Lessons on team building and product thinking from NPA Summit 2022

This article was produced as part of the NPA Summit 2022 student newsroom. Learn more about this year’s students and the event.

Team building is one of the most crucial aspects of news product work, but it can also be one of the most challenging.

Throughout the 2022 News Product Alliance, speakers came together to share tips on how to break down barriers within organizations, work wonders with small teams and manage organizational changes.

Here is a round-up of the best tips.

What do you do to develop great story products when your organization is siloed?

There are many boundaries within organizations, including ones created by jargon, independent goals and varying timelines.  

For example, an analytics team and a design team each have their own set of specialized vocabulary to communicate but do not necessarily have a common language to share ideas. Other times, timescales can vary, such as daily deadlines for newsrooms versus quarterly financial goals for marketing teams. 

Product managers and those in bridge roles can coordinate across these boundaries and across teams to facilitate cross-functional work, said Kevin Anderson, the digital products and platforms director at Ideastream Public Media. 

Anderson said these boundaries keep people from doing their best, and there are many activities, such as mediation and advocacy, product managers could do to bridge across these boundaries.

Julie Westfall, a senior product manager for stories and tools at The Philadelphia Inquirer, said the major stakeholders involved for newsletters are marketing, newsroom and sales teams, but they each have different motivations. While the newsroom is motivated by stories, marketing is concerned about consumer interest, and sales teams focus on revenue.

Westfall said her organization carefully picked stakeholders to be on the team and aligned goals when they set out to develop a newsletter strategy, before designing a 90-day plan and launching several newsletter projects. 

The 90-day roadmap later turned into a long-term plan, and there has been progress despite difficulties. 

Westfall two main takeaways were:

• To prioritize people over process, but understand that process is important to working together

• To maintain a single list of goals and to engage in low-stake projects. The key is to pick stakeholders in various departments to ensure multiple perspectives are represented. 

Kat Sheplavy, a program manager of editorial experimentation at McClatchy, shared a case study about a cross-functional experimentation team launched in September 2021. 

Building relationships with people from other teams, keeping impacted colleagues informed about the work and processing improvements are important to creating a collaborative culture in news organizations, she said.

What do you do to create inspiration when your team is small?

Small product teams have to juggle a lot, all while being asked to remain innovative. But to do that, leaders have to create inspiration, even when there are huge to-do lists of day-to-day items.

A successful small product teams workflow can be simple: define the problem, collect input, use tools, consider vendors, collaborate and document as well as protect your time, according to Bethany Erickson, a digital editor at People Newspapers, and Liz Worthington, the director of metrics for news & source matters at American Press Institute, who led a session on small product teams.

Erickson said she is “a big believer in not saying completely no,” instead opting for “later or not yet.” 

Sometimes people “shut down” during meetings when the projects seem to be impossible, and her team uses a wish list to document ideas that may be possible, acting as an open document for innovation. If the idea becomes highlighted in yellow, it has some momentum and could be moved forward, while if the idea becomes highlighted in green, it gets promoted from the wish list to become an actual project. 

“It’s a lot easier to manage, it makes everyone still feel heard, and it still encourages ideas, but it makes that you are not having decade-long meetings,” Erickson said.

Erickson also said it is crucial to advocate for your team and document what you do, because otherwise people might assume that the work is easy and you might be overwhelmed with work.

She rebranded newsletters during the pandemic, as many of the previous newsletters were not adapted to the pandemic. To protect her time, Erickson allocated two entire days to working on the newsletters. 

Worthington shared a case study about tracking source diversity, and American Press Institute created Source Matters, a tool to make this process easier. She said there are many other tools journalists could make use of, such as Trello and Slack.

She added small teams need to create a system that is sustainable, and people should think about their values at work, as well as how other members could support them. People should also think about how their values are challenged at work and if other members could help with this.

What do you do to manage changes within the organization and make them stick?

Changes in an organization can be exciting, or terrifying, but they happen all the time. 

Fabienne Meijer, a digital innovation manager at DPG Media, said it is important to design with the people, spend time with the problem rather than the solution and incorporate systems thinking. 

Susannah Locke, a special projects editor at Vox, said she believes in looking for positive things, making tasks specific and helping people get excited. 

In Locke’s team, colleagues need to update story assignments by 4 p.m. on weekdays, and she said people could make use of Slack reminders or create Google calendar events with no duration time to remember to update their story assignments. It’s important to utilize technology to keep tasks visible, she said.

Media entrepreneur Kamala Sripada said product managers could look for smaller changes to focus on and motivate repetitive work when encountering failures with changes in the organization.