My landing in a product management role in 2022 was quite fortuitous. Did you search for “product manager” on YouTube? The videos from the channel Exponent prepare you well for a job interview, but mostly for ‘big tech’ organizations, like Meta, Microsoft or Amazon.
My only previous encounters with product managers were in the context of working in music labels and, with an editorial background, I was initially hesitant to consider news a ‘product’.
But, first of all, what is a ‘product’?
The founder of the News Product Alliance, Becca Aaronson, defines a product as “a good or service that creates an exchange of value”
Anita Zielina, the lead instructor in the Transformation Boost course I attended, defined product as “a function at the intersection of editorial, tech and business, that addresses user needs, provides excellent user experience and advances the overarching business strategy.”
When I’m asked about my most recent work experience in the multiple job interviews I have been doing recently, I usually use the definition that product management is “a bridge role that connects the audience, business and technology, with users in the centre.”
Specific to news products and product management applied to journalism, product managers look at all aspects involved in the experience of producing and consuming news content.
Not so long ago, and even today – for example, rad.ca in Radio Canada or 404 in Los Angeles Times – innovation labs or hubs started popping up in media organizations. The goal is usually to experiment with new forms of storytelling and/or draw new audiences that are not interested in traditional news formats. It sounds pretty cool, right? The problem for these side hustles is that they often don’t lead to advance the overarching business strategy of the organization.
By acting partially or fully independent from the main business strategy of the organization, these ventures are often lacking a long term plan and become unsustainable over time.
Among other tasks, product managers are in news organizations to prevent these missteps and lack of strategy or long-term vision. They live in the center, between customer, business and technology, and a lot of what they do is negotiate with editorial what is possible to do.
Every news organization presents a conflict between editorial, product, tech and executives. Product managers are not necessarily peacemakers but, with a general view of all departments, they are tasked to prioritize, reconcile and move initiatives forward when these align with the overall mission and strategy of the organization.
Product managers, or anyone working in interdisciplinary roles, carry a lot of the transformation weight in the organization. Every intersection in an organization is a potential risk of conflict.
When centralization and consolidation are needed, product managers are tasked to actively moderate potential interdepartmental conflicts.
The idea of product management as we know it originated in 1931, when Neil H. McElroy sent a memo requesting additional employees to manage products, advertising and promotions, while keeping track of sales. McElroy called them “brandmen”.
Concepts that product managers deal with today – like sprint, agile methodology or scrum framework – originated in the tech companies in Silicon Valley, during the turn of the century.
Nic Newman, now senior researcher for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, published The State of Product Management for the BBC Academy in 2010. This document outlines the introduction of product management roles in news organizations, a shift that only became mainstream for most news organizations around 2019.
Why did it take so long?
The clash of cultures:
product vs. newsroom
Newsrooms and product departments answer to different questions.
In newsrooms, the general questions to be answered usually look like:
- What are the key details surrounding the event/story?
- Who are the protagonists surrounding the event/story?
- How did the event/story happen?
- Why did the event/story happen?
- When did the event/story happen?
In product departments, the questions to be addressed look more like:
- What do you build?
- Who builds it?
- How do you build it?
- Why do you build it?
- When do you build it?
- How do you measure success?
Their working cultures are also substantiated by opposing principles.
The historical culture in the newsroom is characterized by lone wolves, specialization over interdisciplinary work, perfectionism, waterfall development, decisions driven by gut feeling, command-and-control leadership style and an ego centric view.
The product departments are guided by drastically opposed principles: collaboration in teams, cross-functional teams from various departments, user-centric view, data-informed decisions, a culture based on learning from failures and leadership style based on coaching and delegating.
Legacy ways of the newsrooms come with a legacy leadership that is hesitant to adapt to the new culture of product thinking.
“Perfect is the enemy of done”
A healthy digital-first organization understands that not everything you are going to try will work out and that in the continuously changing media landscape we live in. The water development methodology that worked in the past (12 months to develop a finalized product) is much more risky than building a minimum viable product (MVP) and build on it based on performance data and the feedback received.
However, there are things worth keeping from the culture of traditional media culture. Working in interdisciplinary teams does not mean that every decision is done in community assemblies, and is worth combining gut feeling with data-informed decisions.
Good leadership must accept that disagreement is part of the process.
Goals help with alignment across departments, but need to be enforced for organizations to act consequently and stop things that don’t get the organization closer to those goals.
Prioritizing is important. Setting up a ‘Northern Star’ metric can help at guiding decisions, and management and leadership should expect to be asked for clarification when goals are not clearly set or enforced.
Don’t be afraid to be persistent communicating goals across the organization, there is a need for consistent storyline from everyone in management communicating goals. Ultimately, if goals are not clearly set, products will not have a clear user value.
When setting up goals, getting buy-in from executives, understand what motivates your bosses, what are they incentivised by, and define the product goals of the organization accordingly.
User-centric design thinking to define successful (news) products
Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.
Think about a product that you use regularly (related to news or not): How did you discover it? What is about it that you like? How much was it? Was it worth it? Why do you get an iPhone instead of an Android phone? Or vice versa? Netflix or Amazon Prime? New York Times or The Guardian? Does pineapple belong in a pizza? My apologies, I’m getting off-script.
Generally, a good product is:
- Fulfilling a need
- Easy and comfortable to use
- Fairly priced
- Beautiful or Nice
- Emotional attachment
Bonfire community experiences are key in media consumption.
You often choose a show or a movie to watch because it becomes a topic of conversation among friends and online.
There’s also a factor of habit, what is known as ‘Lock in effect’. Once you are in an ecosystem, it becomes harder to transition to another. A good example of this is the attachment people feel to Apple products or how easy it was to register to Meta’s Threads if you are an Instagram user.
A product that doesn’t fulfill a need has a hard time in the market. Features, visuals or price are important factors of a product, but what makes a difference is the emotional attachment to it.
You don’t ‘create’ a need, you surface a need people didn’t think they have. Good product design surfaces needs and transfers them to products that serve those needs. Design thinking talks to people about their needs and emotions, to brainstorm potential solutions. It’s hard for people to imagine things that are not there yet (i.e. in a focus group). Back in the day, people asked for faster horses because they couldn’t think of what cars are today.
Pure design thinking and personas are outdated.
By this methodology, the personas of King Charles III and Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osborne have more in common than you could imagine: They are both English men born in 1948, married a second time, with two children, wealthy, spend winter in the Alps and like dogs. Can you really think of a product that completely suits them both?
Product practitioners have moved to empathetic ways of product design like Jobs To Be Done, an framework to define the needs of your audience.
User-centric work is a constant effort, not something that happens just once. Tie these efforts to team members and goals, to keep track of them. Some minor changes can be done in a section of the organization, but eventually leadership buy-in is needed.
In conclusion, the question to be asked is:
What needs does a product fulfill for the user?
This article is the third in a series where I’m collecting my thoughts after attending the 3-day Transformation Boost course at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in New York City, in July 2023. Feel free to share your point of view in the comments or contact me.
Oriol Salvador 
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