The Skills You Need — and Probably Have — to be a Product Thinker

Online News Association53min

Becca Aaronson

08:12

Hello everyone, welcome to our session, I'm Becca Aaronson. Joining me is Emma Carew Grovum. We are very excited to talk with you all today about product thinking in newsrooms. So, for those who don't know us. I'm the Interim Executive Director of the News Product Alliance and Emma, who will introduce herself in a minute, is both the founder of Kimbap Media and our program director at NPA. So, you might be asking, what is the News Product Alliance? Well, we are a new nonprofit organization that is building a community of support and practice for news product thinkers. We'll talk a little bit more about what we mean by news product thinkers in a minute. But what our mission is is to elevate the discipline of product management in news organizations, and also diversify the product thinkers in decision-making roles. So Emma, do you want to tell people a little bit about yourself?

Emma Carew Grovum

09:08

Thanks Becca. Hi everyone I'm Emma Carew Grovum and I'm the founder of Kimbap Media, which is a small consultancy. We're based in Brooklyn and we solve problems at the intersection of technology, audience, content, and inclusion. I also work with some partners under the name Media Bridge Partners and we do a lot of DEI work together so I'm super excited about this session, I have been a product manager like you have been in newsrooms past, and we're excited to talk to other folks who are interested in that role.

Becca Aaronson

09:38

Yeah. And so to kick us off, you know, my background is that I started at the Texas Tribune as a journalist before becoming a designer/developer on their news apps team and co- founding their news apps team, and then I became a product manager, and later went to Chalkbeat and became their director of product so I know firsthand what it means to transition from being a journalist to a product manager, and so does Emma. And so to start off, Emma, do you want to tell, talk a little bit about what is product thinking to you, what does it mean to be a product thinker.

Emma Carew Grovum

10:09

Yeah product thinking to me is about being the person who connects the dots between editorial, business, and technology. And I think, you know, it's someone who is a connector and it's someone who has a foot in two worlds, at least, right? All product people are not experts at every single thing across the board, but most of us have a specialty of some sort. And then we tend to be good pinch hitters and generalists, right? We're easy to pick up new skills, it's easy for us to walk between two worlds, work with different teams and really collaborate across disciplines. What about you?

Becca Aaronson

10:47

I think that that's a great definition, I would add a lot of times, product thinkers are also problem solvers, you're trying to look at how do you how do you solve a problem that takes into mind, both the editorial mission and audience needs, business considerations, and the technology or resources that are available to you. And when you're solving a problem in that way you end up thinking about it as a product that has all these multiple dimensions, and so you might need to bring in expertise for other people, other departments as you figure out how to solve this problem in the best way, or the most strategic way.

Emma Carew Grovum

11:23

I think that makes a lot of sense. When we think about product and intersection with the newsroom, what kind of role do you think product managers should fill in a news organization?

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