Lessons shared on creating a collaborative product team
Product Initiative Newsletter Blog | 15 February 2021
Creating and iterating a product department isn’t a straight line. Do you “move fast and break things” to get stuff done quickly? Or take additional time to listen and communicate until there is wide consensus? It’s not a binary decision, but one that Ben Haywood, director of product at Nine in Australia, has seen from both sides of the spectrum. This week, he shares lessons learned.
And what happens when the product team reaches maturity in an organisation? Does the level of communication also reach a status quo? We take a quick look at the fundamentals of organisational change and where product teams are likely to land.
Thanks for being part of the INMA Product Initiative. If you have feedback, questions, or ideas, please get in touch. You can reach me at jodie.hopperton@inma.org.
In the meantime, I hope these experiences and insights help you on your product journey.
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From closed-door product development to open and full collaboration, some lessons
Ben Haywood, director of product at Nine (and formerly director/audience products at Fairfax), has been through quite the journey with product. Having seen completely different approaches play out within the same organisation, we spoke about his experiences and insights on the effects of each approach.
Some background: Fairfax was an Australian newspaper group that owned leading daily titles The Age, The Australian Financial Review, and The Sydney Morning Herald, amongst others. With a career in journalism and marketing, Ben moved into a product role working on subscriptions.
In 2018, Fairfax merged with Nine, and last year Ben took on the role of director of product at Nine. For more background on Fairfax, the merger, and their approach, check out this Q&A with INMA board members and Chief Digital and Publishing Officer Chris Janz.
Then: Closed-door operations
As with many organisations in the news industry, Fairfax was going through tough times financially and needed a reset. The company brought in consultants to help with high-level strategy for the future of the business. Drastic changes needed to happen for the company to have a good chance at surviving, let alone thriving. Ultimately this meant a serious shift towards focusing on reader revenue (if you are interested in going deeper on reader revenue, take a look at the INMA Readers First initiative led by the exceptionally knowledgeable Greg Piechota.)
With this in mind, the company set up an entirely separate unit with a different office location from the rest of the business. This unit was charged with rebuilding the product from the ground up. Ben joined the team, heading up the subscription product, which was newly key to the company's future path to success. In addition to the full-time team, a few individuals from the existing business were appointed as point people to give input to product decisions and provide on-the-ground insights.
Why the secrecy of this unit? Fairfax felt it needed to move quickly and with focus on the future business. By having a separate unit, a smaller team was able to think and execute far more quickly without having to get buy-in from multiple stakeholders who likely wanted different things, may have been skeptical of change, and ultimately would have held up the process considerably. It also meant not having to balance building the future with the running of the existing business. The approach reminds me of a Silicon Valley mantra: Move fast and break things.
The unveiling and subsequent relationships
The presentation of the shiny new products were made to the newsroom. However — without having spent the time to get buy-in, getting multiple views, and ultimately not having agreed what the end goal should be — the unveiling of the new products wasn’t as well received as it could have been.
Until this point, much of the organisation had been working towards overall reach of the content, a fairly standard metric. The new path needed a shift towards readers willing to pay for content. Editorial knew its audience well but did not have access to an agreed set of new metrics. It took time going from reach numbers to focusing on where each title really had authority with its readers, i.e. content that was unique and audiences were willing to pay for.
The fairly abrupt change left relationships tense and “ownership” was being fought, which made it tough to get things done that left all the stakeholders happy.
Key turning points
There were a couple of key turning points. Firstly, the editorial team hired a head of audience development. Having someone in “their” team as a point person for Ben to liaise with was ideal. Both teams felt represented and they were working to the same goals. As Ben put it, they quickly “became best mates.”
Then, after the merger with Nine, Ben’s remit expanded from leading subscription product to leading the whole product team at Nine. What could have been more of a challenge having been part of this radical change actually put him at an advantage. As he says: “My role in subscription product gave me a front row view of what was and wasn’t working, putting me in the optimal position to move quickly to reset relationships and set a new, more collaborative path forward.”
Now: A fully collaborative environment
He started the role in open conversation with peers getting a lot more involved in the product process, often explaining why things needed to happen in a certain order or in a certain way. Product decisions are no longer made in isolation. There are fortnightly alignment meetings for each product “squad,” which include not only the vertical product managers but also the horizontal (data, design, subscriptions, etc.) and relevant stakeholders — the make-up of which varies for each product. And there are monthly executive working sessions with peers to align and resolve any bumps. Ben and the chief technology officer have a view across everything, so if there are gaps or knock on dependencies, they can manage that.
Ownership and decision making
I joke with Ben about how, in a fully collaborative environment, everyone may have great ideas, asking product to figure it out — which in itself can cause headaches. His approach is so collaborative, he doesn’t allow people to “throw ideas over the fence to leave us to figure it out; they’ve got to come in with us and look at the big picture.”
With limited resources, stakeholders need to understand that there are X number of engineers available and be part of a conversation with all the other stakeholders to understand the trade-offs of something new. This is also reflected in the way the product team presents roadmaps. The team ensures the visualisation encapsulates the relative effort of each project to demonstrate that not all things are equal (each team uses their tool of choice, usually Google slides or sheets).
Jodie’s takeaways/TL;DR
You can move quickly and get things done, but that will come at a cost of bringing people with you. The approach shouldn’t be discounted, particularly to shake things up quickly. But this will win no favours amongst colleagues, and some bridges between individuals may never be rebuilt. It is not a long-term strategy for success.
You don’t have to do everything yourself or within your team. Product operates across all parts of the business, bringing them into the decision-making process with you to see things from different perspectives and get optimal results — even if it takes longer.
