Product management is a function within an organization to guide product development and strategy, and create alignment between editorial, audience, technology and business interests. When news organizations are led by product thinkers — those with the ability to strategically align business, audience and technology goals while integrating journalism ethics — they’re more likely to find success, as they’re able to connect their content and business strategy in order to develop dedicated audiences and new revenue streams. That’s why the NPA’s website boldly asserts: “The future of news is product.” 

But what does it mean for a news organization to be truly product-led? How would we know that product thinking is driving organizational behavior, and that product leadership is producing positive results?

This is a question we set out to answer in May at the NPA Forum, a small unconference of news leaders from product and editorial backgrounds. During our session, we mapped out the essential parts of what makes an organization product-led using frameworks from Table Stakes, a program meant to accelerate journalism’s shift to digital from print.

Many product management teams first appear in newsrooms as a service desk. So-called “bridge roles” are created, often on the development or technology teams, to respond to editorial and other stakeholder needs, create tickets and focus on individual units of work. But to truly align editorial, business, technology and audience goals, product leaders need a seat at the table so they can set a strategic agenda.

We started with the clearest indicators of success – both journalistic and business – and worked backward from there.

A news organization can be thought of as successful if it produces substantial journalism that yields a positive impact on society and can sustain its operations to continue to drive that impact.

So, we asked, what skills, processes and structures do news organizations that demonstrate strong product outputs have in common? Here are themes that emerged:

• User-in, not content-out: Focusing on audiences came up repeatedly – not just to inform the journalism, but to make the whole business more customer-centric. Successful news organizations are relentlessly useful, solve people’s problems, and often expand the definition of “news” to include functions not always thought of as journalism.
   

• Reliance on organization-wide performance: Product thinking and product work are not confined to a product person or team. A strong product culture should exist in the newsroom, in marketing and elsewhere, as product thinking occurs at all levels of the organization – not just among the rank-and-file.
   

• Inspired by what works elsewhere: Product-led shops take inspiration on organizational design and process from what has worked for many years in high-performing tech companies – iterative development, data-informed decision-making, autonomous cross-functional teams – but they inform this design with what is known to serve the journalism.
   

• Outcomes not outputs: Adopting frameworks just for the sake of adopting them or “performing product” can be harmful to the overall business strategy. It’s important to always demonstrate impact when engaging with product management.
   

• Iterative processes and rejecting “this is how we always have done things”: It is crucial to hold regular retrospectives and attack processes. Reject doing things just because that’s how they’ve been done for years and instead manage change head on.
   

• Product should facilitate and multiply: The job of the PM should be to help the organization maximize its resources, align stakeholders, free blockers, make strategic decisions that have ROI and create capacity.

The participants at our panel sat down and brainstormed concrete examples of the skills, organization design and culture, processes, outputs, outcomes and impact seen in news organizations with strong product leadership. For each of these headings, they started at individual contributor skills and ended at our overall outcomes and impact to our organizations, our audiences and the industry.

What can we do with these insights? We can start by using them to develop some benchmarks that show what healthy news product operations might look like. 

This, in turn, can help organizations of all sizes and shapes evaluate their progress on the way to becoming more resilient — and product-led.

This conversation is just the beginning. We have captured these insights on a Google Doc as well — please help us continue to expand on this collaborative document to continue developing insights of how we can truly be product-led.

Eric Ulken is Vice President of Product at The Baltimore Banner. Reese Oxner is the author of NPA’s Product Notes newsletter and product manager at Slate Magazine.