Building investors.trustpilot.com

INSIDE THE ENGINE ROOM

I rarely evangelise about my work. I see all the flaws, so while I'm proud of the achievements of my team, I rarely dish out kudos or self-promote. But following Trustpilot's recent float on the London Stock Exchange (yay!), I do want to give a look inside the engine room of creating investors.trustpilot.com.

The Mission

We began prep work on the website in November 2020. While there was much uncertainty about the actual day of the IPO, the deadline to reach was end of March 2021. By that time we would want to have a a pre-IPO landing page and a full Investor Relations website serving documents, insights, share prices and company results.

I would normally have followed up with questions around KPIs for the site, but in this particular case it really wasn't about leads or number of visits. It was about building a website in 4 months to support the top strategic priority of our organization and give potential shareholders, analysts and press a place to go to find information and updates.

The Challenge

While building a website in 4 months may not seem like an extremely tight deadline, consider this:

• Number of developers: 3
• Number of stakeholders: a lot
• My knowledge about stock trading: 0
• Need for editing flexibility: maximum
• Requirement to show dynamic share prices, regulatory news and more
• Requirement to have a disclaimer based gating in place with strict adherence to legal requirements
• Requirements for document download functionality, calendar functionality and an array of table views.

The Team

This is the kudos part! Here is the group that built investors.trustpilot.com: Derek Brown led the project from the investor relations perspective. I led the project from the implementation perspective. Ole Sandb?k J?rgensen, Carlo Pascual and Aleksandr Borkun developed the site based on our existing framework and leveraging Contentful CMS. Polly Bosworth designed the website. Wynn Mustin delivered the copy. Marta Zugliano was responsible for tracking, monitoring and reporting. Ines Ribeiro built the pages in the CMS. Graeme Barron and Michael Tomae delivered legal and financial input and documents. Brighter IR delivered the dynamic share price and regulatory news widgets. Aashni Shah kept us all real and steered the ship through regular catchups and project planning in Monday.com.

But as I learned recently (and which I will write about in a later post) when I graduated to 1. Dan (black belt) in Goju-Ryu karate, there's a silent supporting cast in any project like this. Those who pick up the tasks that fall in between the cracks because you're busy doing other stuff. Those that stretch outside of their comfort zone or professional expertise to pick up the pieces you're leaving behind. Those who are patient with their projects and ambitions and find workarounds. Those who fight off the sharks so you can hold the ship's course. They are not the ones who get to be on the stage on opening night, but nobody would be on stage if it wasn't for them. Thank you!

The Process

I split the project into four phases:

1. Site structure, design and core copy - November-December
2. Core technical architecture - January
3. Modular build - February-March
4. CMS implementation & tweaks - March

It looks neat and tidy when I list the bullets like this, but in the day to day there's a lot of adjustments, especially when working with multiple stakeholders from all parts of the organization. Copy needs legal verification, numbers need to be checked by Finance, ideal design is impacted by the reality of what's possible to achieve, the technical build is limited by the framework, etc ...

For process, we used Monday.com for high level project management. We used Trello for all implementation tasks, and at the very end we used a good old spreadsheet for the last minor comments and tweaks. We had weekly catchups with the project group and, from February onwards, daily standups with the developer team. We used Figma for design and design feedback. Contentful is our CMS. For tracking we use a combination of Google Analytics and Segment.

The End Result

Whenever I launch a bigger project like this one, I take a moment (typically on the evening before the launch, just me and a glass of wine) to browse through the site. I try to put on my "regular user" glasses, to look past the flaws and various errors that I know are there and simply "breathe in" the experience. The question I ask myself is never "Is this perfect" but "Is this a fair experience"? I'm not in the business of creating award winning websites. I'm in the business of building things that work. An 80% guy, not a 100% guy...

I'll take a small detour here to say that it's not easy being an 80% guy while still noticing all the bits that could have been just a liiiittle bit better. How the site loads a little too slow for my liking. How the design to create an "Upcoming Events" box on the home page looked much better when there was more than one upcoming event to show (there will be more, but not yet). How some of the mobile spacing is a bit off. How we didn't get the footer CTA right for launch. How creating an Add to Calendar functionality proved more difficult than first imagined and we had to scrap it the day before launch. But then I remind myself that I see these things because I've spent four months inside the engine room, while a typical visitor spends 40 seconds browsing at a glance and finding the stuff they need, which in the end is what's important.

So: Is this a fair experience? It certainly is, and I'm proud of it, and I hope that everyone who was a part of this project is as well. I also feel deeply privileged to have played a role in Trustpilot's IPO. Finally, as I do with almost all projects of this caliber, I feel an immense humility and gratitude towards the true team effort required to accomplish something like this.

And now it's time to digest data and tweak! Congrats on the IPO, Trustpilot!