Blog: Behind the Scenes

If you have been using Campaign Monitor for a while you might have dealt with our smart and helpful customer support team, many of whom work from their own homes in Europe and the USA. We're looking to add another person to the team (ideally based on the east-coast of North America), someone who is smart, customer focused and keen to provide great service.

This is not a general support role, it's a compliance role, working from home and helping our customers send permission based email. So while an interest in the web and technology is important, specific technical or design skills aren't required. If that sounds like you, please check out the full job description.

If it's not of interest to you, please consider passing the link on to anyone you know who might be a good match. We're a great team to work with, we pay well and we want to provide ever better customer service to all our customers. Thanks!

Yesterday, our friends at 37signals featured a round up of their team's iPhone home screens - the result was a insightful (and fun) view into app choices, priorities and personalities. We thought that we'd continue the game by adding a selection from our own team - can you tell who are the avid readers, photographers or socialites amongst us?

• Ben Richardson

  Founder & developer

  Bg: Black, minimalist

• Cameron Newman

  Systems administrator

  Bg: I love wallpapers with family! Aww...

• Dave Greiner

  Founder & designer

  Bg: Also black, no sugar

• Diana Potter

  Customer support team leader

  Bg: Android, animated, amazing!

• Greg Strutton

  Customer support

  Bg: A British desire for sunny days

• James Dennes

  Developer, API guy

  Bg: Graffiti in May St, St Peters

• Jarrod Taylor

  Customer support

  Bg: Somewhere walkabout Lithgow way

• Jesse Dodds

  UI designer

  Bg: Fissure fisher

• Ken Nguyen

  Developer

  Bg: Family. Angry Birds. Iron Maiden. Respect.

• Mat Patterson

  Head of customer support

  Bg: He's a classy pinstripe kinda guy

• Ros Hodgekiss

  Community manager

  Bg: Wedding photo, aww schnookums!

• Stephen Jesson

  Customer support

  Bg: Delicious bookshelf style

• Stig Morten Myre

  Customer support

  Bg: Black is the new black

• Trish Khoo

  Test lead

  Bg: Mmm mangosteen

It's your turn to join the party - if you have a particularly snazzy home screen, jump on your phone and tweet us a pic with the hashtag, #showphone. We're giving away 5 Campaign Monitor t-shirts to our favorites, so either fire away on your handset, or use the pre-filled tweet box below:

We've announced the winners of our #showphone contest on Twitter. Many thanks to everyone who entered.

Back in February we started the search for two more designers to join the Campaign Monitor team. Initially we took the same approach we've used in the past; add the roles to our Jobs section, mention them in our blog and newsletter and spread the word across our network. We'd also post them on a targeted job board like Authentic Jobs—which has worked well in the past—and briefly chat to some recruiters we trust.

This, I imagine, is the approach taken by most companies. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So here's my theory on why it often doesn't - we're looking for standout people, but the truth is that most standout people never make it to the job market. They're not looking for a job. They're being paid well and doing interesting work somewhere else, or they're freelancing and have potential clients lining up at their door.

Let's do something different

If the kind of designers we want to find aren't looking for a job, we needed another way to get these roles on their radar. Eventually we decided the best way to do that would be to create something worth sharing. Something designers would find interesting that they just might share with their peers.

A mini-site worth sharing

Drawing inspiration from the gorgeous Nike Better World and Best of 2010 site by Dave Gamache, we built a parallax-based single page site to promote the two roles and share a little about what it's like working for Campaign Monitor.

Targeted banner ads

We regularly advertise on a number of design-related ad networks like The Deck, Fusion Ads and Dribbble. For a couple of weeks we switched our usual promotions to focus on driving more designers to the hiring page.

Jesse, who was the brains behind the design of the landing page also added a screenshot of his work to Dribbble, where it made it to the Popular page for a few days.

The difference a little effort can make

Within 24 hours, our hiring page received more than 20,000 visitors. By the end of the week, that doubled to more than 40,000 different people who had checked it out.

The site also received more than 900 mentions on Twitter, driving close to 5,000 visitors in the first few days. To top it off, a number of high profile designers had some great things to say. The site was also picked up by a few popular design galleries and design-related blogs, further exposing these roles to the right crowd.

For the two weeks before our mini site, the Jobs section had 1,085 visitors. Within two weeks of the new site, more than 50,000 people had checked it out. In my mind that's well worth the few days work it took to put together.

