Stuff’s outdated technology stack was limiting audience and revenue growth, and circumscribing innovation. By retiring costly and end-of-life content management systems, ad tech, and infrastructure in favour of a leaner, more performant platform, Stuff has laid the foundations for accelerated growth.

Delivered with support from Google, Stuff redesigned and streamlined the Stuff.co.nz website and apps. Building new fit-for-purpose publishing and distribution tools for editorial and commercial content creators, consolidating editorial users into a single CMS stack with streamlined workflow; a flexible and highly configurable advertising platform; and, in its technical infrastructure, the blend of flexibility and stability necessary to foster future innovation.

As a major product development exercise, this involved detailed requirements gathering and user story mapping, disciplined scope-setting, pragmatic solutions architecture design, and constant consultation with executive, editorial, audience and commercial stakeholders.

Resulting in a fresh face on the familiar Stuff.co.nz - a modernised aesthetic with streamlined navigation and content more readily discoverable, improving the user experience for Stuff readers. For Stuff’s advertising customers, the upgrades provided previously unseen flexibility in ad placements, vastly improved responsiveness to client needs, and the ability to easily create new opportunities.

The value of the project will continue to emerge over time due to new capability to deploy more frequent product iterations and innovations. The impact is two-fold: Stuff has a technology stack that can adapt as their needs change; and they are unencumbered by error-prone legacy systems that limited their horizons.