Selma Stern is a strategic advisor helping media leaders transform their organizations for sustainable growth, drawing on 15+ years of experience in consulting and global news media. In particular, Selma bridges the gap between high-level strategy and the messy reality of execution, helping publishers fix the internal structures that hold them back.
In this article, Selma shares 5 recommendations for surviving in this gap as a subscription leader:
- Accept your real job: consensus builder, not decision maker
- Master internal storytelling
- Build cross-functional infrastructure
- Invest in human chemistry
- Give away the credit
If you are a digital subscriptions leader, you probably face a paradox every day: all the accountability, almost none of the control.
Having led subscription businesses at two US media companies, and now advising publishers on subscription growth in Europe, I see this everywhere, all the time. The head of subscriptions holds the P&L responsibility. But they rarely hold the assets—the CTO controls the dev queue, the Editor-in-Chief controls the headlines, and the CPO controls the UX. If the head of subs is lucky, they control email marketing and customer success.
If that’s you: To get anything done, you cannot just decide—you have to barter.
Because subscriptions sit at the exact intersection of business, product, editorial, and data, you are an elite player in a game of extreme cross-functional collaboration.
Here’s the playbook for surviving in that gap.
1. Accept your real job: consensus builder, not decision maker
The first step is admitting to yourself, and to your tech and product counterparts, that your job is consensus-building, not decision-making.
When I was pleading for a spot on the roadmap, I didn’t pretend to have authority I didn’t possess. I sat down with the CTO and Product Leads and was radically honest. It was my job to bridge the gap between “commercial needs” and “technical constraints” by analyzing the data myself and presenting it without ego. My job was to connect the right people at the right time with the right information.
2. Master internal storytelling
When you don’t have the power to decide, you only have the power to compel. You cannot simply tell an editor to “assign more premium content”. You have to sell them the story of why it matters in a freemium setup. When I was pitching an idea, I went into every meeting having prepared answers to two questions: What’s in it for them? And what is it worth to me compared to other priorities?
In a siloed organization, your internal narrative is just as important as your external marketing. If you can’t tell a compelling story about why the paywall needs to change—or convince the CFO that LTV beats cash flow—you won’t get much done. Be crystal clear on your goals. And yes, that means some people will call you anything from bold to persistent or even annoying. Own it. Tell your story.
3. Build cross-functional infrastructure
While storytelling matters, you cannot rely entirely on logic. You need to build a “shadow” organization that bypasses the bureaucracy to get things done.
The Weekly Meeting: You need a weekly touchpoint with the functional leads from Product, Tech, Editorial, and Data. You drive the agenda. It forces the different gears of the machine to mesh. Importantly, don’t mix more than two levels of formal hierarchy in a meeting. It will make the conversation slow and political.
The Chat: Create a dedicated, informal group channel for this cross-functional task force. Keep it light-hearted, because change can be scary. In the beginning, people will be surprised to see new names from other departments in their Slack groups. They’ll get used to it faster than you think.
The Data Routine: Minimize data requests by creating a killer subscriptions dashboard. No, it’s not the data team’s job. They can build it eventually, but you need to specify what’s in it: conversion rates by content type, paywall exposure rates, monthly cohort retention, churn by acquisition channel, LTV by segment. Top-converting stories, story output per day. Whatever matters most to your organization. The point is: Make it useful for all functional leads, so they get used to referencing the same source of truth.
You’re building new pipes for information to flow through because the old org chart doesn’t allow for it. If you don’t do it, no one will.
4. Invest in human chemistry
I learned that the strongest data pipelines aren’t built in SQL; they are built in social settings.
The tech folks love karaoke? Get in on it. Invite them. Yes, you take it out of your budget, be generous. Maybe the writer and the engineer will bond over how they hated it, and how they prefer doing deep work at home. They might start exchanging information at the water cooler instead of waiting for formal requests.
I’ve seen personal empathy unlock collaboration too many times to count. The next time the paywall malfunctions for the journalist, the answer won’t be a ticket in a backlog; it will be a Slack message away.
5. Give away the credit
This is the most critical tactical advice I can give: give away the credit.
Here’s what this looked like in practice: We wanted to A/B test paywall copy variants. Editorial set the tone. Marketing wrote the variants. Product had to build the testing framework. I coordinated all of it, but when the winning variant lifted conversions by double digits, I made sure the Product team and the Engineers were standing in the spotlight alongside Editorial and Marketing. (If you’re wondering, “support our journalism“ didn’t fly, the cold hard value proposition did).
The result? The next time I needed paywall work prioritized, Product volunteered. They’d seen their names in the win email. They wanted to be part of the next success.
If you make others look like heroes, they will volunteer to work on your projects in the future too.
The takeaway
Leading subscription businesses in media is not for the faint hearted. It’s frustrating at times, and you’ll invariably make mistakes. But it’s an excellent training ground for true leadership—the kind where you get things done through influence, not formal authority. Where you build coalitions instead of issuing orders. Where a double-digit conversion lift happens because you got engineers and journalists in the same karaoke booth, and then in the same meeting room, working toward the same goal.
