Sample Off the Shelf, but Customize in House

No one gets like you do the differentiators encoded in your company’s DNA.

That’s true at Shutterstock. And it’s true at the smallest of small businesses.

Technology solutions work best when they fit best – when engineers combine science and art to holistically solve problems. At Shutterstock, that has driven us to combine minimal off-the-shelf shopping with an emphasis on customizing software and systems in-house. We’re scavengers, basically. We pluck the important “bits and pieces” of different technologies and we glue them together and use them in very narrow places. We do so in ways that allow us to swap these “bits and pieces” for new and better technologies at any point in time, while keeping the middleware the same throughout.This “sample a little, customize a lot” method works for us because our team has the technical competency to stitch together the right capabilities to keep our framework functional. Does it take more work than a strictly off-the-shelf paradigm? Of course. But the advantages are numerous:

There’s a freedom to being “vendor agnostic” 

While we do standardize as much as possible, we don’t want to be wedded to a single vendor any more than we want to be reliant on a single school of thought or a single approach. Again, because we favor holistic problem-solving, fluidity and nimbleness are keys in our framework design and in our people.

Free thinking solutions create a reflective culture 

Lately, when I go to conferences or skim the news, I see a trend that makes me wonder. As a sector, we spend a lot of time listening to and emulating consultants who have big names on their resumes – Google, say, or Facebook. I’m not devaluing anyone’s expertise, but chances are your company doesn’t prioritize internal and external needs in the same way as Twitter or LinkedIn. Again, no one knows your infrastructure better than you do. That means we can’t build out our infrastructure in anyone’s shadow. We need to create what works best for us, not what worked best up the street six months ago. By putting a heavy emphasis on customizing our own infrastructure, we also emphasize the need to stop and think, solve and iterate and solve again.

Right now at Shutterstock, we happen to be in the midst of a particularly reflective stage. Continuing to be successful means rethinking our architecture and constantly re-visioning our infrastructure. Not every element – the middleware we’re building now will stay constant – but surely there will be emergent technologies we don’t know about yet that will get us to the next version and iteration. We want to standardize where it makes sense, but customize where it will make the most profitable, more efficient difference.