FT Edit and the Financial Times

FT Edit is a new app by the Financial Times that offers 8 in-depth articles a day. The app aims to replace the endless scrolling on social media and news sites with more thought-provoking reading time. It’s the first new app the company has launched in a decade.

Contrary to popular belief, I think there’s virtue in launching something new on a decades-old foundation. The team felt like a startup, while our 135-year-old organisation is far more comfortable launching new products now than a year ago. Here is what I’ve learnt:

1. Identify your baseline

We had a good starting point – the FT already had a strong internal belief that:

1. FT content has much larger audience appeal than our subscriber base (look at our 7m LinkedIn followers), and
2. It’s hard to attract new customers at scale with our price of +£35 a month.

But launching new products requires a new mindset. Drawing on my previous experience launching new features at Google Arts & Culture and running my own startup, I knew a lot needed to change.

Being an intrapreneur always requires cautious patience which can, at times, clash with an entrepreneurial spirit. I mapped in my head the areas that were critical to change immediately; areas I could change later; and things I needed to accept and appreciate.

2. Pick your battles

When launching a new venture, you need to be ready to make decisions every minute. Inevitably, there will be arguments — a positive sign you have surrounded yourself with thoughtful, critically-thinking individuals. However, as you have limited time and energy, being wise on which battles to pick is essential for success (and your sanity).

My rule was that I aimed to influence situations that were vital for validating product-market fit.

For example, the FT’s initial understanding of a low-cost product was £19 a month. While it’s nearly half the price of the current subscription, it’s still more expensive than any other news subscription on the market. Our main job with the FT Edit was to understand if users would engage with the product and be willing to pay for it, at scale. If we set a price that was too high, we wouldn’t know if it was the proposition that didn’t resonate with readers, or the price was too high for that proposition. It was a “make or break” decision and we decided to push the organisation to agree on a cheaper price (currently £0.99 for the 6-month trial).

As you have limited remit (and energy) as a Product Manager, there were areas that I challenged but decided to park for later. These were mainly areas which, prior to launch, we had no data on, therefore it was pointless to engage in long discussions. For instance, we took the decision not to include new articles on the app during the weekend; instead we would feature “best articles of the week”. One year after launch, we are seeing weekend engagement rapidly decreasing for new users and the team is now revising this approach.

Finally, there were the situations I had to work with. In our case, it was whether we could launch a fake-door paywall instead of spending time developing a working paying solution. One of the worries was it would impact our brand. I sensed that the organisation was not ready for this type of crude experimentation. A year later, this is no longer the case!

3. Get your team comfortable with ambiguity

There will be many moments in the new product development journey where you need a team that is comfortable saying, “I don’t know, let’s try and see” or “Yes, why not”. It’s an attitude that is significantly different from the requirements of a regular job, no matter the department. In a normal setting, you are praised in your job if you know all the answers and you are detail-oriented.

Doing new product development requires the opposite virtues: distilling signals from noise, and knowing what’s important to focus on right now, and what you should worry about later.

For example, the FT Edit experience is no different for users who have been paying for 2 months or for 8 months. We decided that life-time value is something we will optimise for only if we validate there are enough users ready to pay for the product after using it for a month. This is not to say that long-term retention is not important, but we made the conscious decision that our resources were limited, and there were more important things to solve right now.

I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who, although they had no experience in launching new products, were curious and excited and wanted to challenge the status quo. This mentality made our team move much faster.

4. Take the team on a journey with you

If you are someone who has launched multiple new products, you probably have the whole playbook in your head, but don’t assume people from your team will know what’s coming next. It’s the job of the Product Manager to ensure everyone in the team understands the decisions you take and feels confident that we are building the right thing. I aimed to be systematic and transparent on the product decisions I’m making and what would follow based on different results and scenarios. I aimed always to articulate to the team what our product strategy was and why we had prioritised one feature over others.

