barrett: So about six and a half years ago, seven years ago, we had a very different setup for the LADbible Tech team. Their focus was to allow the editorial team to produce content, get it on the website, and keep the website up. That was their only remit and they managed that very successfully. They helped grow the business, and it got to a point, I think, where there was no further growth in that area. Things stagnated, and our former manager was brought in to completely restructure and rebuild that tech team.
And when upheaval like that happens when you've got a team who are well settled and comfortable in their ways, a lot of people will go, right, that's it; I'm going to go and find my new adventure. Mark, our leader at the time, had to rebuild the engineering team from scratch. Every single engineer was brought in brand new and Harrison was part of that.
Harrison: That's where I entered stage left. Yeah, I came in as a senior at that point.
Tim Barrett: So you had a group of brand new people in a team with leaders who'd been with the company for a matter of months. It was a challenge like, right, we've got to reset everything here.
Harrison: Yeah, it was a really interesting start. I mean, it's quite fun, people had the startup mentality. You're working with people that help build the foundations for this next step. And I think a lot of things kind of translated into sort of the CMS thinking as well laying the solid foundations for how we were going to move from static site generation. We were static site generation and we moved to dynamic rendering using our own custom kind of framework, well built on React, but sort of custom in a way, all of us contributing towards that.
The team collaborated on their vision to build a successful site with the volume of traffic that we were seeing; I can see a lot of that vision translating directly into that.
Tim Barrett: Yeah, moving from static site to dynamic was a fantastic idea. And again, that was an example of a head of engineering coming in, a guy called Dave, who was fantastic. He redesigned everything that we did and how we did it. And he said to the leadership team, I'm going to need this team for four months, and we're going to build this, and you're not going to see anything else. And they just went, yes, do it, do that. We'll back you. And that's the same metal, once we've done that with the front end of the website and the web platform that Harrison and the team created, we were able to do the same with our CMS, and our backend and Contentstack was thankfully where we ended up.
Jasmin Guthmann: I think probably many people listening were thinking to themselves, how the heck did they get approval for a change like that? A big change like that? How did you?
Tim Barrett: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was a business case that I helped to build with our previous head of engineering. We worked on it together, but we didn't focus on the technical aspects of it at the time. We focused on the possibilities of what it could do and how it could scale with us as a business. Because this business has huge ambitions for growth. Every year, you think you've hit a new height and you do. And it's a really nice environment to be a part of because it keeps you ambitious and it keeps you looking for that next thing, but we had no capability whatsoever with our previous CMS to deliver that. We'd once tried, it was at the very start of when we were working from home in COVID. We discussed the possibility of building a new content type and it was going to be a very basic image gallery, a listicle, as some people call them in publishing, easy content to enjoy. And so we built this, and you'd think that this would be the most simple thing to do in a CMS. And we had a nice front end. We had a nice design for it, but when we delivered it on the CMS, we'd done the best we could in this system that that no one in that team was a part of creating, so they'd all inherited this legacy system to work with and in order to change the order of images, once you'd publish it, you had to actually go into the code itself, it was almost like you had to be an engineer to create and edit these things. So I think of all the effort that we went through in that early summer when we were all in lockdown, I think we produced one. It just put the brakes on any kind of aspirations that we had to grow the website beyond just article content, beyond what we were already doing. So we came together, we looked at what the publishers were doing, not just social media publishers. We don't constrain ourselves to that. We look at what bigger publishers are doing as well. We look at the BBC and Sky News, and they run these live blocks where they're covering a breaking news story, and you can hit it, there are key updates on everything that you do there, you know what's important, you've highlighted it, and it's updated in real-time whenever there's an update to the story that they're covering. So we presented that to our leadership team and said we're confident that we can deliver these kinds of content, but we need you to back us on this selection. And I think it was a two-week discussion. There was no real pushback from our side about go on, go on, go and find something for free or go and build it yourself. It wasn't like that. It was like, no if you say this is what we need to do, we will back you for it. And they did. And it's paid off ever since. And in the last three years, the business has seen the benefits of what we've done and what we're able to deliver. And we can make informed decisions rather than just thinking, oh, what if we could do that? Now, we can actually see what would happen if we do that.
Jasmin Guthmann: That's fantastic. Tell me more about what that looks like today. Your listicle sounds horrible.
Tim Barrett: Oh, it was, it was so brutal. And I felt really bad because it was our engineering head who built the experience in the CMS.
And even he had his head in his hands apologizing for it at the time. It's like, we built it, but it's really not good. But now, in fact, the funny story is we're about to release our first release of a new listicle that we built for the first time in Contentstack. We're at the very end of that project right now.
