NTS takes pride in announcing the Launch of the “The Times Christmas Collection” website. This launch is successfully completed from scratch in a span of just 6 days by one of our talented teams – “The Specialist Titles and Platforms”.

Heart of the Matter

The Christmas Collection site is built as a strategy to drive engagement with readers with content that sits outside the pay wall and direct them to evergreen content behind the paywall. We also wanted to use this opportunity to see if we can use the site to increase advertising opportunities and to assess if paid or organic social is the best way to get readers to the site.

Our challenge? To launch the website in only 6 days!

About the team

The team that pulled this off is a group of 7 Engineers and 1 Scrum Master.

• Ramasamy Ayyappan – Scrum Master
• Karthik Bhat – Lead Engineer
• Bhaskar Pramanik – Senior Software Developer
• Siddharth T – Senior Software Developer
• Subrahmanya Mahabala – Software Developer
• Vivek Ganesan – QA Engineer
• Karthickraja Ganesan – QA Engineer
• Kothai Venkat – Software Developer

The “The Specialist Titles and Platforms” team is the latest addition to our Product Development wing. Their responsibilities are to manage Engineering for more than 25 business WordPress websites that are hosted in their internal WordPress platform. The team follows an iterative delivery model and an adaptive development approach enabling them to deliver high quality work at speed. The team started off with 5 members and are expected to grow up to 11 members by end of this year.

How was it done?

This definitely was a big ask from the team, but, with meticulous planning and support from the stakeholders, the entire team wholeheartedly took this up.

Highlights of this success were attributed to responsiveness of the group of people involved from the UI/ UX team and the product management team. Immediate feedbacks on non production environments from the Stakeholders team also came in handy.

Appreciations

Team’s contribution was acknowledged widely across News UK, including;

• Christina Scott – Chief Technology Officer, News UK
• Chris Duncan – Managing Director of Times Newspapers Ltd, News UK
• Paul Wilson – Programme & Portfolio Director – Technology, News UK
• Rudi De Sousa – Director of Engineering and Architecture – Technology, News UK
• Dominic Carter – Group Chief Commercial Officer, News UK
• Meribeth Parker – Executive Director and Luxury & Media consultant engaging, News UK
• Aeneas McDonnell – Group Head of Product – TNL, News UK
• Tom Miller – Digital Director, Style, News UK
• Shinal Patel – Digital Group Head – The Times & The Sunday Times, News UK
• Kerrie Lapworth – Senior Product Manager – Specialist Titles, News UK

Here is a excerpt from the NTS “Senior Management Team” and special note from Nagaraj Nagabushanam – Director – Digital, NTS .

“The specialist titles team has done an amazing job of showcasing team members’ capabilities to own and turnaround the Christmas hub website in such a short time, only 6 days. This will be the standard to which we should hold ourselves and show our commitment to customer and consumer delight. I thank the entire team for going above and beyond to deliver this season’s special and wish them all the very best and cheer for the holiday season and the new year ahead.“

The team, in turn, has great pleasure in acknowledging and thanking the below for their constant support and mentorship through this release.

• Sabah Carter – CIO, NTS
• Nagaraj Nagabushanam – Director – Digital, NTS
• Ravi Krishna Das – Head of Technology, NTS
• Mohanraj Pachaiappan – Senior Engineering Lead
• Krishna Venkataramanujam – Agile Project manager

A pic from their success party is shared below. The team is now thrilled and motivated to take up more such challenges.