Teams involved

• Marketing
• IT
• WebDev
• QA
• l10n
• PR

Timeline

Week 1

July 7

• Marketing team asks interns to lead a community campaign
  

July 9

• Creative: contacted to design logo and banner for campaign
  
• Metrics: contacted to determine date of billionth download
  
• Metrics replies saying to talk to Community Marketing
  

Week 2

July 14

• Billion Downloads campaign prestented to Marketing team and approved
  
• Launch scheduled for mid-August
  
• Site planned to be ready by end of July
  

July 16

• Promo: CMT asked to send in photos for the site by July 31st
  

July 17

• Interns conduct phone conference with SO about webdev
  

Week 3

July 20

• Copy ideas brainstormed
  
• l10n contacted with initial timeline of late July / early August launch
  

July 21

• Initial creative mockups received from Sean
  

July 22

• Promo: Facebook group created
  

July 23

• Marketing meets with SO, who provides first site mockup
  
• IT: Domains purchased
  
• IT: Bug filed to setup website, with request to push production branch with splash page (bug 506062)
  
• QA: Contacted to help test site
  

Week 4

July 27

• Copy finalized and sent to SO
  

July 28

• Creative: Banner design finalized
  

July 29

• IT: Metrics tracking code requested (bug 507238, major severity)
  
• l10n: Opt-in bug for localizers created (bug 507293)
  
• QA: begins to QA site on the trunk (bug 507286)
  
• 5:30pm - PR: Media outreach email sent with link to onebillionplusyou.com
  

July 30

• 2:45pm (approx) - First press articles appear with links to onebillionplusyou.com, which currently shows 404
  
• 3:15pm - After meeting with WebDev, onebillionplusyou.com setup bug upgraded to blocker (bug 506062)
  
• 3:52pm - IT: onebillionplusyou.com now shows splash page (bug 506052); however, other domains are not redirecting to onebillionplusyou.com
  
• 5:20pm - Metrics tracking code request upgrade to critical severity (bug 507238)
  
• 5:55pm - Promo: CMT emailed about campaign, including link to onebillionplusyou.com
  
• 10:45pm - IT: Other domains now redirect properly to onebillionplusyou.com (bug 506052 resolved)
  

July 31

• 11:30am - SO asked if site can be launched today, if necessary
  
• 11:45am - l10n begins localizing page (bug 507680)
  
• 12:35pm - SO confirms that site can be launched today
  
• 12:40pm - IT: staging site is setup (bug 507143)
  
• 2:15pm - Marketing decides to push launch to today, only initially shipping in 5 languages
  
• 2:30pm - IT: bug filed to launch site (bug 507710, critical severity)
  
• 2:57pm - WebDev concludes security testing
  
• 5:00pm - Cron job works on staging site (bug 507143)
  
• 6:57pm - l10n & IT: First five locales finalized; bug filed to launch site (bug 507710, critical severity)
  
• 10:03pm - IT: Site launched in five locales (bug 507710 resolved)
  

August 1

• 1:00am - Metrics code received (bug 507238 closed)
  
• 1:14am - WebDev: email feedback provided about launch of site and revisions to make
  
• 10:49am - Omniture code added to trunk
  

Week 5

August 3

• 8:00am - Code optimized with CSS changes
• 2:50pm - IT: Bug filed to update site to include 28 locales (bug 508083)
• 3:49pm - IT: Site updated with new locales, layout appears broken to Marketing team (possibly a caching issue, either client or server side)
• 3:56pm - IT: Request to revert back to original site with 5 locales (bug 508083)
• 4:04pm - IT: Site reverted to revision 48301.
• 8:53pm - Beltzner reports that site is displaying in wrong language for users
• 9:35pm - IT: Cache cleared. Appears to have fixed language problem.
• 11:42pm - Revision 48301 reported to be buggy and has caching issues
• 11:43pm IT: Bug filed to update to revision 48448 to fix the caching issue

