Talk given by Songkick's Dan Crow at Leanconf 2013

1. Dan Crow
Songkick: becoming a
data-driven company

2. whois
Dan Crow
CTO, Songkick
@crowquine
Ten years in Silicon Valley
● Apple
● Verb
● Unicru
● Co-founder: Blurb
Five years at Google
● Google Squared
● Ads and Android

3. Songkick
We do live music
● Started in 2007
● One of first 10 startups in London
● Tell us who your favorite bands are, we’ll
alert you when they play in your town
● Second largest live music service in the
world

4. Core product

5. Boomtown
It’s a rat trap, and you’ve been caught

6. Where we were
Mid 2010:
● 2M monthly uniques
● Big ball of Ruby mud
● One big dev team
● One release every 2 weeks
● Velocity trending to zero
● Unhappy dev team
But: talent + agile = hope

7. Simplify the product
After four years our product had accrued cruft
● Complexity in user interface
● Complexity in features
Time to radically trim what we delivered
● What do users actually use?
● What do we need to support core use
cases?

8. Simplify the technology
Simpler product means:
● Delete a lot of code
● Service-oriented architecture
● Page-component web app model
● Reduced build times
● Continuous integration
● Web apps separated from backends
● Create new apps fast
● Support many more apps

9. Technology impacts team
Componentized tech means:
● Small, independent teams
● Clear goals
● Clearer roles, e.g. Tech Lead
● Distributed, devolved decision making
● Need for process across teams

10. Results
●
●
●
●
Build time from 4 hours -> 25 minutes
Developer velocity improved 4x
Site performance improved 2x
User satisfaction increased
○ faster site
○ less cluttered, easier UI

11. releases per week
The impact

12. Continuous
deployment
I made my way to the top of the hill...

13. How it works for us
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
Jenkins build server
Ten minute build time
Automatic push to production
Features can accumulate behind flippers
Acceptance testing in production
Manual testing in production with real data
Business metric monitoring
Roll forward

14. CD workflow

15. Mostly a cultural change
●
●
●
●
●
●
Quality becomes a dev issue
Whole company must buy in
Business must be willing to break things
Development is a flow, not a cycle
Some people won’t adapt to it
Took us 9 months to do right

16. Experiments

17. How to experiment
Everything in a startup is an experiment: your
company, each product, each feature
● Experiments answer a question
○ Don’t present a fully formed feature
● What’s the lowest cost way to the answer?
○ Most experiments fail, so move fast
○ e.g. Do our users want to share? Sharing buttons
that do nothing

18. How we do it
Multivariate testing environment:
● Feature flippers allow us to direct traffic
● Split traffic across versions A/B/C…
● Use a variety of stats packages to analyze
○ Google Analytics
○ Songkick “skab” package
● Code and design are always thrown away
● Successful experiments = feature rebuild

19. Again, a cultural change
●
●
●
●
●
Always find the MVE
Be comfortable with lower quality
Get used to experiments failing
Experiment often
Trust your users, not your intuition

20. Downsides
●
●
●
●
●
Frequently changing user experience
Can get stuck in local minima
Hard to maintain consistency
Stats can be challenging to interpret
You need traffic to make it work

21. Benefits
●
●
●
●
Only users can tell you what works
Avoids question-asking biases
Ties feature improvements to business goals
Results constantly surprise us

22. Wrap up
Data is good

23. Where we are now
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
9M monthly unique users
iPhone and Android app (2M users)
Tourbox - portal for artists
Detour - crowdfunding for concerts
Integrations with Spotify, Foursquare
Comprehensive ticketing product
Smaller dev team, moving faster

24. In summary
● Getting the technology right is critical
● Experiments are the heart of lean
● It’s always about the culture
○
○
○
○
Hardest thing to change
Takes time and effort
You need everyone to work that way
Has the biggest impact