Clarify why

Before beginning development on a new product or feature, we step back and ask: Why? Why this feature? Why now? And why should we do this versus something else? Often, it’s insights — information gathered from quantitative and qualitative data that helps us better understand our audience — that enables us to answer these questions.

Having a clear motivation is helpful in organizing teams, especially cross-functional ones. And the more rooted in data, whether it’s direct customer feedback or data analysis, the stronger the case for why.

Article gifting is a feature we launched late last year. The feature enables subscribers to share Atlantic articles with others (even those without a subscription) on a monthly basis.

We know our subscribers not only enjoy engaging with our journalism themselves, but also find delight in sharing it with others. However, if their recipient didn’t have a subscription, they often were unable to view the full article.

Our audience-research team reported that the lack of the ability to share access was one of the most frequent pain points noted by both active and prospective subscribers. Armed with this information, we considered how article gifting might fulfill this request and how it would work at The Atlantic.

Article gifting is not a concept we created. Many other news publishers, like The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post offer this type of functionality. While it was helpful to look to these as examples when considering our version of the feature, we wanted to make sure we built something specific to our audience’s needs that also aligned with our own business goals.

> How we introduced group subscriptions to The Atlantic

Set clear goals

Goal-setting is another essential step in the development process that creates focus for the feature and the cross-functional team working together to build it. By setting a clear goal up front, it ensures everyone is on the same page about what the solution is meant to do or solve for.

It can also illuminate when different teams are not on the same page about what the intended outcome should be. Still, it’s better to have that come to light at the beginning of the project versus after launch.

For the article-gifting feature, our goals were two-fold: 1) provide a new, highly-requested benefit to subscribers to improve satisfaction and 2) create a new way for those who aren’t subscribers to access our journalism.

While we believe our journalism is worth paying for, we also know that some readers need more time with us before committing to a subscription. With article gifting, we could give subscribers a way to be our advocates and share with family, friends, and followers — with hopes that they eventually become subscribers, too.

Source ideas from everywhere

Good ideas really can come from anywhere. Whenever it’s time to consider a new feature or product, the product team aims to include partners from across the organization. We host cross-functional brainstorms and design sprints, consistently share ideas and learnings from our peers, and collect feedback on requirements and designs. For product managers, sourcing ideas and leaning on our partners for their respective areas of expertise is our superpower.

For article gifting, we worked closely with design, marketing, copy, engineering, data science, and audience team members to define how the feature would work, what it would look like, and exactly what success would mean in terms of metrics. This also helped us think through potential risks and ways we might be able to mitigate them.

(Over)communicate

Good communication is often the difference between a successful project and one that stumbles to the finish line. But having open lines of communication is challenging, especially when every team is busy and has its own priorities and deadlines. This is why we’ve established some lightweight, repeatable ways for our teams to facilitate communication and foster collaboration.

For instance, with article gifting, we leaned on a project-based Slack channel and a weekly 15-minute check-in to communicate progress, major decisions made, or open questions that needed to be resolved. We also made sure the PRD (product requirements document) always had the most up-to-date information about the feature as well as how we were progressing against our timeline to launch. This enabled partners on other teams to stay updated without having to spend too much time in meetings.

> Also from The Atlantic team: bringing more value to readers and subscribers through our mobile app

Share results and learnings far and wide

After a feature launches, it’s important to understand its impact against the goals articulated at the onset. Like every other step of the development process, this shouldn’t be done in a vacuum. We often share post-launch performance reports soon after a launch that detail how the feature or product is performing, lessons learned, and any changes we plan to make. It’s important to share our learnings across the organization because it develops a shared understanding and sometimes inspires new ideas for us to pursue.

For article gifting, we learned quickly that subscribers were having a hard time distinguishing article gifting from our regular digital-sharing functionality. This led us to reconsider the user experience and update the flow to make it more intuitive. Monitoring subscriber behavior with the feature, as well as engagement with the gift articles by recipients, has inspired several optimizations we’ve made since launch.

Feedback from subscribers has been overwhelmingly positive in response to having this new benefit, many expressing gratitude for enabling this capability so that they can share with friends and family. Article gifting has also enabled our journalism to reach a wider audience, converting many into new subscribers, too.

This feature’s success was absolutely a result of many teams at The Atlantic being generous with insights, ideas, and feedback to ultimately deliver something of value to our subscribers. And it’s this spirit that we aim to bring to everything we build.