Product plays a key role in the growth of news media organisations, but it depends upon other departments to make it successful.

Demonstrating product’s value within the company and creating a way for all departments to work together is critical for growth and to build new audiences. Pundi Sriram, chief product officer at The Hindu Group, used the metaphor of a rocket ship during yesterday’s INMA members-only Webinar.

“If you look at a rocket ship, there’s a payload that’s the high value object, and then there’s the rocket that carries that payload into orbit,” Sriram said.

During his presentation, Breaking down walls: The role of product in driving growth at The Hindu, Sriram shared the company’s journey, noting the challenge for product departments is often that “you have accountability but often no authority.” 

“The way we see it, our payload is our editorial content. It’s the high-value content that our editorial colleagues put together: news, opinions, analysis, all of that. And the rocket is the product.”

Product, he explained, is what helps the editorial content reach the right user on the right device at the right time. While the product team manages the design and development of the rocket, the tech team was responsible for building it. It requires “a constant balance” from the product department to address the customer experience, drive growth, and enable monetisation, Sriram said.

“The product role performs different specific roles in each of these areas,” he said.

That means different things for each of those areas: To own the customer experience means measuring, monitoring, and influencing user behaviour on the sites and designing a pleasing UX for that. It also involves developing new features and acquiring user data to improve the customer experience.

For growth, the team has to look at how to acquire and engage users both on and off the platform and convert anonymous users. Both of these areas work together to improve the third area, monetisation, through advertising, subscription, and other revenue.

“There are always tradeoffs between advertising, subscription [and] other revenue, and user experience and growth,” Sriram said. “And that entire positive feedback cycle that we’re trying to create is the responsibility of product and how we operate.” 

Working better together

He used the recent redesign of The Hindu and Businessline as examples of how product can work across departments.

To bring the publications up-to-date, it was important to create mobile-first products that appeal to the overwhelmingly large market of mobile users in India. While many users are mobile-only and most users access their news via smartphone, The Hindu still has a significant print audience.

“Very often it’s the same audience in print. The print audience is also accessing our products online, and many readers access our products across multiple platforms,” he said. “So, any product redesign or relaunch needs to address this and be coherent across different platforms as far as reader experience is concerned.”

Product defined the parameters of the redesign, ensuring it would accommodate videos, charts, graphics, and images that work well on the mobile device and make it easier for readers to skim and browse. It also had more of a “premium look and feel” because the Hindu has migrated to a subscription platform where people are paying a premium for content.

In addition to creating a premium mobile experience, however, it also wanted to emphasise The Hindu’s print heritage. “Importantly, it must feel like you’re reading a newspaper at some level and users must connect with the news regardless of what platform they are on,” Sriram said.

This redesign marked the first time the same team redesigned the print publication as well as the Web site and mobile app for a legacy publication, which allowed The Hindu to provide a consistent experience across all platforms.

Thinking “and” not “vs”

Next to the design experience, Sriram said a big challenge for publications is the three areas he had mentioned: customer experience, growth, and monetisation. It has become customary to think of these three areas with a “versus” mentality, “meaning, if I provide a clean user experience, is that going to cost me ad swaps? Or if I provide traffic growth, is that going to limit the kind of paywalls we can use?”

While these are questions Sriram said product departments often struggle with in a news media company, The Hindu adopted a different mentality, thinking of “and” instead of “or.”

“We could at the same time create a clean user experience, create that premium experience, but rather than think about more clicks, think about more engagement — rather than think about more stories, more articles behind a paywall,” he said. “Look at smarter payables and better ad slots. [Our Web site has] fewer ad slots, but those ad slots are more prominent, and it’s yielding the same outcomes as before — if not better.”

The data shows the redesign has increased momentum and gained active monthly users, Sriram said. Making the tradeoffs between customer experience, growth, and monetisation has been key to breaking down the walls that once separated those areas.

Data-driven decision making

Another important dimension has been the company’s commitment to bringing data-driven decision-making into the organisation. Choosing four North Star metrics has allowed it to advance its efforts in those areas. The Hindu focused on known users, monthly active users, pageviews, and pageviews per active subscriber.

“We will add more to this, and these may not be the right ones for your business when you’re looking at it, but it works for us where we are in our journey,” he said.

Sriram added they have considered adding things like session duration and session time to the metrics, and he expects changes in metrics as their expertise in data evolves. The company is also looking at AI and machine learning tools, thinking about how to integrate them into internal workflows.

Audience development has also been an area of focus. Finding a specific audience and then creating specific content to fit that audience can be used to build and scale product. Sriram showed how The Hindu had used new products including games, a Learning Corner, and a two-page spread called Text & Context that delivers political policy information but is designed in a snappy, Instagram-style format to appeal to younger users.

“This is similar to how we are approaching audience development across other segments as well,” he said, acknowledging there has been a learning curve for the different departments to learn how to work together. “But once we have passed that learning curve, we’re now talking the same language and shooting for the same goals. There’s often some question about where the role of product begins; historically, a lot of what product has been doing has been done by either technology or editorial.”

Breaking down walls and establishing different lines of communication between departments allows them to work together toward the same goal, Sriram said: “That’s allowed us to build a subscription business that I would say is in the early stage of being a very successful business.”

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