Comment by knuckleheads
21 hours ago
If I recall right, they have most everything in the same CMS, in particular their discussion/help forum is integrated into their main site. To me, that's what the difference is, having done similar work in the past. They have a unified and singular control over the content on their front page. It's not a dozen groups obviously jockeying for control of who gets to be higher on the page or featured more prominently, or just a portal for taking you to subdomains of each department. I don't think you can build a website like this if you don't have that CMS behind it unifying everything together, and I don't you can have a CMS like that unless you insist on it very deliberately organizationally, as the tendency in every org is towards sprawling feudal estates ruled by vp's.
Yes. That reminds me of another thing: no landing pages for each level of menu. If I go to Docs > Surveys, I can skip the overview and go directly to Features > Conditional questions. I dont' need to load an entire page with a giant banner of people smiling, and a call to action button that wants me to contact them before I have read through the functionality.
if, by way of totally random example, each feature team within each department measures how much revenue and how many customers come because of a specific feature that team is working on and responsibly, and that feature team's pm is compensated based on these metrics, then naturally each team will want to bloat the landing space on the front page areas as much as possible. very hard to make something that presents as cohesively as this when incentives of those involved are in competition with one another.
Agreed. Conway's Law. Every time I ever fought that law, the law won.