The FT and its digital strategy

Graham Hinchly, the engineering manager at FT Labs, writes about the business newspaper’s digital first strategy and the technology behind it.

Hinchly writes:

Clearly at the FT, we decided that the advantages of a Web app outweighed the advantages of a native app, and we still believe this is the case.

The Web app is a key part of our strategy, and we invested significantly in it in 2013, fundamentally re-architecting and re-designing the app to give us a product that we can continue to innovate and build on.

For me, two lessons stand out, which I think are applicable to any news or media organisation, regardless of size.

Firstly, the success of the Web app has proved to be a vital component in moving the FT to a “mobile-first” approach (although this journey is not yet complete). Encouraging people throughout the organisation to participate in trials of new versions of the Web app has been a particular success for us, engaging a much wider variety of people with mobile and digital.

Whether you’re at a point where you’re advocating “digital-first” or “mobile-first” in your organisation, it’s important that someone is responsible for advocating this throughout the organisation. Developing an innovative product in-house makes this job much easier.