August 4

9:50am - SO optimizes CSS

August 5

10:20am - IT: Bug filed to update to revision 48615

• All times in PDT

What worked well

Issues

Scheduling / Timeline

• Projecting the date of the 1 billion download, which impacted the whole project timeline
• Initial estimate put the milestone at mid-August, when it actually occurred on July 31 (two weeks earlier than expected)
• Making decisions on pushing the launch date up
• Recommendations: Accurate project should have been obtained sooner, metrics and marketing should have better communicated roles and who could best forecast the date, timing updates should have been immediately communicated to all teams

Involving other teams

• Some teams were contacted 1 or 2 weeks into the campaign, giving them only a couple of weeks to contribute
• This led to teams rushing and being pressured to move quickly
• Teams impacted: l10n, QA
• Recommendations: Teams should have been involved from the start of the project

Getting a splash page up

• Initial production push to get a splash page up was delayed due to a bug dependency (bug )
• Press included a link to the site before it was up, giving them a 404 Not Found error
• WebDev and IT had to be alerted for an emergency fix on the afternoon of July 30
• Recommendations: Bug dependency could have removed, timing needs should have been better communicated to IT, link should not have been publicized until a splash page was live

Other issues

• QA was approached late
  • This made us rush
  • We didn't know about bit.ly, and tested functionality, which worked on the surface, but the bit.ly links were broken, as William discovered
  • Weights and measures (metric, etc.) caused confusion

• PR timing of the announcement in conjunction with the actual billionth download - as stated by the Twitter account

• Potential Issues to the timing of the Site
  • Was there any way that we could have tracked the potential interactions we missed with the timing issue?

• Was this ever thought about to drive downloads?
  • If people who are IE/Safari/Chrome users visit the site because they wrote an article about it, there is no place that says "download FFx here" etc.
  • What about an "upgrade" button to drive people that have Ffx 1.0 or 2.0 to upgrade to 3.5

• Issues to the actual copy of the site:
  • In the "mission" blurb we reference the MoFo, we usually reference only Mozilla. Not the foundation specifically
  • The Link to Find out more about the mission links to the organic software page - not the "what is Mozilla page" so it doesn't really talk about the mission etc.

Concerns

How we can improve

Communication

• Include all team members on emails as appropriate
• Send regular (daily or weekly) project updates to all teams involved
• Update all teams on scheduling changes or decisions that impact other teams
• Schedule meetings at least 24 hours in advance whenever possible
• Make all meetings available by phone conference so team members can join remotely
• Send out meeting minutes after each meeting

QA

• Marketing needs to clarify any special QA needs for testing the site
• Ex: bit.ly links and posting to Twitter functionality
• Clarification on international numbering (ex: 1 billion vs 1 000 000 000)

Metrics

• Better understanding with Marketing team on download count data
• Being able to quickly project when certain download milestones will occur

IT

• Having an IT project and QA contact from the beginning
• Ensuring that the project document is completed early and all team members are aware of needs and schedule

l10n

• Should have informed l10n of project much earlier
• Content should have been finalized earlier to give l10n members more time to localize
• Some of the reference content was factually incorrect (number of elephants for 1 billion kg)
• final content was available 24h before the launch which turned localization into a rush for localizers and the l10n team
• pages were cached by netscaler causing locale detection code to not be executed, l10n had to modify the code during the week end to send the right http headers bypassing server caching (action item: document this trap into web-l10n documentation)
• not enough time to localize all graphics used, we had to limit ourselves to the main banner
• had to rely on localizers to provide localized banners for Persian/Arabic/Telugu, their scripting specificity would have required a web designer to do the banners and make them look good but we had no time for that.
• site was launched on a Friday night and l10n had to fix the site bugs (not only l10n bugs but also webdev) during the weekend before 3.5.2 and 3.0.13
• no production tag with a cron job was set in time so as to be able to publish languages one by one and quickly resolve bugs

PR

• Review links in pitches and blog posts before publishing them
• Broken links should be avoided - either remove the link or get the site active

Page content

• Clarify on when to use "Mozilla Foundation" vs "Mozilla" in messaging
• Decide on use of Download button vs Upgrade the Web button - when to use each
• Include location in the caption for the photos
• Linking to "What is Mozilla?" vs Organic page due to localization limitations