Product is not a new term. The premise of the four Ps of marketing; price, product, place and promotion were introduced in the 1950s but while the idea of a product is widely understood the idea of product thinking, or a product function within a company, is something that has become increasingly important and fashionable in business.
“Product thinking is balancing the user experience with the business needs, says Jodie Hopperton, product lead at International News Media Association (INMA), an international trade association for the news media. “The Irish Times used to be just a newspaper but now you might engage with that brand on its web page, you might have the app, you might see it on Instagram or Twitter. It is so fragmented now that we need to think of the end-to-end user experience, the user problems and what problems we’re trying to solve, that effectively is what product thinking is.”
The term product covers what are we trying to achieve as an overall business and finds the right solution based on user needs by working with engineering to build that over an agreed timeline
While borne from marketing so-called product thinking has been adopted by software as a service (SAAS) businesses, which partly explains why product is seen as the cool new thing.
“It’s really about having that focus on what our product is, what the end user is doing, and bringing together the engineering and the marketing elements to make sure that user experience is perfect. It is what pulls them all together by asking important questions such as: “what is the best user experience here?”, “what do we want our consumers to do?” And “how does this help us reach our business goals?”
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Product thinking starts with understanding what a user problem is, she says. “In news media, a lot of the work done is about improving existing products as opposed to new product development. A one-second speed improvement on the website is more important than any new feature that we can build. In this arena getting content to people faster is the single most important factor so product now is partly about innovation and partly improving existing products.”
She says product functions and teams are growing in popularity, particularly in news organisations. The New York Times, for example, have a 60-plus strong product team people who bring different groups of people together around specific business goals.
The building of a web story within a newspaper takes resources from several areas of the house, she explains. “You have a journalist or editor who is putting the article together, maybe they will include photos, perhaps an interactive graphic to explain, or possibly the decision is made that video is the best way of telling the story. In this instance, product helps bridge the gap between editorial and technology, but the story is not the only thing on this web page. Advertising also want space, but how much should be allocated? Editorial will want less and yet advertising has revenue targets, so it wants a load of space. Another team might be pushing subscriptions or pushing an event, so they want some space too. Sitting in the middle of all these component parts is product. It is what pulls them all together asking important questions such as: “what is the best user experience here?” And “what do we want our consumers to do?”
In news media a lot of the work done is about improving existing products as opposed to new product development
You can have the best article in the world but if no one can find it then nobody is going to read it, she explains. “Product is really about getting the right content to the right people and balancing it with the business needs of how we’re actually going to make money.”
Like marketing, product is a discipline that runs across every strand within a business. But as Jodie points out; it needs to be in the C-Suite for it to be taken seriously.
“A good product team will bring together all of the different departments they need for any given project, she explains. “It will pull in key stakeholders. It needs to be represented at c-suite level because they must be empowered to make decisions. Product takes a multidisciplinary view. It covers what are we trying to achieve as an overall business and finds the right solution based on user needs by working with engineering to build that over an agreed timeline.”
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Through her experience Hopperton has created a seven-step process — a guide to successful product
1. What is your organisation’s mission statement? It isn’t creating more video or growing Instagram. It should drive all decision-making. Anyone in an organisation should be able to say what its overall mission is because then everyone can then figure out what they can do to move the needle on it.
2. Identify the problem you’re trying to solve. You will then be able to see what users are doing and how what you’re doing fits with your mission
3. Define your customers’ needs. Consumers on TikTok are different to those reading a newspaper
4. Validate the idea by making use of the customer data behind it and the metrics can you use to measure it in the future
5. Prototype the product. It has to function in a way that people actually want to use repeatedly. If it is too bare bones it may not stand up to real-life scrutiny.
6. Test and test again. Change and tweak for as long as you need to so as to finetune and finesse. And keep mapping it back to those predefined metrics.
7. Share results. Whether the results are good or bad you need to share them. Someone who is respected internally should be charged with this job. You need people who are evangelists and great communicators. People always want to join in success.
You can find out more about INMA here INMA product initiative here.
Link to an article she mentions The newsroom matchmaker