More than 150 applicants

To date we've had just over 150 designers apply for the two roles. That's more than triple the response we've had for a previous design role we advertised, and I'd argue the market for great designers is even tighter now than it was then.

Welcome Matt and Pete

Out of the 150 applicants and other designers we spoke to over the last few weeks, there were some notable standouts. None more so than Matthew Farag, who put together a stunning application site specifically for the role at Campaign Monitor. He literally saw our move and raised us one.

Matthew started with us two weeks ago and you'll start to see some of his work in Campaign Monitor shortly. He's already having a big impact on the way we think about the personality and experience of our software.

We also recently welcomed Pete Usborne to the design team, who'll be starting with us in July. On top of a sweeping portfolio of work, Pete is also the brains behind Prevue—a gorgeous concept sharing tool for designers.

Worth the effort

Looking back at this little project, I couldn't be happier with the results. I'm confident we wouldn't have had anywhere near the kind of response we got if we'd just stuck with the usual approach. Recruitment, like just about everything a business does, is a marketing exercise.

If you care about finding great people, the first thing to remember is that typically, great people aren't looking for you. Whether it's through a memorable web site, your personal network or good old fashion headhunting, you need to put the effort into getting their attention.

The exact same lesson applies to job seekers too. Out of the 150 people that applied, more than 100 of them made little to no effort to make their application unique. I received the same cover letter and resume they likely sent to dozens of other jobs they also applied to. If someone can't take the time to read a little about the company they are applying for and reflect that in their approach, how much attention to detail will they have as a member of our team?

It's all about standing out.

Here at Campaign Monitor we're continuously on the look out for ways to improve the way we work in every area of the business. Fortunately for us, our industry is full of great companies who share their ideas and experiences freely. So here's our contribution to that ecosystem of experience reports. This is how we make Campaign Monitor.

It's difficult to describe our exact development process because it is constantly evolving with each release. Because we have short releases, we can easily try out new approaches and refine what works for us and discard what doesn't.

My job in the Campaign Monitor kingdom is to test and analyze the product. Given that I’m part of the test team, you may notice a slight quality assurance flavour to this overview.

Each release cycle is typically between 6 and 8 weeks long, but some larger features have been known to take up to 8 months. We keep our quality goals high and our release dates flexible. So if we think the quality isn't up to scratch, we just move the release date to allow ourselves time to get it right before we ship.

Our development team is currently made up of two designers, six developers and three testers. We also have two product owners and the global support team, who provide input into many of the features. Sometimes the entire team will work on the same release, and sometimes the team will work on two or more releases side-by-side.

How we collaborate

The only regular development meeting that we hold is a weekly meeting where each team member says what they're working on and how it's progressing. This will often also include a demo of something that a team member has been working on.

The whole team keeps track of tasks and bugs using JIRA. The open task list, plus the stand-up meetings usually give us a good indication of how close we are to being able to release. The test team maintains a hand-written "dashboard" in the lunch room, showing the current quality state of each feature area. The test team also sends out a weekly campaign newsletter, updating the whole company on the current release progress. As our releases are very quality-driven, testers are well-placed to help give an idea of how close we are to a release date.

As we each work in closed, private offices and don't have many meetings, communication has to find other mediums. Our most preferred method of communication in the development team is a visit in person to someone's office. For quick questions, we'll use instant messenger. If we need to talk to the whole team, we'll use Campfire, which is a real-time chat program. Or we'll simply save it for the stand-up meeting.

Our whole office eats lunch together every day, and it's not uncommon to find team members having discussions in the kitchen or even over a game of ping pong. So we talk to each other all the time and as a result we really don't find much of a need for meetings and emails.

Design first

We take a design-first approach to development. What this means is that the design will get nutted out first by the design team and the user interface will be coded during this process. As our designers are also front-end programmers, creating and modifying a design concept can be pretty quick. Much of the design planning is done in a chatroom that is public to the whole team, so any other team members can see what’s being done and comment on the design.

When it’s ready, this front-end code is handed to the developers along with a very brief specification document that explains things that aren’t obvious in the design itself.

So instead of doing huge amounts of planning up front, we usually keep it pretty light and then dive right in to see what works. Ideally most or all of the back-and-forth between teams happens in the design phase, where there is little cost to design changes. It’s a very iterative process where the design is continuously evaluated, improved, implemented and tested until what we think is the best experience eventually surfaces.

Build and test

How do we manage this iterative process without degrading code quality and causing huge delays to the release? Well, there are a few things that help. With regards to code quality, we have a few automated processes in place that make monitoring this a bit easier. We use continuous integration software and run unit tests against every check-in. Then a "smoke test" is automatically run against each build. The smoke test is a small suite of GUI-level tests that checks the most basic functions of the application to see if anything is broken.

