Hi there.

I feel like the year has just started. While many of the INMA team were in Amsterdam for Media Subscriptions Summit last week, I was in San Francisco confirming the venue and meeting speakers for our brand new Media, Tech & AI week in San Francisco this October.

It’s going to be an exceptional event looking at the now and near future of AI’s impact on media. I hope you can join us.

And today I kicked off our Building Direct Audience Master Class. It’s not too late to catch up and join modules two three later this week and early next. 

In this newsletter, I’m looking at the right fit. Do we have product/market fit? And what’s the right ratio fit for a product, design, and engineering team? I’d love to hear your views on either or both of these. Drop me a note at Jodie.hopperton@INMA.org.

Thanks, Jodie

Do we have a product/market fit problem?

We hear a lot of discussion about the best way to move people down the funnel. If we know the risk of churn significantly decreases when a consumer reads 10 stories, how do we get them from averaging five stories to 10? 

I imagine many of you have had some form of this conversation many times. 

But this is very much a business problem — not a customer problem. What if your users consuming three to five articles per day are happy with that? What is the customer need you are fulfilling?

As one of the INMA Advisory Council put it: Do we have a product/market fit problem? 

To understand that, we need to know why people are using our product and consuming our content. What are the motivations? The Reuters Institute at Oxford did some research on this. 

Note that it’s not always content driven. Some sign up to support journalism, some to identify with the brand. In fact, only two of the top five reasons have to do with our core product: the content and the experience.

And these are the people who paid for news. Many others did not — even if they are extremely interested in news (67% in U.S., 86% in Germany, and 87% in the U.K., according to the same Reuters Institute study). 

During our advisory council meeting, we also discussed that many loyal subscribers pay to have access. It’s not about how much they consume, but there is value to having access when it’s needed. Many users consume less than they think they do but their perceived value is higher. 

Most news organisations are trying to serve all these needs with single products. With massive content libraries and sometimes feature-heavy products to service loyal audiences, can we also truly serve the more casual user? 

Personalisation of the home page is one way to do this. We have an entire INMA Knows category devoted to personalisation, and my colleague Sonali Verma, lead of the INMA Generative AI Initiative, will have more on this in her master class in April. 

But it also makes me wonder whether it’s worth workshopping what an ideal product would look like for each user segment if we were building from scratch. And then see if it’s feasible to put these into a single Web site or app. Could a product be versioned for different users?

Dates for the diary: October 20-24: Media, Tech & AI week in San Francisco

As Artificial Intelligence rapidly reshapes the media landscape, the urgency for news organisations to adapt has never been greater. 

The week’s mission is to bring together news media companies and the emerging constellation of AI and tech companies into a conversation about what the AI-fueled future looks like. If you want to understand AI’s impact on news, you can read about it. If you want to truly shape the future of your news business, come to San Francisco. 

Feel free to reach out to me if you have questions. I’m at Jodie.hopperton@INMA.org.

What should your product/design/engineering team ratios be?   

I recently asked about your product team ratios, and I want to share what we learned. Thanks to those who took part. I appreciate it, and your input helps us as an industry.

Two things to note about this survey are that: One, the sample size is small; and two, all respondents were large organisations with over 100 journalists or FTE equivalents (the average was 300). Smaller organisations should bear this in mind when considering the results. 

The results

In these organisations, the average product team size is just over 20 people. But these results ranged from teams of 1.5 to 65 people. The median was 12. In fact, slightly less than half were under 10 people.

We can conclude that product as a function within the news industry is still in flux. I suspect product functions are “hidden” in other teams where product work is being done under a different guise.  

Understandably, engineering teams are much larger. The average within the survey participants was 68. However, if we remove one outlier which weighted the results, the average moved to 38. 

Design teams are often smaller; the average was 12 people. Again, there was one outlier which skewed results. If we take that out, the average comes down to seven. 

Averages, not best practices

I feel it my duty to point out that these are industry averages — not necessarily best practices. For example, when I look at the outlier that changed the design results by having a larger team, I see their products and brands have exceptionally good design. 

What we can deduce about team ratios

I compared these findings with another, confidential, source that was shared with me. If we take all these numbers, the ratios are actually pretty clear. They suggest that a balance of circa one design to one to two products to six to 10 engineers is the industry average. 

About this newsletter 

Today’s newsletter is written by Jodie Hopperton, based in Los Angeles and lead for the INMA Product and Tech 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 and Tech Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Jodie at jodie.hopperton@inma.org with thoughts, suggestions, and questions. Sign up to our Slack channel.

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