The French telecommunication company established a beachhead in the heart of Silicon Valley to keep tabs on industry innovations. Within its San Francisco office were dozens of analysts, engineers, and business professionals examining trends such as cloud computing, gigabit internet, startup investing, and more.
One of my biggest accomplishments as the Strategy and Research Content Lead was the production of OrangeSV.com, the inaugural public-facing website for Orange Silicon Valley. My responsibilities include overseeing the discovery process, managing the development process from start to finish, handling the copywriting, and ensuring the website’s successful launch.
Additionally, I managed the compilation of a weekly email newsletter highlighting relevant telecommunication and technology news.
Ideation and Creation of OrangeSV.com
Objective: To showcase Orange Silicon Valley’s capabilities and opportunities in a way that differentiated itself from the more well-known Orange Fab startup accelerator.
After discussions with OSV’s vice president of knowledge transfer and other stakeholders, I crafted the functional specification document that outlined the intent, behavior and workflow of the website. From there, I composed a Request for Proposal (RFP) that I submitted to several design and development agencies, ultimately selecting Kanopi Studios to complete the project.
Over the course of a few months, I worked with the vendor on wireframing, identifying user personas and key features needed, prototyping, reviewing layouts, and overall build-out. The site launched in November 2014, on time and on a budget of nearly $25,000.
During my tenure, maintenance of the site included working with analysts to secure bylines for our blog, keeping photos and event listings fresh and relevant, along with posting PDF copies of the latest published reports.
Managing the ‘Gazette’ Newsletter
I was also the editor-in-chief of the “Gazette,” a weekly email delivering a summary of relevant technology news to Orange executives and other stakeholders. With an average of 40 stories per issue, each article one was succinctly reported on and accompanied by an opinion from an OSV analyst.
The “Gazette” included content categories that impacted Orange’s business, including:
- Mobile applications and services
- Network products and technologies
- Telecommunications and cable companies
- Consumer web, entertainment and marketing
- Internet of Things
- Middleware and platforms
- Enterprise IT and applications
- Regulation
- Mergers and acquisitions
In addition to sourcing news for OSV analysts to review, I edited their work, frequently contributed my own analysis, formatted each edition appropriately, and worked to gain approval from our office CEO before distributing the emails.
For years, the “Gaz” production process was tedious and quite manual. Not only were analyst contributions collected by email, but some programming experience and the use of a text editor were required to compile each newsletter. In addition, OSV did not use a commercial email delivery platform — an internal mechanism developed by Orange’s “skunkworks” team was preferred. On average, about five to 10 hours a week were dedicated to this process.
Working with a developer, I crafted a cloud-based system to streamline the process. Analysts were given access to a web portal that contained a form with relevant fields. When submitted, it would go into a database that could then be exported. Editors could then review all contributions on the web, simplifying things for whoever was responsible for that week’s edition.
When the week’s “Gaz” was ready for delivery, a button click would send the coded information to the internal OSV email platform and then be sent off to recipients.
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