The guides are not designed to replace existing resources; on the contrary, they summarize current trends and approaches to critical issues in an easily understandable way and provide links to other resources – always with a strong emphasis on practical use and real-life examples. Over time, we will add a case study to each of the guides to highlight a particular approach undertaken by MDIF’s portfolio companies.

Guide #1: Practical Guide to Product Management in Digital Media, by Derrick Fountain.

This guide provides practical strategies and tactics for implementing the product management function in a media organization.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.kbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Guide_Product_Management.pdf” title=”Practical Guide to Product Management in Digital Media”]

About author: Derrick Fountain is a global product leader with deep experience of launching digital products in the US, the Middle East, Africa and Turkey. He is currently Head of Digital Products at TRT World in Istanbul. Prior to that, he was Principal Product Management Specialist at Al Jazeera Media Network, where he launched more than 50 web and mobile products. His professional career in media started in 2008 with US-based LAKANA, where he managed a network of 36 mobile web portals.

Inviting readers to join one of three tiers of membership, the British newspaper is relying on a combination of readers being ready to pay to belong to a community of ‘diverse, progressive minds’, and the attraction of privileged access to events and a vast new venue, ‘Guardian Space’, where many of the workshops, activities and courses will be held.

This is how Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger explained the membership plan and vision to readers: http://www.theguardian.com/membership/2014/sep/10/-sp-guardian-editor-alan-rusbridger-welcome-to-guardian-membership?CMP=twt_gu

Ken Doctor in Nieman Lab points out that by building an actual (rather than purely digital) community with a central venue, The Guardian is betting that the answer to newspapers’ digital woes are to be found in the physical world. The newspaper plans to hold hundreds of events a week across the country by partnering with education and cultural institutions to produce and co-produce events. “What makes The Guardian initiative stand out at this point is its sheer scope. Currently, seven to 10 people staff the events/membership business, [Deputy CEO David] Pemsel says he anticipates a ramp up to 30-50.” There are also plans to extend the scheme to some of it 105 million global users in the U.S. and Australia in 2015.

Jasper Jackson in the Media Briefing says The Guardian is “offering access to events and other perks aimed at building a third revenue stream to complement the cover sales, print and digital advertising that currently make up the bulk of its revenue, while also tying a core of readers closer to the Guardian brand.”

The three levels of membership range from free ‘Friends’, through ‘Partners’ at $25/month, to ‘Patrons’ at $100/month, “but will not include any additional access to the Guardian’s journalistic output in print or digital, which is currently available free on the web”.

Converting a 30,000 square foot space in the heart of London will have “an impact on the overall commercial narrative”, but the initiative is projected to contribute revenues within five years. Jackson also quotes Pemsel as saying:

“The revenue from the £15 tier and the £60 tier, in the modelling and all the research we’ve done, breaks even at some point and starts to contribute a quite significant amount of money. The days of legacy print organisations being able to monetise anonymous reach are obviously under severe pressure, therefore one has to look at multiple business models to address that.

“Growing anonymous reach is great for spreading the message but converting that into money is hard. If you don’t deepen the engagement – time spent etc. which are very important benchmarks of how people are engaging with your content – and then through that converting that data into knowing people is very important. Trying to do all three of those things globally is quite an interesting job, but from a commercial perspective, we continually talk about doing those three things equally because you can’t do one without the other two.”

Jackson thinks it’s “a big ask for intangible value … The paid tiers appear to offer limited value for a relatively steep price. Both resemble very expensive loyalty cards (with the added bonus of being able to call yourself a “card-carrying Guardian reader”). And for the moment at least, the events portfolio will mostly appeal to those within easy reach of London.” He compares it with The Times’ subscription scheme at $40 per month, which offers an events programme and exclusive access to digital content.

In addition to the direct revenue created by the two paying tiers of membership, members’ details will be used to personalise ads and content.

Pemsel noted one area where The Guardian is going to have to learn fast – managing relationships: “However, through our multi-platform reach we’ve now got more relationships with more people than we’ve ever had before and we need to try and convert that into something, not just because we want to make money, but because our readers want us to.”

