The arranged marriage of product and technology is not always a blissful one, but there are signs that the two are getting along better these days. During Wednesday’s INMA Webinar, members heard more about what can be done to improve the relationship.

Erik Bursch, Gannett’s senior vice president/consumer product and engineering, and Jason Jedlinski, former senior vice president/consumer products at Gannett | USA Today Network, joined Jodie Hopperton, INMA’s Product Initiative lead, to talk about what’s working and what needs improvement.

Managing the Product and Technology Partnership Effectively provided an honest discussion of some of the common challenges facing news media companies. The two men shared their story of how they brought the two departments together and improved results. As with any relationship, it all begins with better communication.

Hopperton asked attendees to share how product and technology are getting along in their company, and the results of the poll were optimistic, with more than half saying they were “getting along pretty well.” Around 40% of respondents said “it’s complicated” and the remaining responses acknowledged that they needed counselling.

And that’s partially what Jedlinski and Bursch offered.

“Much like any relationship, it changes over the years,” Jedlinski said of the product and technology partnership. “Things happen and come and go and ebb and flow.”

Jedlinski and Bursch traced their relationship back to their initial meeting at Gannett, when they had two separate departments with different leaders and different initiatives.

“From a technology side of things there, we didn’t feel connected to the product as a whole,” Bursch recalled. “And while we did make progress during that timeframe, it was not the speed and the agility that we needed to be forward-thinking from a digital media standpoint.”

Because the departments had different cultures in terms of experimentation, innovation, and what was important to them, they lacked a clear North Star — and it showed. When Bursch and Jedlinski decided to approach it as a true partnership, they began getting results, but it wasn’t an overnight change.

“We didn’t get that right on the first try,” Jedlinski noted. “But that partnership and shared mutual respect and shared goals I think is the key, however the org chart may be structured. There has to be that understanding and you have to act in the spirit of ‘we are all rowing to the same horizon or destination together and we succeed and fail together’ versus pointing fingers at each other.”

Secrets of making it work

Once they came together, Bursch said both sides were empowered to take ownership and think differently. That opened the door to alignment and created what Jedlinski called “a culture of curiosity.” It also allowed Bursch and Jedlinski to work together to approach problems and develop solutions.

“We declared [to leadership] what we thought we could do,” Jedlinski said. “We put the hypothesis out there that we would move faster and build better products [together] and we transparently reported on our progress.”

They also assumed accountability for the results of their decisions, which made it easier for leaders to loosen the reins, they said. And it ultimately paid off: “The business really prospered with this alignment from all metrics … of the two organisations,” Bursch said. “So I think we were validated immensely with our decision, even though it took a long time.”

While bringing the tech and product teams together to the extent that Gannett did may not be the answer for everyone, Jedlinski said they must at least reach a point of curiosity and communication. They should be asking each other “why?” and learning what drives each department’s decision-making process. They should also be able to recommend ways that might make more sense — things the other department would not think of.

But through it all, both sides must have respect for what the other team is doing.

Nurturing curiosity

Creating that culture of curiosity will also unleash more creativity within each department. When Gannett gave everyone access to data and information, it changed the ways ideas were generated, Jedlinski said.

“I can’t emphasise how many ideas came from a product designer, from an intern, from a platform engineer. It wasn’t just product managers saying, ‘Here’s what we’re doing.’”

Trusting people to become collaborators and help grow the business unleashed their creativity and created momentum, he said. It was also important to set expectations upfront and reduce pressure on the teams. That included allowing room for failure and letting them know that the first creation is a prototype. Jedlinski compared it to building something out of papier mâché:

“If it works and if it succeeds and these tests are promising, we almost need to start at square one to build it the right way,” he said. “We want something that we can get reaction to quickly. We all know what we’ve built and if it goes well, we know where we have to go next.”

That next step didn’t mean continuing to build on the papier mâché, Busche added. If something succeeded, it meant taking a step back: “Jason was a great supporter of this, so this is where we worked really well together to say, hey, we’ll get something out there quick, but if it is successful, we need to take a step back before we take three steps forward.”

Knowing when it’s over

In addition to having a plan for testing, developing, and releasing product, it is critical to know how and when to close something down.  That is a cost that is often overlooked, Jedlinski said: “You think you just unplug it, but that is not how things go.”

Creating goals and hypotheses is part of the process but isn’t the only way to measure success and failure. The teams changed the definition of failure from “not meeting a benchmark” to “not measuring its outcome,” Jedlinski said. That created a safer environment for people to try new things and realise that, even if they didn’t reach a specific KPI, they might have learned something valuable that can benefit the project and the company.

“We were not rigid with ‘was this a failure or was this success?’ and I think that allowed us to build and move forward,” Bursche said. “Talking to my peers, a hurdle in a lot of companies is [they] need the ability to spin up an opportunity or spin up an environment to be able to test in. Sometimes that takes longer than actually deploying and getting that test out.”

While it is possible to increase speed in product development, that comes at a financial cost and relies on the proper tools being available. At Gannett, Jedlinski and Bursch had open conversations with leaders about the cost of moving faster and how it could provide a competitive edge. That led to investments within the company that allowed for greater efficiency and the ability to innovate and test more quickly.

“It wasn’t just, all right, we’re going to crack the whip and we’re going to go faster,” Jedlinski said.

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