For things that are simple to check, we use automated tests. This means that we write scripts to check things for us automatically. It’s like having a robot that can we can program to test the same things every day, faster than we ever could if we did it ourselves. We have several automated test suites, checking various functions at a unit level, at the GUI level and via the API. By monitoring the failures from these tests, we can quickly be alerted to bugs in existing areas of the application while we’re busy working on new features.

In addition, we have a test team dedicated to testing new and existing features throughout the entire development cycle. All of this allows issues to be quickly reported back to the designers and developers as they are developing features.

The other thing that helps is that we are so light on process and documentation. If something needs modifying, we don't have to go through any tedious request and approval systems to get things done. These kinds of processes just aren't necessary for us because we're not restricted by client requirements, budget constraints or rigid deadlines. We have the luxury of being able to take this less formal approach to changes in product requirements.

One more thing that really helps is that our team members have very broad skillsets and aren't restricted to specific roles. The designers are also front-end programmers, the testers can cut code, and everybody in the team helps to test the product as it's built. Since everyone is from a technical background, we all speak the same language. The whole design to testing process may only involve three people, which means it's pretty quick and easy to go back to the start of the process and re-design, re-code and re-test as necessary.

Ready to ship

Our features are ready to ship when our team is happy with them. We’re all very proud of this product, so this happiness metric can be a pretty challenging target to meet. When everyone on the team says we’re ready to ship, we’re ready to ship.

So, that's how we do things around here. We're always striving to reflect and improve, so we'd love to hear your thoughts. And if you'd like to know more about the way we do things, please leave us a comment.

Want to join our test team?

If this sounds like a way that you’d like to work, we’re currently looking for a Test Engineer to join our team in Sydney. Read a little more about this role and we'd love to hear from you if it sounds like a good match.

Just as our new years' resolutions have started to lose their lustre (5am. Boot camp. Really?), we've decided to hark back to more optimistic times by announcing a winner for the 2010 Christmas email competition. This year, our support team sifted through thousands of campaigns during their regular review process, before coming up with a shortlist of 39 amazing designs. After an extensive peer review that involved much intercontinental nodding and grunting, 3 finalists were selected and a winner declared.

This year, our congratulations go to the team at Ambition Creative for their toasty email newsletter. We couldn't help but warm to their one-column design:

A winner is declared!

Picking a winner from thousands is never easy, even when our criteria of good looks, effective message and technical merit are applied. At first glance, we may have fallen for any of the image-heavy, Photoshopped wonders to fall on our desks. But once they started looking less than cheery with images blocked, it was straight to the cutting-room floor.

Ambition's concept was simple. A one-column layout, an inviting header image (with ALT text) and a personal message from Gary & Gerry. Our team loved the warm colors, the friendly tone. But what gave Ambition's design the edge is that it displays faultlessly across the major email clients, including Lotus Notes. It's also effective on mobile devices, too.

However, what will have you saying 'wow' is this short video on how the team created the header image. There's far less Photoshop involved than you thought!

We'll be rewarding Ambition with a Parrot AR Drone, $100 in Threadless vouchers and 50,000 Campaign Monitor email credits. Just what our British friends need to stay amused during these snowed-in winter weeks.

But, that's not all...

Almost as hard as picking a single winner was choosing two runner-up designs. Again, one-column layouts dominated our interest, as did short, snappy copy.

The folks at Clever4 went for an easy-on-the-eyes approach, with cool colors, a subtle background image and some very cute pixel art. Did we mention that all of the text is just that - actual web text?

Now, we simply love this bold message designed by DRID for Aumann Katzsch Architekten. Big text has always gone down well with us - not only does it look great on mobile devices, but it simply jumps from the inbox! Click through and the matching e-greeting on their site is equally well done - assuming you like German bikers...!

Our friends at Clever4 and DRID will receive 10,000 email credits each for their thoughtful designs.

A look at previous designs...

It's with much pleasure that 2010's winners will be immortalized in our ever-growing gallery of impressive Christmas email designs. Let's take a look at some of the previous winners (click to view):

A huge thanks to everyone who used our app to send their holiday campaigns - it was absolutely inspiring to go through them all and a real testament to how creative and forward-thinking our customers are. We hope these entries have given you fresh ideas for the year ahead and we look forward to seeing what's in store for our next holiday competition!