Overall, Jackson’s take on the scheme is that there is too little value in membership to make it work on a rational consumer level, but that isn’t the point – the paper’s strategy is to appeal to emotion: “Yet the way both Pemsel and the wording on the Guardian’s membership site emphasise that Patrons, Partners and even Friends, will be ‘supporting the Guardian’s journalism’ makes it clear this is aimed at more irrational impulses. It’s an appeal to the emotions of those who identify with the Guardian brand. It is reminiscent of the way loyal print readers did, and in small numbers still do, consider the idea of being a Guardian (or Times or Telegraph) reader a core part of their identity.

“The Guardian is effectively saying to its most loyal readers: ‘we won’t make you pay for our content, but we will ask you to in return for a few, mostly intangible, perks, and the knowledge that you are contributing to what we do’.”

In a country where terms such as ‘Guardian-reader’ and ‘Mail-reader’ are regularly used as both badges of honour and abusive stereotypes, “Building a business model around the affection some of its readers feel for that voice makes sense for The Guardian in a way it wouldn’t for most competitors.”

Read more: UK daily newspapers have doubled in price since 2004 and shrunk in size – no wonder sales are down

“A significant portion of your newsroom is hiding from you. They’re not openly resisting the push toward ‘digital first,’ or even disagreeing with it. They simply don’t know how to proactively step out of their comfort zone.” What journalists need are newsroom leaders to engage them one-on-one to share the strategic vision of the company and explain how they fit in and can help deliver the changes that are needed.

Putting digital people in charge won’t bring about effective recruitment, put ongoing learning at the heart of the organisation or help staff embrace change. What will is appointing someone who is “devoted to managing human capital, specialized in journalism and the challenges journalists face today”.

Here are some of the reasons why:

Shrinking newsrooms – as newsroom numbers fall, management need to be able to manage poor performers up or out, while also ensuring that top performers don’t jump ship.

Career counselling – “The best way to bring newsroom staff out of hiding is to engage them in a very personal dialogue about how your organization’s needs and priorities mesh with their own performance and career path.”

Constant change – However much change you’ve led your organisation through, you can be sure there’s more to come. Newsrooms need leaders who can identify and hire the right people and enforce change on staff who are struggling to adapt.
Read more:  Newsrooms need HR specialists, not just technologists, in top leadership

Strategy, structure and culture form an interdependent triangle for change. “Any attempt to change culture without developing a strategy and structure is doomed to failure. And any attempt to implement a new strategy without working on structure and culture is also unlikely to succeed.”

Strategic change drivers: Faced with disruptive competitors such as search engines and social media, print businesses have to develop new strategies and products. Websites, mobile sites, apps, social media channels – the pace of product changes and modifications has increased tremendously. Publishers are in danger of being left behind.

Structural change drivers: Breaking the focus on daily deadlines for the printed paper is important in supporting the strategic shift to digital. So are agile product development and an adoption of improvements in technology, platforms and collaboration.

Cultural change drivers: Sometimes cultural changes demand structural change and even strategic change. For example, news types of employees: “young graduates (Generation Y or Millennials) are bringing different value sets and expectations to the workplace… And organisations must adapt to this trend.”

Dr Knoll says you should always “sweep a staircase from the top”. Trying to change culture from the bottom up will not work. “The simple fact is if managers — whether they’re in editorial or commercial areas — do not believe in a common change in vision and goal, it will not work.”

In times such as these, “transformational leaders are needed to share an engaging vision and navigate people through unsteady waters. But, first, we need managers who really understand the changes taking place.”

Read more: Sustainable culture change for media companies must start at the top

1. Know Your Exit Plan Before You Buy

This is a big, often-overlooked issue and one software providers often don’t like to address. You need to know what file format your data will be when you receive it back. The more standardized the file format, the better. Packages that operate in Microsoft SQL are the best because SQL is widespread and you will find an abundance of programmers to prepare your files for your next package, should you ever have to leave. Most, but not all, large providers use SQL, but smaller providers may use various kinds of freeware or proprietary database structures that are not easily converted to other formats. Always ask what file format your data would be returned in and also ask if there would be any charge to return your data. Some providers make it as difficult as possible to leave and do everything from charging a high fee to return your data to giving it to you in a format which is so archaic that your next software installation is likely to fail. Know your exit plan, before you buy! Don’t assume that software marriages last forever. You may outgrow it down the road or find it just wasn’t the right product for you.

