How I…Tony Elkins’ Path to Product

We’ll soon restart our popular ‘How I..’ event series led by Tony Elkins. In previous editions, Elkins interviewed emerging news product thinkers about their journeys into the product realm.

While we wait, today we’ll hear about Elkins’ own journey. He spoke to us about moving into a formal product role after being appointed Product Director at Gannett Media, career transitions at a senior level, and how to advocate for product thinking in a newsroom.

You took on many different roles before becoming a Product Director at Gannett. How did all these roles contribute to your journey to product?

I started out as a print designer, which is the original UI/UX, where you’re thinking about how your customers and readers consume the content on the page. Then I did a little bit of web design in the early 2000s. Later, I transitioned into managerial roles. I didn’t have an idea of what product really was until I started project management.

I worked with our investigations teams and helped them, making sure all the assignments were done, making sure we were gathering all our assets, websites were getting built and social media campaigns happened. That was my introduction to product without knowing it was product management.

As I became a design thinking facilitator, I started reading more and understanding the difference between a project and product. I learned how a product is all-encompassing of so many different things and aspects of the industry. Now with this transition to being a Product Director, I’m learning the ins and outs of being a product manager, understanding the role of product in the organization as a whole and it has been very eye opening.

How has your perception of product in journalism evolved over the years?

Being in the editorial news side, I didn’t really understand product initially and it was a foreign concept to me. For me, so much of product involved technology and coding. I never thought that it was something I’d be able to do. I’m severely dyslexic, I transpose numbers quite easily and so I’ve never been able to code. I thought if I couldn’t code, I couldn’t be in product. That isn’t further from the truth. What I’ve learned as I transitioned into this role is that all the things that made me a good news manager, made me a good product manager. It’s about communication, connecting with people, understanding the workflows and how everyone works together. I’ve only been doing this for a few months now in a strict, formal product role, but it really is about connecting with people and communications as much as it’s been about technology. It’s not all lines of code, it’s making sure that everyone’s on the same page and helping them get to a particular point.

Since you’re also new to the formal product field, how did you work around understanding the technology and jargon required to parse this role?

Step one was opening my mind to outside methods and not being stuck in the journalism box. It included a lot of IDEO and Matter design thinking training and looking at design thinking as a whole. It led me to think about business model generation, using things like empathy maps, using frameworks outside journalism and how we can bring these traditional business models and ways of thinking into journalism. Step two was taking the time to sit down and fully understand the technology that my organization works with. I’m being afforded this opportunity by my company.

One of the first things my boss, Eric Ulken (Product Director at Gannett Media), told me is that it’s going to take time to understand the technology. You can’t be an expert on day one.

If we want to see more people succeed in product, especially those making the transition from news, there needs to be more knowledge sharing, more runway to learn these skills, more frameworks and training out there - the reason we founded the NPA was to be able to do this. For journalism to be successful, we need to have a two-way street here. We need to see more news people in product and more product people in news.

You switched roles at quite a senior level in your career. What was it like to make that leap?

There’s always risk in trying something new. There was fear and trepidation. I didn’t make this move myself and it happened as part of a reorganization of my role, team, and several others. I used to be in innovation and got to create my own job and lead this team of thinkers and innovators. When you move into product, everything is more defined. You’re now looking at metrics , KPIs, learning all these acronyms and what they all mean. You’re steadily working towards a goal rather than just ideating and thinking about what you can create. When you go from doing one thing that you’re a master at to learning a whole new job, you certainly bring those skills, but there are also pain points. For example, I didn’t lose any seniority or rank, but now I’m going from being a team leader to an individual contributor role. What does that mean? How do I do that work? How do I go back and time-box these things? How do I learn these skills?

What advice do you have for those eyeing a similar career change at a senior level?

The advice I would give, especially if you’re making a transition further along in your career, is that you have a lot of the skills already and you just don’t know it yet. It’s all about the soft skills which we don’t talk about. It’s about how you talk to people, how you manage your time, and how you take notes. All these little things make a great product manager and you just have to reframe them and think about how those apply to product work. It’s about getting over the fear and addressing impostor syndrome.

Change means you have to evolve. You have to radically accept that and what it means for you, what it means for your career, what it means for your daily work. We don’t talk about the stress surrounding that and the different things you have to think about while going around the process.

If you came to me six years ago and asked me - what is your next role? I would have 100% told you I would be Executive Editor of a local paper. That was my career path. I learned to lead a newsroom, I had ideas for how to lead a newsroom and ideas for what type of newsroom I wanted to lead. A few small decisions took me as far away from that as possible. I love it because I’m doing something that’s completely different that’s still supporting the role of journalism.

Tell us more about your role at Gannett? What are you working on now?

One of the things I’m working on right now is a large product that ties together some backend work that affects how we build stories and how we manage metadata to better render on the frontend so our readers can follow along. One of the things that Eric and Kara Chiles (SVP of Consumer Products at Gannett Media) have done is really let me understand and explore how Jira tickets are made, how DevOps are run. They have been instrumental in my transition to a full product role by giving me and my former team the runway, knowledge base and connections to build our skills. I’ve even shipped several products. Now I’m getting to how I should pitch my own ideas - how do I get it from thought to shipping. It’s something I’ve done before, but not as a formal process. I take these ideas and think about how it works with various teams, what are the bugs it will cause, how do we sell it to journalists, how do we ship it? I’m getting into the work of bringing my ideas into reality but in a much more structured way .

What are some practical tips that people can takeaway to learn more about product?

This works across the line - find a ‘product buddy’. Just ask questions. It can be during the meeting or even after. It’s something journalists do. But you don’t think about that in terms of organizational work or product work. The skills that make someone a great journalist - if you’re moving from news or editorial or any other journalism role - is to just connect with people around you. We think we have to have all the answers all the time. Especially when you’re coming into these new roles, you won’t.

Product in journalism, especially for those transitioning from the news side, is an emerging field. How do you manage buy-in for product in the newsroom?

It comes down to communication and bridge building. Great teams talk to each other. There’s still a lot of work to be done to break down silos. I know that L.A. Times had a bridge team. That’s super important because it’s really hard to sell journalists on new tools and new products. If there is transparency, and you understand the actual work that goes into building a product, there’s a better understanding of why things take so long, why it takes so long to get something on the roadmap, get it developed, have it tested, deployed. Whether you’re a startup or one of the larger journalism organizations, product is complex. How our technology plays together is very complex. When you start adding revenue, subscription models, and privacy concerns, tech stack - it’s infinitely complex. It’s not as simple as I want this thing, give it to me. It’s about what metric are you using? What are your KPIs? How are we going to test it to make sure that it’s meeting our business needs down the road? If we communicate better with our newsrooms, with our journalists, and with our leaders about how the system as a whole should work, then we’ll have greater understanding and exchange of ideas from product to news and news to product. It works both ways. Then we start working towards a more successful business model.