Jasmin Guthmann: Finally, that's amazing.
Tim Barrett: So with the new test, the new innovations, the prototypes we make, we call them, we just have hack days or hack weeks where we put a list of ideas on a board, and the engineers put their own ideas on a board as well. And they pick from that and they choose what they want to deliver.
They'll play that back to us as the rest of the tech team. Eventually, we've had such good, great success with it. They've played that back to the senior leadership team as well. and board members who have been so impressed with what the team has done. And that's improved not just the tech strategy but the company strategy as well.
Planning a year's roadmap in advance is a waste of time for everyone, especially in this industry, because your priorities will change. In a tech environment like this, you'd be given a project, and tech has to go away and deliver it. And by the time that one's done, the benefits have disappeared or the focus needs to be somewhere else.
The way that we work in both CMS and web is we get the absolute minimum out there first. That's going to add the value. And I know that is a very typical, very standard agile thing to say, but that is true of what we do here. Get using it. Give us feedback. Let us know how it works. So yeah, the MVP approach and the minimum viable products are 100 percent how we work.
Harrison: Yeah, it works really well for the team being able to kind of get it in front of people as early as possible and get some feedback and then iterate on that rather than releasing a product all in one and then finding out that it doesn't do anything how it's supposed to. It doesn't meet the expectations of the end users.
Tim Barrett: We want to make sure that we are doing the right thing right now for the business. Are we doing it for the right reasons? Are the right people going to take advantage of what we're doing and utilize what we're building right now? Because everywhere, and here included, we've sometimes worked on projects that haven't delivered what we needed to do.
But you learn from that, and you pick it up, and you take those learnings into the next one. It's about delivering value. And that's the most important thing. We take an audience-first mindset, and that's really working. That's why we're growing.

Jasmin Guthmann: The web leadership team playing all of that, because I understood that is a relatively new thing that you have.
Tim Barrett: That's been something that's been in place. There's that last 18 months to two years. So, it'll take different forms in different organizations. Some people call them steering groups or council of people, but it's the most senior stakeholder group responsible for traffic, performance, and monetization.
Everything that we do on the websites, there's a leader in that room. That represents those areas. And that's what we do. We meet weekly. We all work together. We check each other's performance, you know, work, and report back on performance. How have sessions been this week? How was the advert performance on this unit?
We're running a test on this. How's this performing? What do we think we can do to change it? There's not a single finger-pointing exercise ever taking place in that environment. Everyone, no matter where it is in the business, is pulling in the same direction in that room. And having a group of stakeholders like that who work together and communicate properly on an equal footing is, it's so refreshing to work with.
Any one of these teams could be on the receiving end of a decision made that they weren't a part of. Well, being part of that decision-making process makes the difference. Most organizations don't have this environment where you've certainly, from a tech perspective, where you're expected to be the service and the deliverer of new things for everyone else to play with.
Usually, we're not a part of that process, not to this extent, and having that voice in the room, not just to help inform daily strategy and roadmap over the next three to five months, strategically change the way we publish content, and unlock these new ideas. And this is what we think will help us achieve that and that works for everybody.
Jasmin: Sounds like paradise.
Harrison: There are problem solvers in that web leadership team, and they're always willing to offer their expertise to try and resolve problems. So whether it's engineering can possibly take some of the strain off commercial or commercial can possibly adapt a little bit depending on the problem.
Tim: It does take work to get to this point as well. Sometimes, you have to go through some pain points to realize, right, this isn't working as we're doing it right now. Let's address it. Let's speak to management. Let's get the backing to create this. And once you've got the right people in the room with the right attitudes, that's when it makes the difference.
Jasmin Guthmann: And that leads me to another super interesting field. Because what it tells me is your business moving so fast and your audiences are so demanding, how do you make sure that your people are always not just up to date but really at the forefront of what's possible? And we talked about that many times, the engineers are actually the drivers, not the content people per se.
Tim Barrett: I think we're quite lucky that we work in a company that has a lot of young, very motivated, driven people, that work in their own individual areas. So that's half the battle right there. The other thing is the culture of the company is very collaborative. Every single feature, every button click, they create documentation for, and they publish that to a shared repository, like a shared intranet that everyone in the team can access.
There's a user guide written by the engineers in a very user-friendly way with screenshots and everything for every function that we do. We also work very closely with our editorial teams. We don't just release a feature and say, there you go. There's a new content type you can create. We engage with them.
We show them how it's done. It's the culture of the team and the wider company as well. We'll always work and strive to make sure that we're working on the right thing at the right time for the business and for the teams as well.
Jasmin Guthmann: And you have the data to prove it because you're A/B testing it simultaneously?