2. Find Out What Kinds Of Support Packages Are Available

If you are buying a package that is worth its salt, it is powerful enough, complicated enough and customizable enough that your use, expansion and improvements in your processes will require ongoing support. Nobody who buys software wants to hear this. Software sales reps want to minimize the cost of the product, and buyers want to hear that it’s turnkey once purchased, but it’s not. Systems that run your business can be tweaked, customized and adjusted to continually improve your business. It’s not a static process. You should find out what kind of ongoing consulting packages are available, and meet regularly (preferably monthly) with your software provider, to address business systems that you find time-consuming or less than optimal. By improving and evolving your systems on a monthly basis, you’ll make your consulting fees back tenfold. Your employee costs will always be your main company costs, not your software costs, so focus on ways of improving efficiency, saving man hours and reducing labor costs and you’ll make a lot more money in the end. Buyers who go into a software relationship on the cheap have high failure rates, don’t fully utilize systems, and never achieve the kind of economic efficiency they can have if they continuously attack inefficient processes within their companies.

3. Drill Down Into The Details

The smartest companies draft up an RFP outlining what features they are hoping to have in their software package and they have the vendors fill them out. The best companies look forward to this comparison and the weaker vendors will not.

4. Require Your Potential Providers To Rank Their Competitors

The good vendors usually know the market and know what they are good at and what they are not good at. Ask them to name their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You’ll find out pretty quickly which competitors they respect and those they genuinely think are weak competitors.

5. How Long, How Big and How Many?

Find out how long the vendors have been around. It’s very hard to start a software company and compete with companies with mature products. The mature products have a decade or more of a head start and usually ten million dollars or more in development. Find out how many clients your vendors serve. The ones with the broadest customer base will have larger development staffs and tend to race ahead while other vendors can’t due to their small size. Find out how many full time employees each vendor has. If the answer if five, you should think twice. It’s almost impossible to provide any sort of support and development process with so few employees.

6. Touch The Product

Ask the vendors to use an actual copy of the software. There is no safer way to evaluate than to get your hands dirty and really experiment with the actual product.

7. Don’t Be Sold By “We don’t have that feature, but we’ll throw in custom development of that feature if you’ll sign right here”.

This is what companies that don’t have robust products do to try and get a deal done. Many clients are fooled into thinking that company A is more helpful than company B. But its fool’s gold. Any software company that becomes tied up in custom work for each client won’t be focused on developing new features that serve its overall client base. Custom work adds to maintenance costs of the overall software package and the best companies will focus their efforts on making their software package customizable by you, not trying to create custom reports and features for you. You may be the focus while they are trying to get you to sign on the dotted line, but they’ll move onto the next custom project once you are on board, and you’ll notice that your future needs are not being met because the company’s development staff is doing custom work for the new client. It’s a slippery slope that the best software companies don’t go down.

So, do features matter? Yes, but don’t fail to realize all of the other important considerations when investing in software for your publishing company.

• The Seminar presented the following topics:“Technology Platforms & Decision Criteria”.  The presentation outlined the key decisions involved in selecting and maintaining web platforms.  The presenter discussed the pros and cons of in-house versus outsourced development as well as proprietary versus open source software.  Detailed decision criteria are recommended.  Because of the importance of the Content Management System, the presentation closes with a comparison of the three open source CMS platforms – Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Platforms; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Product Management Roles and Responsibilities”.  The presentation focused on the role of product management as a ‘translator’ between the needs of users and technology’s ability to deliver web products to meet these needs.  In particular, the seminar outlined key elements in a business plan and product specification.  Examples of online and software products used to support the product development and bug tracking processes are also included.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Product Management; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Opportunities in Online Advertising”.  The presenter detailed the elements of online advertising standards including pixel dimensions, file size and other graphic requirements.  The discussion outlined new trends in online advertising targeting including behavioral and contextual targeting.  The rapid emergence of real-time bidding or programmatic buying and its key components is also introduced with specific examples and a summary of companies working in the Russian/Ukrainian market.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Advertising; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Development Metrics: Measuring Your Site for Improvement”.  This section presented a model for online metrics including examples of data sources and calculations.  Three types of metrics are discussed.  Foundation metrics provide basic audience behavior (visits, page views) and audience descriptions (location, gender, etc.). Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are discussed in terms of developing measures that assist in making business and content decisions to optimize websites for traffic or revenue.  Finally, tactical measures like A/B testing and heat maps are introduced as techniques to acquire specific information to make tactical decisions about a website.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Metrics; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Website Hosting Fundamentals”.  The Seminar presented the key types of hosting, their different uses and recommended criteria for selecting hosting methods and vendors.

