An inside look at how CNN builds product | Upasna Gautam
Upasna Gautam, a Product Manager at CNN and mindfulness teacher, discusses thriving in the chaos of news product management. She shares how CNN's product team collaborates with journalists, uses unique protocols like breaking news dress rehearsals, and leverages mindfulness for effective leadership.
Deep Dive Analysis
15 Topic Outline
Equanimity and thriving in news product chaos
Building buffers and backup plans for breaking news
Product team's interaction with journalists and editorial staff
CNN Digital's product organization structure and teams
OKRs and long-term planning at CNN
Integrating tech leads into product discovery and review
Boosting morale for remote product teams
Balancing new features with maintenance and bug fixes
New platform saving CNN.com during 2020 election
Simulating breaking news scenarios with dress rehearsals
Cultivating high agency under high pressure
Meditation and mindful communication for PM excellence
Simple steps to begin a meditation practice
The News Product Alliance: Elevating product thinking in news
Lightning Round
3 Key Concepts
Equanimity
Equanimity is the mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in stressful situations. It enables one to remain unrattled in extreme circumstances and to pause before reacting, which is crucial for navigating chaos in product management and breaking negative patterns.
Mindful Communication
Mindful communication involves being deeply aware and fully present in a conversation, actively listening without assumptions, and conversing in the language of the listener. This practice, rooted in the ability to pause before reacting, helps product managers understand root causes and build trust, rather than just providing immediate answers.
High Agency Under High Pressure
This unique skill, cultivated by CNN's product team, refers to the ability to enable rapid development and integration of new features and workflows, quickly test hypotheses, and reduce risk. It is particularly vital in complex, fast-paced environments like breaking news, where time is of the essence.
10 Questions Answered
A product manager in news needs equanimity, which is mental calmness and composure, allowing them to pause before reacting to stressful situations and navigate chaos effectively.
Product teams at CNN build in buffer time for all planning and have backup plans, understanding that journalists must prioritize breaking news, which requires the product team to adapt and accommodate their chaotic schedules.
The product team uses a system with four touchpoints: weekly demo days, working sessions, breaking news dress rehearsals, and office hours to gather feedback, recreate workflows, and address friction, translating needs into product functions.
CNN Digital is made up of several product teams (squads) structured around different product areas like content management, data infrastructure, personalization, video experience, and podcasts, each with PMs, engineers, designers, and delivery managers.
CNN uses OKRs as an anchor, looking two to three years out for overarching goals, then breaking them down by quarter, month, and even daily for rapid development phases, with flexibility for individual product teams to tackle goals autonomously.
Involving tech leads and engineers in product discovery, user testing, and design jams helps them understand user needs at a deeper level, enabling them to define technical solutions with greater clarity and precision, and better determine technical feasibility.
Remote teams can boost morale by making a point to celebrate successes, such as sending gift boxes with meaningful items after a successful launch or onboarding, to counteract the anticlimactic feeling of remote work.
The team conducts scripted breaking news dress rehearsals, simulating the entire process from the initial news alert email to publishing the page, involving engineers and editorial support to stress-test the platform and gather feedback.
The News Product Alliance is a community formed to increase awareness and education of product thinking and management in newsrooms, increase diversity in these roles, and provide resources, especially for smaller newsrooms, recognizing the unique challenges of product in news.
Start by integrating mindfulness into daily activities, like brushing your teeth, by fully engaging all senses and being present for two to three minutes. The Insight Timer app is also recommended for guided meditations.
11 Actionable Insights
1. Cultivate Equanimity for Chaos
Develop mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in stressful situations, by pausing before reacting. This skill provides an outsized advantage in stakeholder management, team morale, and translating user feedback to product development velocity, helping to cut through chaos.
2. Practice Mindful Communication
Engage in conversations by being deeply aware and fully present, actively listening rather than immediately reacting. This involves speaking in the language of the listener, avoiding technical jargon with non-technical stakeholders, and helps build trust and respect while extracting the root cause of problems.
