The concept of “bridge roles” — multi-disciplined team members who help connect siloed teams to work on strategic priorities — has emerged in several INMA presentations and conversations recently. It came up in one of my advisory council meetings, during my October master class, and again in an ask-me-anything session with a corporate member.

So it felt like the right time to dive into the topic and better understand bridge roles and how they can accelerate organisational transformation. 

At the INMA CEO Roundtable in August, I asked the 50+ C-suite executives gathered whether they felt there’s a disconnect between their newsrooms and the business side of the operation. About 75% of those executives raised their hands. 

Lisa MacLeod, FT Strategies’ director and head of EMEA, says the “damaging us and them mentality” between commercial and editorial colleagues hampers innovation and new strategic thinking.

In the image below, bridge roles are represented by the orange bubbles, and these are within project teams that exist across the Financial Times. The orange bubbles often create cross-functional teams that bring together the talent and skills from around the organisation in pursuit of an end goal (e.g. reduce subscriber churn), according to FT Strategies.

“The value of bridge roles comes in the ability to connect disciplines in service of the reader, particularly when it comes to growth and audience development,” writes Lamberto Lambertini, senior insights consultant at FT Strategies.

Lambertini notes at the Financial Times, the position that best embodies the qualities of a bridge role is the head of audience engagement (AE) team, working closely with newsroom and data teams to help manage medium-to-long term initiatives. Ultimately, it also helps connect product and commercial teams with these initiatives to break down siloed efforts, create a culture of collaboration, and test new hypotheses, he writes.

Indeed, I have worked in organisations with bridge roles connecting audience insights with the newsroom and digital circulation with the newsroom and have found those roles to be extremely effective. 

What attributes are needed for bridge roles to be effective? FT Strategies offered some great advice on that:

• Set clear and common goals that are documented and communicated across departments in easily translatable language.

• Be laser focused on listening to audiences, usually in part due to a background in audience development, product, data and analytics, and/or SEO.

• Use strong people management skills and experience in editorial to unlock the newsroom into more creative thinking that looks at the long term over the short term.

• Spin up “project teams” and provide a clear view of the group’s aims and timelines to other stakeholders.

• Work with the data and analytics team to think creatively about the right metrics and quantitative audience research to understand reader engagement and value.

• Have a keen eye on initiatives to sunset by understanding the power of lessons learned and failures while keeping a positive experimental mindset within teams. 

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