The Seminar aimed to provide media managers with decision-making and management techniques for working with technology including content management, advertising and ad serving, and metrics systems.

Location: Moscow, Russia

Dates: 9 – 10 October 2013

Attending:  Russian and Ukrainian Technology, Product and Commercial Managers

Read a comment from PaidContent’s Mathew Ingram: Jeff Bezos is both right and wrong about why newspapers are like horses.

Building the right kind of sensibility means building the right kind of brand that resonates. In a crowded media sector these days, the white space to create anything unique is non-existent, or at best narrow, which is why content-based startups take a longer time to gestate and build up.

Hiring and building a team present peculiar challenges for a media startup compared to any other kind of software or consumer product startup. Cultural fit becomes the driving criteria above almost any other criteria, particularly at the early stage.

Having been a student of media and media startups all my life — and now a year into building my second — I’ve learned a bunch of lessons along the way on building the right kind of teams in lean content-driven environments.

Different stages in a company require different strategies, and for this article I am focusing on the early stage, where the focus is on building editorial, product and distribution. Call it my year-one guide to hiring in a media startup.

General culture and companywide skills:

• Bringing negative energy into the company is not worth any kind of talent. This is true for co-founders, employees and even investors. Because in a daily ideas driven startup, the flow of energy back and forth matters a lot more, any negative people in the company suck up all available energy in the company. This may sound esoteric and hard to quantify, but if you’ve done this long enough, you know this matters.
• The product in a media startup changes every day, unlike any other product startup. The front entrance of your flagship product changes many times a day, and the people you hire need to understand the manic-ness that goes into doing this day in, day out.
• Product thinking: Typically media startups have been stuck in “post thinking,” as in a blog post, a story post, etc. In a multi-platform environment, product-led thinking that continually tweaks to keep the brand fresh in digital becomes the driving force. Iterate, test and build; a thinking in mainstream consumer startups, has to come to media startups as well. Hire people who get it.
• Visual and multi-platform thinking: Anyone you hire — from editor to developer to social media manager to sales to business development — has to understand the visual nature of media these days, especially in a social media-driven, multi-platform world. This is easier said than done, but people with varied and non-traditional career paths tend to get this the most.
• Living in a Google Analytics stream: Or in other words, data thinking. These days, data skills for anyone you hire across any function in the company — from editorial intern to social media manager to founders — is not an optional skill. That’s true for any startup, but for media startups that live and die in Google Analytics (and most use that at early stage, because it is free), it means making sure everyone in the company understands it, uses it, and makes decisions that are informed from it. Baking it in at the hiring stage will ensure you make it pervasive across the company as it scales.

Editorial team:

• The 4 S’s of Content: be Smart, Sharp,Surgical and Strategic. With a small team in the beginning, can the editorial talent you hire be nimble enough to understand this, and execute against it?
• Because part of the talent you will hire will likely have come from existing old-school media companies, one of the things you are looking for is how much can they unlearn what they’ve learned before. Especially if the editorial product and the voice you are trying to create is something the industry has not seen before.
• This is my personal favourite: No journalism circle jerk or moralising media people. Get the basics of reporting right, keep the future of journalism prognosticators out.
• Related to above: Avoid scenesters, above all else. Media tends to attract a lot of those because it comes with the high profile of a byline and public presence. These days with the amplification of social, people love the idea of working in high profile places and would do anything to flatter you. It will take some trial and error, but you’ll learn the necessary skill of avoiding these people.
• Curation thinking: This is another critical hiring and company culture parameter. No media startup can survive doing just original content, it has to be a mix, of original, of curated or aggregated, of licensed if that is an option. It means hiring people who have the ability to mix content types, and not be moral about it. You’ll be surprised at how many journalists look down upon curation. In a small team, curation thinking also means learning to do a lot more with lot less.

