Weathering the Storm

Ian Rushton, 42, weather.com's vice president of architecture, recognized that incremental changes wouldn't radically speed up the site, so he recommended completely replacing the existing physical architecture. It was a multimillion-dollar risk that in the end reduced download time from 18 seconds to less than 2 seconds. "Effectively, we ripped the engine out of a car while going down the highway -- and we didn't skip a beat," he says. "We doubled the service capability of the whole site. It's a huge accomplishment."

Huge accomplishments like that often require daring decisions, something that weather.com doesn't shy away from. "Debora understands what it means to be supportive of emerging technology," says Ryan, the company's chief technology officer. "Sometimes it takes time, sometimes it takes resources, and sometimes you're going to fail. But failure isn't something to be looked down on. It's a step in the maturation process if you're going to be leading edge."

Those technical opportunities and that "best of breed" mentality has attracted some very talented people. Ryan came to weather.com in October 1999 from eBay, where he was that company's chief technology officer. Before that, he worked at IBM, where he, Rushton, and two others who would eventually join weather.com built the complex networks that have supported the last several Olympic Games. At weather.com, Ryan says, "You have the chance to take one of the innovative leaders in the industry to the next level. . . . Maybe I get bored quickly, but I'm always looking for what's new and what's creative -- and that's what I get to do around here."

A lot of decisions that must be made involve tweaking the site and making minor adjustments to applications, to servers, or to operating levels. Such issues come up every day. But with a high-volume Web site, there's no such thing as a small tweak. Change is change. It's risky. Every time that you touch the site, you could bring it down. One reason the engineers at weather.com feel comfortable about changing the site throughout the day is that they systematically manage their changes. Every morning, at the change-request meeting, team members review various requests and decide which alterations to make, as well as the order in which to make them. Throughout the day, a change coordinator monitors the sequence of the changes and then records each modification as it is made. That way, if something does go wrong, the engineers can quickly identify the most likely source of the problem.

Weather Changes -- Strategy Doesn't

As important as it is to continue altering parts of the company, some business assumptions at weather.com are unwavering -- take its business forecast, for example.

"This is not a culture where the CEO comes up with a new strategy every day, based on what the analysts are saying or what the marketplace is doing," says Wilson, the company's CEO. "That seems to me a desperate mode of operation. We absolutely know what our business is, and we are absolutely focused on our content category. Instead of scattering in different directions, we do 100 things right every day to get us farther along that line."

Unlike her often manic, frenetic, and in-your-face dotcom counterparts, Wilson is calm, purposeful, and poised -- pleasant, yet also to the point. But she's no less intense. She begins her day at 5:30 AM, when her husband and teenage daughter are still asleep. For an hour and a half, she goes through her mail from the previous day and then she reads business magazines, Internet newsletters, cable trade journals, and the Wall Street Journal -- about three dozen publications in all.

"Debora is a sponge," says Walrath. "I've never given her an article that she hadn't read already. She reads more in three days than most people do in a month." Wilson shrugs it off as part of the job -- an Internet CEO's homework. "This industry does not allow you the luxury of not knowing what's happening on a day-to-day basis," she says. "So much is happening and changing." If she comes across a potential advertiser or partner, she picks up the phone and matter-of-factly leaves a pre-dawn phone message for her employees. "They think I'm nuts," she jokes.

Wilson says that in order to fully understand the customer experience, you have to act as one of your company's customers from time to time. In terms of weather consumers, she's more of a planner than a weather enthusiast. Recently, when she was planning to pick up her youngest brother at the Atlanta airport, she monitored the status of his flight from Washington, DC, using weather.com's new flight-arrival feature. Sure enough, his plane was delayed. "It was very useful," she says. "I was running late, and I didn't want to spend more time at the airport than I needed to."