CNN Underscored

Shop smarter.

SUMMARY

Lead the Commerce product development team behind Underscored, the fastest growing business inside CNN that helps users make smarter purchasing decisions. I turned the team from a small group of contract engineers to a mature, multi-squad Product Development team with innovative Product Managers, strong Engineering leadership, and a full suite of commerce-optimized features.

THE OPPORTUNITY

I joined Underscored in Jan 2021, at the height of a pandemic that inspired millions of in-store shoppers to take their habits online. Businesses worldwide had to evolve to support this more frequent, discerning online shopper. Our incredible expert editors at CNN were already hard at work testing, vetting and finding the best deals for products online to help make shoppers’ lives easier. CNN’s commerce business was booming, despite its very scrappy beginnings.

While the content was best-in-class and valuable, the Underscored product and site left a lot to be desired. That’s where I came in. My directive was to take this high-growth business and multiply its potential by building the experience that Underscored deserved. In the years since I’ve joined, I’ve built a rockstar Commerce product team and led the hiring of engineering leadership – together, we’ve taken the Underscored experience to the next level.

A WHOLE NEW SYSTEM

In Sep 2021, Underscored became the first brand at CNN to launch on its new proprietary CMS, Stellar. The new editorial experience for writers was night and day from the outdated CMS3 they were working on, and publish time when from painstaking minutes to less than 10 seconds.

With the new CMS came ease of development. Our engineers now crank out new features at an unprecedented velocity within the org, including nearly a dozen commerce-specific components that help editors tell better, higher-converting shopping stories.

UNIQUE NEEDS CALL FOR UNIQUE SOLUTIONS

Underscored’s affiliate-based business model calls for wildly different requirements than the rest of CNN.com’s largely advertising-based business. Our product development teams focus on finding the perfect balance between great user experience, optimized monetization, editorial automation and operational excellence. Below are select features we built specially for our commerce business.

  • SPONSORED CONTENT

    To support our burgeoning sponsored commerce business while upholding journalistic integrity, we built a special sponsored template that made it very clear that the high-converting placement was a paid and not organic article.

  • REAL-TIME PRICING API

    To maintain up-to-date prices, we built a custom pricing system on top of Sovrn’s merchant API to make sure our users always got buy options from the most beloved, top-converting merchants with the lowest prices.

  • BOT PROTECTION

    To tackle the issue of malicious bots that target affiliate publishers, we implemented HUMAN’s bot detection technology that identified safe bots vs malicious crawlers and bad entities, reducing bad traffic and misreporting of our CTRs.

  • INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

    To optimize Underscored for search and improve discovery of all Underscored has to offer, we completely refactored our IA with parent and child categories, new landing pages, breadcrumbs, tags and and a new navigation.

  • CONTENT SYNDICATION

    We’ve built custom feeds to support syndication with business partners that help spread our content across the web for evergreen articles, as well as for major tentpole events like Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and our very own Deals Fest holiday.

  • PRODUCT MARKETING TOOLS

    Our team has implemented a wide variety of product marketing tools and features to support user discovery and personalization through platforms like web notifications, CNN app notifications, newsletters, on-site display placements, social media and text messaging.

  • PRODUCT DATABASE

    We aim to make Editors’ lives easier and dynamic features possible by managing a reusable library of all products recommended across Underscored, searchable and sortable by product name, category, date added, merchant link, CTR and more.

  • AUTOMATIC AFFILIATE TAGGING

    To eliminate the manual workflow where Editors add affiliate network tags to each product, we built a monetization tag generator that automatically pulls the merchant name and applies unique tags from the preferred affiliate network and internal tracking based on our unique business logic.

TODAY

Underscored continues to grow as a rapid pace, expanding into new product verticals and landing in new places for shoppers to love and discover. Underscored has become the fastest growing business at CNN Digital with the highest margins and RPMs, along with a beautiful new interface that has changed the shopping game.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT KUDOS

Product • Darren Tome • Lexi Chun • Christine Tran • Upasna Gautam • Andrew Ross • Yana Kharitonova
Design • Mark Amadio • Agnes Kroczek
Engineering • Fahad Zafar • Andy Beane

And many, many more talented folks within and beyond Product Development that have made Underscored a success!