Developers:

• This is hard in the best of times, and for media startups that may not seemingly be solving rocket science tech problems, your options of how and what to attract developers with are lower. In most cases media startups are about execution, and that requires a slightly different kind of developer than a software or product company would need.
• Look to the pool of journalists turned developers, or dual majors in journalism and computer science, of which there is an increasing pool. They generally tend to get ignored by other high-profile consumer startups, and present an attractive pool to target for hiring.
• This is especially true if you are trying to create media-derived data products, and there are a lot of cross-dependencies that somebody with the media background would understand better than a regular developer.
• Developers with media background tend to understand presentation of data and information in right formats.

Cross functional agile product manager:

• Agile development, a methodology that came out of the software world, is increasingly being implemented across other parts of companies as well, especially as a buzzword by marketers. For a media startup, agile would translate into building quick, fast and dirty, with few resources, whether it is edit, business, sales, and of course tech development. That means a cross-functional product manager who is almost a junior COO, working with founders to keep everything running and launching on time, amidst the requisite amount of chaos.

Content marketing & partnerships:

• The social media editor is dead, the engagement manager has arrived. Call it whatever you want, beyond the buzzwords it means marketing your content is a full time function, and is multivariate, multi-service and multi-platform. The skills required then becomes a lot more complex than just someone who tweets and “engages” with community. It is a mix of being natively good at social, ability to focus on various social networks in different ways that those platforms require, in different formats of media. It means seeding various sites, forums and platforms beyond social; it also means part traditional business development functions of maintaining and seeding existing content partnerships.

Sales:

• The first sales hire at any media startup is a crucial and scary step. Hiring someone who can just sell banner and boxes, even if lots of them, won’t cut it. The first sales hire has to be strategic enough to think big picture, understand what the nascent brand stands for, and be on top of emerging trends in content market, native advertising and digital branding. And as digital has enabled the rise of early adopters, fanboys and prosumers across various industries, a sales hire should typically have both B2B and B2C experience to understand how companies market to various constituencies in different ways.

Caveat:

This is an early stage template. Beyond year two and beyond seed stage, the hiring guidelines and skill sets needed will evolve as product, business and strategy evolves — even if philosophies and operating principles stay rooted in founders vision.

(I have used the words “news”, “media” and “content” interchangeably here, to cast a wider net. Don’t get tripped up in the semantics of the words, larger lessons apply to any kind of content-driven startup.)

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn, and it has been republished here with the kind permission of the author. 

However, look beyond these standouts, and the picture is much more mixed. Fortunately, with more paid content projects being launched in the last two years, we now have the data to understand the factors that determine success or failure.

While it is easy to point to the size and resources of the New York Times and the Financial Times, they alone do not guarantee success. While pursuing a very different paid content strategy than the FT and the New York Times, The Times of London has not been as successful with its paid content model, and it is backed by the resources of News Corp. Away from the big beasts of Western Europe and the US, Piano Media works with many smaller publishers and has shown that size doesn’t necessarily matter.

As Tomáš Bella, CEO of Piano Media, said in our previous coverage of paid content, user experience does matter.  It is a point that Earl Wilkinson, the executive director and CEO of the International News Media Association, echoed in talking about the differences between success and failure in paid content strategies. Wilkinson said:

What media company executives tell me privately, across the industry worldwide, is the radically different performance in digital subscriptions has nothing to do with content or design. It has everything to do with a very poor user sign-up experience online.

Your audience expects the easy user experience and excellent customer service of major e-commerce sites, and if you can’t provide that, your paid content strategy will suffer.

