If the product is news: Svenska Dagbladet case study
The case for tighter newsroom and product collaboration – and a radical approach to building news organizations for the future
This article is part four of a six-part series. New installments will be published over the coming weeks, so check back regularly for the next entries.
Svenska Dagbladet
Svenska Dagbladet is a Swedish news brand in the Schibsted Media portfolio that’s been publishing since 1884. As a legacy news operation that exists in a larger media brand, its product team has felt the familiar shift over the past several years from centralization (working across many brands under Schibsted) to decentralization (working directly with media brands like Svenska Dagbladet) that large media houses like this often experience.
Recently, Svenska Dagbladet announced a new working model they’re calling the “editorial growth hub,” which will bring together news, product, and several other functions into one organization.
According to Dagens Media, “The new cross-functional hub consists of project managers, reporters, video editors, editors, developers, UX designers, SEO specialists and data analysts. It also includes new roles such as data support project managers and a new kind of reporter position – one that moves between experimentation, development and daily news work.”
Inanna Lallerstedt, the Head of Product & Growth, will operate as the hub’s manager and will work in close partnership with an editorial manager. The goal of this team is to “drive digital growth, develop new ideas and integrate innovation into editorial work,” according to the press release announcing the change.
In an interview conducted prior to this announcement, Lallerstedt explained how much the relationship between product and news had improved over the years.
“Our editors have quite a clear understanding that product development is a strong driver for value and for our news brand,” she said. “And to make editorial content available to users, you need to have products to make that possible. It also started with editorial top management encouraging more collaboration between product and editorial.”
She also noted that editorial staff have an ever-improving grasp on data and user needs.
"It's a journey to better understand each other's professions, and to also understand where there is synergy if we work together. Showing the editorial staff that you have an understanding and respect for their profession has been a key factor to be accepted into the group,” she mentioned.
The incubation and launch of Svenska Dagbladet’s SvD Kompakt product in 2023 might have been one of the success stories that proved out the value of tight editorial and product collaboration.
SvD Kompakt is a new product geared towards younger audiences who tend to suffer from news fatigue and therefore avoid engaging with it, but still have the need and desire to be informed.
A working group comprising various functions across product, design, editorial, tech, and others set out to tackle this problem together. Lallerstedt said they spent several months aligning first and foremost on rigorously defining the problem together. This was not a project in which product defined the problem and presented it back to cross-functional partners – they defined the work together at the start.
Doing this work upfront, allowed for them to move quickly onto the next phases of the project, going from prototyping, to user testing, to beta launching, to a full go-live in only a matter of months.
Tasked with creating a new product, Svenska Dagbladet tapped a cross-functional working team tasked with working together from ideation to launch.
SvD Kompakt came to life in a little over 7 months – an extremely rapid development lifecycle for a 0-to-1 product launch in a news organization.
SvD Kompakt has been a success thus far, driving over 50,000 sign-ups in its first year – with 63% of those being new users. The product has also received 90% positive feedback from its users, signaling that it’s resonating in the way they’d hoped.
Lallerstedt noted that the larger media industry can be “in a state of denial” about how much the world around us is shifting, especially with generative AI and how that’s impacting consumer behavior. And noted that it’s successful partnership, like the work done for SvD Kompakt, that could help pave the way forward.
“For us to be relevant in 10 years, how do we start to do things now that sets us up to have a chance in 10 or even 20 years?,” she asked. “That's a question that I feel we need to become much better at asking all the time. Also across product and editorial.”
About the author
Mariah Craddick is a product strategist with deep experience in the news and media industry. She’s currently leading product strategy at The Atlantic with a focus on driving subscription growth and enabling retention through feature adoption and delightful subscriber experiences.
Previously, she led teams as product manager at The Wall Street Journal, McClatchy, and Crain Communications, playing a key role in building features that drive readership and engage subscribers. Prior to her product management career, she held several roles across the newsroom – from writing for the legendary Ebony and Jet magazines to executing social media strategy at Crain’s Chicago Business.
This “If the product is news” blog series published via the News Product Alliance is part of a larger research study and project she conducted as part of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY’s Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership which she completed in June 2025.