Align around one set of goals and have more specific metrics for individual areas. At Nine, each department now looks at what metrics they are working towards and therefore which levers they can individually and collaboratively pull to achieve those objectives. (NB we’ll be discussing more of this in the Product Initiative over the coming months)
Set timelines and be clear about when things will happen. The one thing Ben said he would change with the benefit of hindsight is making design processes tighter. It’s possible to continue to iterate afterwards, but at some point decisions need to be made.
Dates for the diary
Wednesday, Febuary 17: “A Practical Guide to Podcasts, Short-Form Audio, and Voice AI,” an INMA members-only Webinar for those interested in audio as a product.
Wednesday, March 3: My next Product Initiative Webinar, “What is Product Success? A look at Key Metrics that Everyone Can Buy Into,” will tackle what is product success, taking a look at key metrics that everyone can buy into. Something that comes up a lot in product discussions is the need for shared understanding of the goals. How do company goals translate to product so that each person and department is focused on pulling the right levers within their power to meet those goals?
Join the conversation. Sign up here or if you have a story to share, please contact me at jodie.hopperton@inma.org.
Getting to a mature product organisation: from leading the change to becoming the glue
Almost every leader I have spoken to over the last two months has raised collaboration and communication as key attributes to success during the introduction or transformation phase of product.
In the interview above, Nine is fairly far advanced in it’s product thinking. Yet during our wrap-up, Ben mused whether eventually it would be possible to“deliver even more value for organisation if, rather than being closely coupled [with other parts of the organisation], it was just tightly aligned so we could work a little bit more quickly and maybe a little bit more in isolation with clear ownership and trust. You are absolutely all aligned and working towards the same thing, but don’t need to have just so much communication and collaboration to get anything done.”
Historically, newsrooms have been siloed from the “business.” However as businesses have become more complex and more distribution channels have arisen, this is no longer the case. The introduction of product raises questions of who “owns” what and — the holy grail — to fully integrate and remove any reason for being territorial.
This change is often a structural and certainly cultural transformational. Anyone who has been through any form of organisational change will know that it doesn’t happen overnight and it takes time to bring people on board, let alone open up.
A Harvard Business School article on organisational change states that some or all of the following factors bring about organisational change:
New leadership at the helm of the company or within its departments.
Shifts in the organisational team structure.
The implementation of new technology.
The adoption of new business models.
Look familiar? A move to a product-led strategy is likely to encompass most, if not all, of the above.
The same article lists the top skill leaders managing the changes need to have, including “the ability to communicate clearly and effectively — this includes actively listening to their team and colleague” — which is why this is such a critical skill for product leaders who are at the forefront of the change.
During the transformation, there is likely to be a period of over communication and collaboration to reach a new status quo — one in which trust is built and new processes become a way of life. With product-led changes, a degree of this additional communication and collaboration must endure as it remains both central to the strategy of, and an integral part of, the organisation as a whole.
Noemi Ramirez, chief product and customer officer at Prisa in Spain, describes product as being “the cement in between the bricks” and believes it’s essential for product to have a holistic view of the organisation, bringing all the pieces together as a support structure.
And Louise Story, chief news strategist and chief product and technology officer at The Wall Street Journal also describes her team as the “glue that holds it all together.” She firmly believes it’s too easy to slip back into silos and individual goal orientation. It’s therefore important when “you bring in people’s new capacities and skill sets — whichever pocket you hire them in — [that they understand] they’re coming in to collaborate with the others who are there, and we’re working together to come up with something that everyone can use.”
So is it possible to reach a status quo in which so much time spent on collaboration is necessary? In short, yes. The alignment and facilitation of a product strategy can become a natural way of being. Communication and collaboration will always be essential to balance customer experience with business goals, but the transformation itself takes an additional layer of listening, explaining, and communicating.
My ask this week: experts in these fields
As we are planning the Product Initiative throughout 2021, we’ll be speaking with experts in the subjects below. Is there anyone you are dying to hear from, you think should be on our radar, or do you have a great story to share? If so, I’d love to hear from you at jodie.hopperton@inma.org.
Product success metrics that a whole organisation can buy into: RFV, LTV, and OKRs are three we will be looking at.
Product methodologies: Agile is popular, with scrums and sprints. Who is using Kanban or other methods?
Content is the product: The essential ingredients for newsrooms and product teams to harness skill sets and drive the organisation forward.
Product innovation: Sourcing, testing, and developing new products.
Recommended reading
- What is the MACU? by Lousie Story, chief news strategist and chief product and technology Officer at The Wall Street Journal: “Sometimes organisational divides get in the way of conversations around common goals and ways of working. Take the MACU, for instance. In marketing organisations, you’ve got entire disciplines that have developed subscription models around “members.” In newsrooms, there are audience development teams that help reporters and editors think about “audiences.” Circulation operates call centers where agents talk to “customers.” Product designers and engineers focus on “users.”
- If content is king, “Product is queen”: thoughts on the role product plays in news. Twipe does a summary of some recent presentations from various news conferences.
- Five Unusual Things Marty Cagan Said About Product Management That I Can’t Stop Thinking Aboutby Louise Lai: “As someone who has read quite a few product management books, Marty still surprised me with his fresh perspective and somewhat contrarian opinions (see: OKRs are not all good).”
About this newsletter
Today’s newsletter is written by Jodie Hopperton, based in Los Angeles and lead for the INMA Product Initiative. Jodie will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of global news media product.
This newsletter is a public face of the Product Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Jodie at jodie.hopperton@inma.org with thoughts, suggestions, and questions. Sign up to our Slack channel.