10:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
(New York time)
Master Class moderator
If you’re lucky, many people will have great ideas for new products. Or you may want a format for teams to make suggestions. How do you filter and prioritise ideas to work on and launch? How do you determine what user problems need to be solved? And which should be solved? We hear from experts on different evaluation methods, and how to communicate to ensure stakeholder buy-in across the company. Jodie Hopperton, Product Initiative Lead, International News Media Association (INMA)
Today's classes
10:00 a.m.-10:15 a.m. (New York time)
Introduction10:15 a.m.-11:00 a.m. (New York time)
Project Bob: relaunching metro dailies from start to finish
To kick off this Master Class, we hear from News Corp Australia which went through the entire product process to challenge and change their existing approach to digital. With consumer-first insight and using human-centered design they completely relaunched the digital versions of their metro dailies.
Julian Delany, Chief Technology Officer, Data and Digital, News Corp Australia
11:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m. (New York time)
Product Thinking 101
Naren was asked by a colleague to explain product thinking. And that gave rise to this presentation where Naren has taken the basics in a series of easy-to-understand components to explain what product thinking is, why it is important, and how we can help cultivate it within our organisations.
Naren Katakam, Principal Product Consultant, ThoughtWorks
11:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. (New York time)
Solving for user needs
Before even thinking about building a prototype, let alone a product, we need to understand what user problems and needs we are looking to solve. Hilde joined Aftenposten from another Schibsted division where she had deep expertise in using systems and frameworks for mapping user needs. In this presentation she will use a case study on building a local offering to demonstrate the value and methodologies of using both quantitative and qualitative data in order for the organisation to truly understand what users need.
Hilde Maartmann-Moe Sommerstad, Senior Product Manager, Schibsted / Aftenposten
12:00 p.m.-12:30 p.m. (New York time)
Designing roadmaps to delight customers and respect stakeholders
There's never a shortage of good ideas. Even once we've validated them against user needs and business goals, we're still left with far more than we can accomplish given limited resources and capacity. How do you prioritise and sequence the work in a way that stakeholders can understand and support, even if it's not what they asked for? Jason has led product teams at Tribune, Gannett and Dow Jones. He'll take us through his playbook for designing roadmaps that organizations can get behind.
Jason Jedlinski, formerly Head of Audience Touchpoints, Wall Street Journal and SVP Consumer Products, Gannett
V'ming takes us through detailed analysis of what it takes between setting objectives to getting a new feature live. This experimentation had five phases over six months before it was launched to all users, and we’ll look at the variables and the outcomes of each stage along the way.
Jeff is a big believer in seeing a product visually quickly and getting it in front of humans early in the process. Throughout his career he has learnt the value of prototyping from “coffee shop prototyping” where he and his team brought some paper mocks into a pub and coffee shop and asked users what they thought to more pre-constructed tests for an OTT experience before putting the project into development. 
It’s likely that you’ll have many great ideas, and demands from various departments to test them. How do you run experiments up and down quickly? And how do you run multiple experiments any time without them impacting each other? Luckily this is what Katie does all day every day at the Wall Street Journal. She will share best practices and tips for managing this part of the product process seamlessly. 
When employees could pick their own title at Yahoo in 1999, Ilana chose “it’s all about the user.”. Throughout her career she has kept that mantra and now as head of user experience and consumer insights she will take us through some of her best practices to understand users through case study to solve the problem ‘do consumers think we are biased’. 
One of the biggest benchmarks of a new product is the return on investment. So how do you start thinking about monetising new products? Caitlin Clarke joined the FT to do just that. In this session, Caitlin talks about how she structures new opportunities and how commercial and product work together to give new products the greatest chance of success.
With product experience in various industries C.J. Jacobs takes us through some framework thinking and a case study showing how to select the market for launch, test scale, add features and drive further value. She will discuss the business processes and how to make a business case to get further investment from an executive team.
Celeste LeCompte, ProPublica’s VP of Strategy and Operations, is evolving the brand’s audience journey. Find out how they leverage Sailthru’s ESP capabilities in new, creative ways to inspire subscriber engagement.
This piece of the product process is easy to overlook but is exceptionally important if you want to build an environment that encourages ongoing innovation. Having gone through rounds of innovation projects, Kara knows this all too well and will share a number of tips to use data and story telling to communicate the successes and explain the failures internally.