2020, What a Roller Coaster Ride You’ve Been
As we say goodbye to 2020 — a year that will be written in the history books as having changed the world — and as we welcome 2021 with open arms, we can also look back and say that we learned a thing or two.
In fact, at Outbrain, 2020 has been a year of adjustment, growth and discovery, taking us from a place of uncertainty to a strong, impact-driven organization that keeps this ship sailing even stronger, faster, and bolder.
It goes without saying that we had our share of ups and downs. We especially give thanks for a lot of good things that happened this year at Outbrain, due to intense collaboration between our business, product and technology teams. The “new normal” forced us to rethink, and deliver quick responses with creativity and innovation across the board. Let’s take a look at some of our major projects from 2020 and how they impacted our customers and industry.
Think Fast, React Faster
When the pandemic struck the markets and global economy, we had no choice but to think fast and take necessary action to deflect the coming tsunami and turn it into a tough storm that could be overcome. So Outbrain employees around the world got themselves into gear.
#Technology: Growing our Infrastructure According to Demand
The Cloud Platforms group, and more specifically the Facilities team that manage our bare metal datacenter, is made up of four engineers in charge of deploying, maintaining and operating Outbrain’s fleet of over 7000 servers, across all data centers. With automation and observability in their DNA, the team was able to rapidly scale Outbrain’s serving capacity to meet the surge in demand — despite many challenges, supply chain disruptions and uncertainties imposed by a new (and hopefully temporary) reality of a global pandemic. Read more details in this story.
#Product: New Needs Demand New Features
With the rise of gaming apps and mobile apps in general during COVID, marketers were looking for more dedicated formats to increase their app downloads. Very quickly, a unique Outbrain format was tailored specifically for this purpose.
We released “App Install Smartad” and leveraged Outbrain’s existing infrastructure in order to create the new app download card. This is an amazing example of the way our teams handled the pandemic as an opportunity. All groups and pillars (ie. product, UI/UX, software developers and BI) collaborated to execute this initiative and respond fast to market needs and opportunities.
Now that we’ve been running with this feature for several months, we can also see its wide adoption and positive impact on business metrics and KPIs. Learn more about App Install and other SmartAd experiences here.
#People & Culture Keeping Us Together: Outbrain’s Resilience
One of the most important aspects of successfully dealing with the pandemic crisis is organizational resilience. This resilience stems from the relationship that the organization maintains with its employees over the course of time.
At Outbrain, we have core values that guide us through this mutual relationship. One such value is- Trust, which was reflected in our employees’ loyalty and motivation to keep the ship sailing in times of uncertainty. The transition to “working from home”, distributed communication and dealing with other cultural changes was smooth because trust is in-built to our organizational system, and it trusts us back.
Other important values are “Learning” and “Expand the toolbox”. The experience of “learning together” was very important for us to maintain. With no option for external conferences and meetups, we had to bring the learning experience to Outbrain employees, so we came up with the concept of OB.IO — Internal Developers Conference and “Yachadness Hackathon”. Although we could not get together in person, we still found creative ways for our developers to interact, expand their toolboxes, and work on their self-development.
Software Solutions for Client Performance: Meet OB Code
Another achievement in 2020 was how we succeeded in leveraging our platform’s capabilities with a delightful user-friendly interface. In this way, we managed to save a lot of time for our customers, and we all know that time is money.
OB Code is a great example of how Outbrain — as a technology-driven company — equips all marketers with the superpower of programming. With OB Code, our non-technical clients gain the power of API with a drag-and-drop interface. It’s really that simple.
Pure Passion for Data
Outbrain’s technology organization consists of four groups: Product, Platform, Engineering and Recommendations, Outbrain’s core data science group. This past year has been particularly exciting for the Recommendations group with changes we made in automating our Machine Learning models and accelerating business KPIs.
Another interesting activity in data science this year was building a new data model, based on several types of events in one data source. The model is built in real-time and its architecture is based on Druid, Spark Streaming and Kafka. This model utilizes the “Union” approach instead of “Join”, is flexible and works at a high scale.
2021 Here We Come
In a very challenging and unexpected year, this sums up just a fraction of what we were able to achieve at Outbrain. And we also learned a lot about perspective. We learned the importance of having core values to guide us in times of uncertainty, and that it is really possible to do awesome things, even in difficult circumstances.
We believe in generating impact. If doing awesome things is a part of who you are, perhaps you should join us, because no matter what lies in store, the ride will continue in 2021, and it’s going to be a good one!
Stay safe and happy new year.