3. Prioritize Direct Customer Dialogue
Regularly engage in direct conversations with your customers and users, understanding that your assumptions are not always accurate. The more frequently, consistently, and earlier you have these conversations in the process, the better for collecting feedback and building trust.
4. Embed Engineers in Discovery
Include your tech lead and engineers in the product discovery process, such as user testing sessions and design jams. This enables them to understand user needs at the same level as product managers, leading to greater clarity and precision in defining technical solutions and improving overall efficiency.
5. Build Buffers into Planning
Incorporate buffer time into planning cycles to account for unexpected chaos and disruptions, especially when working with stakeholders who have unpredictable schedules. The length of the buffer can vary (days, weeks, or months) depending on the scope of work, allowing for flexibility and adaptation.
6. Establish User Touchpoints
Implement a system of regular touchpoints with users to manage intake and gather feedback, such as weekly demo days, working sessions, breaking news dress rehearsals, and office hours. This ensures continuous communication, allows for recreating workflows, addressing friction, and previewing new features.
7. Conduct Stress Test Rehearsals
Create scripted simulations of critical scenarios, like breaking news, to stress test your platform and processes. This provides valuable feedback in a short amount of time, helping to identify weaknesses and understand how far features can be pushed under pressure.
8. Start Simple Meditation
Begin a meditation practice by integrating mindfulness into daily routines, such as brushing your teeth, by engaging all senses and being fully present for a few minutes. Consistent practice compounds over time, cultivating clarity of mind and thinking.
9. Assess Situations Objectively
Cultivate the ability to objectively view a scenario for what it is, allowing for quick decision-making and progression to the next phase. This daily practice is crucial for navigating dynamic environments and adapting to changing circumstances.
10. Celebrate Team Milestones
Make a conscious effort to celebrate team achievements and successful launches, even with small gestures like sending gift boxes for remote teams. This helps maintain team morale and acknowledges hard work, especially when major launches can feel anticlimactic.
11. Cultivate High Agency
Develop a unique skill of high agency under high pressure, which is the ability to take initiative and drive action in challenging situations. This combination of skills is a valuable asset for any product development team, enabling rapid development and risk reduction.
7 Key Quotes
To be a successful product manager in news, you have to be able to thrive in chaos.
Upasna Gautam
Real power to me comes from equanimity. And that comes from managing your emotional reactions and not trying to control others.
Upasna Gautam
When our engineers are able to understand our journalists' needs at the same level as we are, they're able to define the how to do it with so much greater clarity and precision.
Upasna Gautam
It's so important to think of your engineers as partners and not just resources.
Upasna Gautam
The power of meditation, being able to pause before reacting, lets you do things like conversate in the language of the listener.
Upasna Gautam
I think a lot of times we think of speaking articulately, first and foremost, or we think about writing well, which those two are really, really important things. But those can't be effective for us as product leaders if we're not listening.
Upasna Gautam
It's never lost on me that my work impacts the world every single day. And on the crazy, frustrating, stressful days, like that is what serves as my anchor.
Upasna Gautam
2 Protocols
Editorial Intake Management System
Upasna Gautam- Facilitate weekly demo days with product design and tech leads as an open forum to deep dive into existing features, preview new ones, recreate workflows, and do show-and-tells, also evangelizing the product.
- Conduct working sessions with breakout groups of journalists and editors to recreate their workflows in the new platform, addressing friction and gathering feedback. These are critical for onboarding, typically 3-6 sessions, two hours each, depending on group size and specific workflows.
- Perform breaking news dress rehearsals, which are scripted simulations of a breaking news scenario to stress-test the platform, running the entire process from the initial email alert to publishing the page, with engineers and editorial support observing.
- Host office hours, which are open blocks of time where the PM, product design partner, and tech lead are available to answer questions, troubleshoot issues, and gather feedback, typically once a week.
Meditation for Beginners
Upasna Gautam- Identify a daily activity you already do, such as brushing your teeth.
- During this activity, fully engage all your senses and be completely present and aware of how it feels, smells, and sounds.
- Practice this for two to three minutes as a form of meditation, without needing special tools or resources.