Tim Barrett: Oh yeah, everything's tested. If a button moves, everything's tested.
Jasmin Guthmann: I'm almost stunned, I haven't yet heard any mention of any type of resistance because if you're ripping out a team that has to do the best of their abilities and their briefing done a good job until they hit that point where it just didn't, it just wasn't enough anymore, change is usually not something that all people embrace at all times.
Tim Barrett: You're right. Change, especially big change, is often problematic for a lot of people involved. At the time with the tech team, the legacy tech team had left the building. They'd left the company, and we didn't have any resistance.
Jasmin Guthmann: From the content team's side, or not the editing team's? Everybody was happy?
Tim Barrett: If anything, I mean, without wanting to sound overly simplistic, I think if the website's working and it's performing, then the content teams are happy. If they can publish content that ends up on the website and it doesn't crash, they're thrilled because their work's got the platform, that's getting the exposure, it works.
I don't think anyone minds too much about how it works, just as long as it does work. I remember joining LADbible halfway through this process of creating a brand new web platform. A request came through from, I think, one of the leads in the editorial teams: "We want to change the categories on the LADbible website. We want to add this one and remove this one."
I thought, "Perfect. Yeah, that's fine. It takes five minutes, surely." But with the architecture that we had at the time and the processes that we had, that took 24 hours. And that's only if it didn't fail halfway through, which was a very high probability. So, just to change the name of a category in the main menu—just the name—was a 24-hour turnaround with a high probability of failure.
No one's going to push against improving that. We're not talking about changing the way that people work. We're not talking about introducing new processes for them to fill in every time they have to create something that they would have been doing for years. So we were just selling the idea of scalability, stability... and yeah, thankfully we got it through.
We've been using Contentstack every single day with every single brand for over three and a half years now. So we've got tens of thousands of articles. The content creation process right now, even with all the additions and all the changes and improvements that we've made and new features that we've added in—even just the article creation process—it's still so much simpler than where we were four or five years ago, where there were workarounds built on top of workarounds because that's all that we could do at the time with the tools that we had.
So, moving an editorial team... I would say, "Right, you're not using this one that you're familiar with anymore. You're using this one, but this one's got 200 different fields and buttons all over the place you don't know which ones work and which ones don't. And to create a tag, it's free typing, and don't worry if you spell it wrong, that'll just mean we've got multiple tags everywhere." It was a nightmare of a process for them to work with as well.

So when we present them with a blank slate—"There's your headline, there's your summary, there's your tags, there's your body content. Oh, by the way, all of the rich text editor fields work. You don't have to guess which ones do"—that's not something you have to sell a lot. People are like, "This is great. This is really good." So yeah, when it's not been too challenging to get these changes through for us, most of the time, people are really excited about it.
Jasmin Guthmann: I'm thoroughly impressed. What's next?
Tim Barrett: Well, yeah, we've got a lot. We've got plans for the engineering teams for the rest of this year. We're looking at, as we've mentioned, the list galleries—they're coming up very soon. We're looking at potentially utilizing further AI integration to help assist with SEO diversification as well. So if we want to create variations of summaries and titles of stories that are SEO optimized, that will only be visible to Google, we'll integrate in a generative AI to assist with that as well. It takes more of the manual processes away from content creation, allowing the writers to focus purely on the creative aspects of it.
As for company strategy, certainly growth, international growth as well. Yeah, and we're also exploring... Harrison, we were discussing multilingual content. last week, weren't we?
Harrison: Yeah, translation's a really interesting area, especially where it intersects with AI. So obviously we're a predominantly English-speaking kind of publisher, but we do get some audiences from non-English speaking countries. So I think some of our areas of sport, for instance, obviously travel well across the world. So it's about finding what content would serve international markets well and then backing that with translation for that market. And I think AI can probably step in there and offer that solution.
Tim Barrett: AI recommendations personalized based on what that person wants are really exciting to explore. Again, if it benefits the audience first, then they tell us whether it's right or not.
Jasmin Guthmann: And that's where your audience-first approach is going to be gold. Beautiful. You've painted a beautiful picture. Also, a very tangible one because I think we've all been in various places where... things aren't great, but then that was a bold move. So, you know, Dave deserves a pat on the back.
Tim Barrett: Oh, he'll take it because he will listen to this, and he will appreciate that pat on the back. He's grinning right now. Dave, we're all patting you on the back. Good job. Well done.
Jasmin Guthmann: Thanks for listening to People Changing Enterprises. This show is brought to you by Contentstack, the leading composable digital experience platform for enterprises. Got a question or suggestion? Email us at podcast@contentstack.com. If you like the show, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. We'll be back next week with a new episode, helping you make your mark.