Research and data are key

To deliver the best paid content user experience, both Piano Media and the New York Times used research and analytics to refine their approach.

Paul Smurl, Vice President, The New York Times Company, speaking at the Digital Innovators’ Summit in Berlin earlier this year, advised companies to “listen to readers and take their guidance”. It takes “rounds and rounds of research, in person”, he said.

For most companies and especially small independent news organisations, this kind of intensive research costs too much. However, this should be one of the criteria you use when evaluating a paid content company to work with. How deep is their research, not only generally about their own paid content products, but also what kind of audience research can they provide to you.

Wilkinson pulled no punches in criticising the poor user experience many news publishers provide when they are asking their audiences to pay for content.

The consumer expects Amazon. Instead, they are getting a clunky registration process that is the product of poor engineering.

And he believes the reason for such poor engineering is clear.

There are too many print people touching digital (and not enough digital people touching print) in the news industry. Either change the people or outsource this process.

Getting the user to the sign-up page

Of course, you first have to get a potential customer to your sign-up page, and as we recently covered, email and social media marketing are key in getting the customer there, according to British magazine publisher IPC Media.

As most publishers know, building a digital audience is relatively easy, but engaging that audience enough to be able to generate revenue from them is another thing. IPC media head of subscription marketing Beatriz Montoya said at a Media Briefing conference in London that the publisher was considering allowing readers access to some premium content if they left their email. Many other sites have added pop-ups that encourage readers to sign up for newsletters.

Email registration is the first step in engaging customers more deeply with your content and encouraging them to subscribe. It gives you a communication and marketing channel to your online audience, but when developing your multi-platform sustainability strategy, it is important that your digital marketing works in concert with your traditional marketing strategy.

Knowing your audiences better

The heavy use of data does not end in designing your paid content offering. In fact, while paid content and advertising are often seen as competing strategies, they are complementary. Digital paid content strategies are about deeper engagement with your audience and deeper knowledge about your audience, and that can be a very attractive proposition for advertisers.

Business Day in South Africa launched the first paid content strategy in the country, BDLive, earlier this year. They use a metered model, where digital audiences get some content for free before being asked to pay. It is similar to the approach used by the FT and the New York Times, and they have worked with Evolok to provide the sign-on and management system.  South African website The Media Online looked at progress at BDLive, including how it is leveraging deeper user data to improve advertising performance.

For advertisers, the subscription model relies on sophisticated analytic tools and data gleaned from user profiles and user behaviour to enable advertisers to construct clear, precisely defined campaigns with minimal churn.  Since its launch, BDlive has attracted a number of campaigns from major South African companies and sold sponsorship packages in a range of niche areas to both large and small corporate brands and public sector firms.

Keeping your subscribers

Of course, gaining new digital and print subscribers is one thing, keeping them is another. In addition to the success of the metered model, many publishers are coupling this with a bundled model, in which they combine print and digital or desktop, mobile and tablet apps in a single subscription. To make this print-digital bundling possible, it is important for news groups to make sure they have CRM, customer-relationship management, systems that are up to the task.

The sign-up page may be turning away would-be subscribers, but Wilkinson believes that another reason for poorly performing paid content strategies is the poor integration of print and digital CRM systems.

Obsessed with delivering a perfect “print + digital” sign-up experience, publishers can’t get their back-end databases to talk with each other efficiently enough – and that back-end difficulty is getting translated to the front-end.

How many times have you gone to a website to buy something and stopped because the shopping or payment process was too difficult? That is what too many potential customers are finding when they try to pay you for your content. The industry has been focused on print and digital editorial integration, but Wilkinson is highlighting that commercial integration is just important.

As more publishers adopt paid content strategies, we now know that people will pay for digital content and we also are beginning to understand what determines success or failure. As you pursue your paid content strategy, remember:

• Digital audiences have high expectations when it comes to ease of use. Use data and research to make sure you aren’t turning potential customers away.
• Use the data you gain from your paid content strategy to deliver better results for your advertisers. This will allow you to grow your subscription and advertising revenue.
• Make sure your CRM systems across print and digital work together so you can deliver the best customer experience to your subscribers regardless of the platform.