Lessons from Building Twilio Live, on Both Sides of the Atlantic

This year, my team and I decided to bring a new product to life amid the ongoing global pandemic. We did this fully remote — in many ways unencumbered by the confines of time zones or physical location. We were driven by the desire to create a solution that would help businesses address the budding demand for one increasingly popular communications channel: live, interactive video and audio streaming.

Think back to the way business was conducted in 2020. 78% of organizations reported that they used video communications to engage with customers, while 98% agreed that customer communications via video accelerated more than other channels during the pandemic. Video was a massive catalyst for immediate, accessible and interactive engagement — from healthcare to financial services, to every industry in between.

Not to mention that as more physical events went virtual, the need for scalable, easy to deploy video solutions within the enterprise skyrocketed. Your favorite annual marketing conference, entertainment show, fitness class and educational course, all hinged on platforms and toolkits that brought these (formerly) real-life experiences right to your digital device.

78% of organizations reported that they used video communications to engage with customers in 2020

But even still, after all this innovation and transformation, there was a gap in the market for developers looking to further enhance, personalize and humanize the virtual customer experience through the newest (and most popular) video medium: interactive live streaming.

Building a New Live Experience.
Before embarking on our quest to redesign the live video engagement experience — via what came to be known as ‘Twilio Live’ — we had to first identify the gap in the market we wanted to bridge. We kept hearing the need to enable video and audio experiences for a larger audience, whether it was podcasts, marketing events, fitness classes, entertainment shows or training sessions. All of which are examples of how live streaming can and should take center stage in any modern customer engagement strategy. As a developer-first organization, we felt that there weren’t any current offerings that gave developers all the components they needed to create a fully customized, unique, interactive live streaming experience that reaches a large audience.

In an effort to provide developers with great APIs that would help fuel their creativity (not hinder it) we wanted to build a live streaming toolkit that would equip them with the essentials — allowing them to focus their time and energies on things like creating new features for their applications, or finding new ways to better acquire or serve customers, versus figuring out the streaming infrastructure around it.

What’s more, we wanted to provide developers with a flexible yet reliable way to compose video and graphic elements into a single interface. We decided that allowing developers to use the familiar tools of HTML and JavaScript would ultimately provide the richest building experience. While providing this extremely flexible developer experience, we also wanted to make it super simple for developers to get started by providing reference applications, documentation and sample code.

Lessons Learned.
After sprinting on Twilio Live this Spring, we announced its availability in Beta in July 2021— a huge testament to our team’s collective, yet distributed, capabilities. Fortunately for us, we’d been operating with a remote-first team culture, spanning both sides of the Atlantic (across the U.S. and Spain), for a few years now. But even still, there were a number of critical takeaways that stemmed from the international development process — especially when we were trying to move as quickly as a nimble startup. A handful that became standard best practices, to keep all teams aligned throughout, were:

• Be clear on product definition, goals and success criteria. If you set a clear, common definition of your goals and objectives early on, you’ll be better positioned to march forward efficiently. At the same time, in the development world, nothing’s set in stone. Although we aligned on our North Star early on, my team found that being open and leaving room for iteration and adjustment based on the market dynamic and customer needs was vital to our success. Be clear, but don’t be rigid.
• Align on problem statements, definitions and milestones — and give individuals and sub-teams autonomy to build out the solution. In building Twilio Live, we brought together a full stack team into a dedicated “feature team”, to help focus and execute our efforts on the problem from end-to-end. From there, we held daily stand-ups within the team, and weekly check-ins with key leaders, to provide business, market and customer context, decision making support as needed, and review live demos and progress. This helped increase our velocity and collaboration. What’s more, in terms of mapping out and assessing potential problems early, we made it a task to identify the highest risk items at the start (scale of concurrency and low latency, for example), and fully resourced those efforts.
• Draw the Owl! At multiple times throughout this journey, it was incredible to see individuals and teams really step up and innovate, think creatively and prosper without an instruction manual to follow. At Twilio, we like to call this “Drawing the Owl”. Even in uncharted territory, we boldly pushed forward. It’s a philosophy that’s been a core value since our early days, but never has it been more applicable than in the past year.
• Build an example app to help centralize real-time feedback throughout the development process. When you’re building a developer platform, it can be hard to balance flexibility with focus. In order to overcome this — alongside building the infrastructure, APIs and SDKs — we also had engineers who were actually building a reference mobile application on the platform. This turned out to be incredibly useful since the backend engineers got real-time feedback on what they were building.
• Lastly, identify and lean on great customers who drive you and help you build an amazing developer experience. In building Twilio Live, we were fortunate to have customers like Welcome and Reddit (building Reddit Talk) on board early on. As early adopters, they too recognized that virtual events had evolved from an ad-hoc experience to a permanent element of nearly every company’s engagement strategy. Throughout the entire R&D process — from real-time communications (via Slack) to weekly video syncs — their continuous feedback was vital to our success.

At the end of the day, your product is only as good as the customer experience. Lead with the customer, build for the customer, and win with the customer. That was the blueprint for Twilio Live. And it serves as the foundation for everything we do.