#meetsoda

About Game of Thrones and Product Development

April was a big month for our development team. The launch of Soda and season 4 of Game of Thrones. Other than the beautiful scenery, sex and violence, there is a lot of knowledge imparted by the wise rulers and warriors of Westeros.

It wasn’t too long before we extended this knowledge to our product.

You know nothing, Jon Snow

Jon Snow knew nothing about the free-folk before he truly interacted with them — we truly got to know our users when we sat side by side and used our application alongside them. Our first usability test made sure we realized this.

Evaluations with real life users, not only tested our code, but also our copy, interactions and how comfortable the users felt using our platform. It became crucial to act like the Rangers of Castle Black in our approach to usability. We regularly crossed over the wall and understood how our users felt about the product. We reported back and made sure we constantly adapted based on the user. After our first test, we realized that some important assumptions did not hold true.

Managing social media advertising is hard: every network has different dashboards, metrics and reports and targeting your campaigns can be very complex. With Soda, we’re on a quest to make social media advertising a lot easier.

It all started when Twitter asked us to join their Marketing Platform Partner Program. We decided we were going to seize the opportunity to apply everything we learned about social media advertising in the past three years — by working for clients like Heinz, Unilever, Randstad, Spinnin’ Records and Dell — and started building a new tool from the ground up. 

We have sworn to each other that even the most easily distracted, but incredibly creative content managers should be able to use Soda to manage the advertising part of their communities.