Time to take product seriously

Here’s a challenge for you: name one truly great digital news product.

Not a news brand. Not a piece of journalism. A product – a digital experience that stands alongside the best that the world’s tech or consumer apps have to offer.

It’s tricky, isn’t it? (And no, you can’t count TikTok.)

The New York Times’s latest app design, where you can swipe left and right for content, is often cited as a benchmark. It’s intuitive and useful. But is that the summit of our industry’s innovation? Is that all we can point to?

The truth is that, as an industry, we have not taken the discipline of product, and the department that brings it to the news business, seriously enough. And we need to fix that fast. The AI companies are investing heavily in their product development and, let’s not kid ourselves, they are coming for news.

The signs of a lack of consideration of product are everywhere. A few months ago a new smartphone app was entered for a leading news industry awards … before it had even launched. It was shortlisted. No one seemed to notice, or to mind.

Imagine that happening in social media, or consumer finance, or gaming. It would be unthinkable. In the news industry, it passed without comment.

This fundamental unseriousness about the discipline of product is hurting us. Our journalism deserves better platforms, more engaging experiences, more useful services than we are giving it. It’s time to treat product not as a support function, but as the core strategic discipline it is.

How do we do that?

In technology companies, product is the heart of the operation. Product teams are the clearing house for ideas, the ultimate arbiters of priority. They sit between design, UX, marketing, engineering and advertising, balancing user needs and business outcomes.

They do not exist to serve one department’s whims. They exist to serve the customer and the business as a whole.

I’ll admit it, for a long time I thought that news was different. I thought its unpredictable nature, the daily flow of unique stories, meant that product needed to sit within editorial, or at least be closely supervised by it.

I have argued this case in previous roles. Only journalists, I thought, truly understood the urgency and nuance of the craft of journalism. Only editors could make the right calls about what readers needed. I used examples like Citymapper to bolster the case: yes, their app content changed every day, but the product itself didn’t.

News, I said, was different. Because the way a story is displayed can change its meaning and signal its importance, so journalists should retain overall control of the process of building the products.

I now think I was wrong.

Not because editorial shouldn’t have influence – it should – but because product’s role is so much bigger than building new templates or tweaking article presentation.

(I still smile wryly at the thought of one former editor-in-chief who really didn’t understand the concept of product: “Just call it ‘functionality’,” he said to me, in all seriousness.)

Product teams need to be thinking about:

– whether stability improvements in an app will drive more loyalty than a full visual redesign

– whether a new story template is more important than improving access to saved articles

– whether users would rather have a better advertising experience than a faster homepage

– whether cutting cookie clutter might lift engagement more than adding a new feature.

This is the real work of product: prioritisation, strategic judgment, a relentless focus on the customer and the business. And that work demands independence.

Product cannot sit under editorial. Equally, it shouldn’t be part of technology, marketing or advertising. It must be its own department – empowered and independent, reporting directly to the CEO.

Good relationships between product and editorial can sometimes paper over structures that might otherwise crack. When individuals respect and trust each other, things can work. I’ve experienced this with a number of product chiefs with whom I’ve worked. We both knew when to defer to the other, where our respective areas of expertise were. But that depends on the unique chemistry of the individual relationships; it’s not a model for the future.

Am I saying that editors should cede all control? Of course not.

Editorial should have a major influence over product priorities. Content strategy and product strategy must be aligned. If your strategy is to serve user needs and grow subscriptions, then product should be bringing that vision to life.

Editors should absolutely own the visual and tonal expression of journalism. The design of a front page or article experience must respect editorial judgment. But editors must also be willing to listen to data, to UX research, to new ideas about how users actually behave.

When editorial and product disagree – as they inevitably will – the right answer is not to pull rank. It’s to test. Different homepage treatments? Test them. Different picture styles? Test them. Should we have a video carousel? Test it.

A healthy relationship between editorial and product is built not on hierarchy, but on a shared commitment to learning and improving.

While editors must give a little ground, so must product owners. In their case, they need to show they truly understand the journalistic mission. And, emphatically, this involves using the products every single day. Nothing annoys a journalist more than the impression that “they don’t read what we do”.

I sometimes ponder whether in future product leaders may become even more senior than editors. That one day a director of product will sit above the editor-in-chief, empowered to say: “The data shows our journalism isn’t engaging users enough. You need to change it.”

I think we are a long way from that. But make no mistake: product will only become more central to our ability to thrive amid present and future challenges.

That’s not going to happen with a “shopping list” approach to product development. Every product manager will know what I mean. “Can headlines be greyed out after I click it?” “Can we move the weather widget up?” “Can we change the style of picture captions?” “Why can’t we print articles?”

We need to focus on the process of strategic hypotheses, rigorous testing and relentless iteration. To do that, newsrooms need a serious, empowered, independent product discipline.

It’s time to stop treating it as an afterthought. We need to stop congratulating ourselves on minor UI tweaks. To survive, we must build products that are worthy of the best of our journalism.

Alan Hunter is a co-founder of Tomorrow’s Publisher and HBM Advisory