A focus on news products took Asian Media Leaders eSummit delegates into new territories… though they might not have realised it.

A new group for news product managers, the News Product Alliance was formed last year as a global “community of support and practice for news product thinkers”, and its interim executive director Becca Aaronson was hot-foot from its first two-day conference to report.

A quarter of delegates had come from outside the US, and only 22 per cent had a ‘product’ title, she said. “It’s not needed to be a product thinker.

“You have to think of your output as a product, put customer at centre of decisionmaking… and basically, think like a product manager.”

Aaronson said journalists are asked existential questions, ‘product thinkers’ had to use frameworks to connect the dots between editorial, audience, business and tech. “Whatever you are creating, those are products, and you should think how the user will engage.”

Journalism skills – such as interviewing, writing a net graph – which clarifies a position – pitching a story, managing editorial calendar, and owning a beat were all transportable to a product role. “You’ll see a lot of cross-team collaboration, not influencing the journalism but working towards goals without crossing ethical boundaries.

“We need to move towards experimenting and learning, strategising and execution… and repeating the cycle from what you’ve learned.”

She quoted Minneapolis Star Tribune content strategist Tom Horgen from the NPA conference, that “putting the audience at the centre of what we do is a form of disruption”.

One person comfortable with the ‘product’ tag was Singapore Press Holdings chief product officer Gaurav Sachdeva who came from “an entirely dedicated product space”, joining SPH from Adobe – where he described Creative Cloud as “my baby” – and Grab. These days his focus is eight daily newspaper and ten magazines in four languages.

He told delegates – 500 of whom had registered by the second day – that any journey needed to begin with acceptance and recalibration, and warned that a slow pace of transformation made it easy for bad habits to enter.

“At SPH we ‘build products that customers love’,” he said, “and want to build the right products. That means being data-informed – trust but verify – and failing fast. Test and learn early, iterate – experiment and correct.”

He urged making sure each product has a user attached, and warned of ‘personalisation’ – a very overloaded word – which should be defined “before you write the first word”.

Sachdeva told delegates to “know your North Star” – starting with metrics – and “be like a broken record, every time you make the presentation”, focussing on the conversion funnel and checkout experience.

SPH had launched a tablet product to ease the transition from print, and was selling archived content through a new product called Photonico. Machine Learning models had been used for prediction during COVID-19.

Easy it was not, “but when was easy and fun rewarding,” he asked.

Peter Coleman