By Elizabeth Casolo

What does it mean for a news organization to be truly product-led? Eric Ulken — vice president of product at The Baltimore Banner — and Reese Oxner — product manager at Slate — continued their work to define how to assess whether product thinking is driving organizational behavior, and if product leadership is producing positive results at the News Product Alliance (NPA) 2024 Summit in October. The pair built on a conversation started at the NPA Forum in May on what it means to be a product-led news organization, leading an exercise in which Summit participants created a beta version of a “gap quiz,” a tool for newsrooms to self-evaluate their product focus and business practices, identifying gaps that exist.

To Oxner, the quiz is “a tangible deliverable that will help you grade your organization and help others grade it.”

Inspired by the LION Sustainability Audit and the Table Stakes “gap quizzes”, Summit attendees defined indicators that would help us understand if news organizations are successfully modeling a given attribute of a high-functioning product organization. 

Thinking big with pillars and honing attributes

Ulken and Oxner identified four pillars to shape the questions that will be asked in the quiz: 

• AUDIENCE: How should local news meet audiences’ information needs in a constantly changing and diverse environment?

• PRODUCT OPERATIONS: How do we build resilient local news organizations that can adapt to tech and user behavior shifts?

• LEADERSHIP: How do we support and empower diverse news product leaders to push for transformation?

• TECHNOLOGY: How can local news best adapt and ethically integrate new technologies, such as AI?

Each affirmative indicator statement on the gap quiz addresses one of these pillars and elucidates what the attributes of a product-led news organization look like in practice — such as employee skills, organizational design and culture, process, and outputs. 

By examining the pillars, skills and other indicators that signal this is a healthy product organization, Oxner said, “you can start building that roadmap of where you are now and where you want to be.” 

Here are examples of “affirmative indicators” of a product-led news organization that Summit attendees came up with:

Skills

• “Our organization is equipped — through hiring, training, and development — to respond to changes in technology.”

• “Interdisciplinary thinking is valued in our hiring, development, and product development process.”

Organizational design and culture

• “Both editorial and tech partners trust product managers to lead projects.”

• “Documentation exists for all key processes, and multiple people are trained to execute all key processes.”

Process

• “Team and individual KPIs are relevant to daily work and ladder up to organizational goals.”

• “We do regular retrospectives and adjust our processes and priorities based on what we're learning.”

Outputs

• “We tailor content to the platforms and the audiences on those platforms.”

• “We collect user data in service of creating better products and business sustainability.”

Looking forward

Right now, Ulken and Oxner are putting their finishing touches on the quiz, which will help teams evaluate their performance relative to each of these ‘ideal’ statements on a scale from one to five. By evaluating their teams’ progress on the journey to becoming product-led, news organizations can take the first step towards understanding their progress and areas in which they need further support.