We did a few things that helped tactically: we have a weekly team meeting with everyone working on the project. All qualitative or quantitative research is shared in that meeting, we discuss the results and we make decisions together.

5. Everything revolves around the value proposition

Our team spent months surveying users, doing diary studies and user interviews, before we designed even one screen. Articulating clearly what problems your product solves and where it adds value into people’s lives is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Still, if this information is mentioned once in a meeting and then collects digital dust in a shared folder, it all goes to waste. I quickly understood that this was not a one-off activity. Particularly in the early days, we mentioned the value proposition at every single discussion we had around the product.

One way we ensured alignment was involving all departments from inception — marketing, brand, PR, editorial, product, technology. They were surely annoyed with me and Maia Bridi (our stellar researcher at the time) asking the whole team to attend user interviews or sit through key insight sessions. We filtered any decision through the lens of our value proposition. This resulted in marketing coining the slogan “Time well read” for our launch in March 2022, as well as editor-in-chief Roula Khalaf describing the app as a way to “Read less, understand more”. It’s exciting to see how little by little everyone is playing to the same tone for a new product you have created together.

> Discover value proposition benchmarks from successful publishers

6. Are we there yet?! Defining success before launch

Another thing that empowered the team to stay focused and move quickly was having a clear definition of success from the very beginning of the product development journey. Reaching product market fit is an elusive term if you don’t know what you want to achieve. In our case, we know we would be successful if FT Edit reached the industry benchmark for Download-to-Paid rate on mobile news apps, and if we did this at scale.

Having a high Download-to-Paid rate with few users would mean we were a niche product; having a lot of users with low willingness to pay would mean we were not offering anything new or valuable.

On the latter, consider how you will reach product channel fit: how to optimise your product to work with the top communication channels your audience is using. It would be a mistake to focus exclusively on growth before you have validated your product is valuable to users, but it’s important to consider embedding one or two growth loops into your product early on. In our case, we over-relied on paid marketing activities at launch which should not be the only growth driver to any new product as marketing budgets are never endless.

7. The perfect MVP doesn’t exist

It’s a paradox: you cannot create a perfect product, if you haven’t launched a scrappy minimum viable product (MVP) first. The process of new product development is a iterative, sometimes chaotic journey that requires you to launch unfinished products to learn how to make them better. By contrast, the FT has a reputation as one of the most trustworthy organisations in the world for the opposite reason: perfection is the aim with everything we publish. This could easily have created tension between the product and editorial teams.

Luckily, the editors on the app, Malcolm Moore and Hannah Rock, were open-minded, and they trusted me with adopting a new approach to work.

While we kept our perfectionism in the editorial realm, we learnt how to be more experimental with testing our assumptions and launching experiments, from new push notifications to product improvements.

8. Validate your biggest assumptions as early as possible

Before the minimum viable products, there were the minimum viable tests. I often share this article by Gagan Biyani, which discusses a leaner approach to testing new product concepts.

It asks you to list all the things that need to be true for your product to succeed.

FT Edit is an app offering long-reads, we therefore needed to validate if people would be willing to do that long reading on their phones. We did this in a diary study before we had a working product and no user has brought it up as a problem.

You don’t need a team of engineers and extensive A/B testing to validate whether your product has a chance of success.

Once you have that initial validation and knowledge, it becomes much easier to pitch internally for more resources.

Hope this was useful!

3 clicks to cancel: what’s changing in France?

A new regulation was recently introduced concerning the termination of contracts in France. Specifically, the « termination in 3-clicks » law requires that we should always be able to end a contract 1) online and 2) in 3-clicks or less. This applies to any business to consumer contract, including electricity, gas, mobile and internet providers, transport companies, gym memberships and subscriptions to any media or press brand.

The law outlines the user cancellation process, click-by-click:

1st click: « Firstly, the consumer clicks on the « Cancel my contract ». This button must be easy to find and understand. Any other wording used for this function mustn’t include any ambiguity. »

2nd click: “After this step, the consumer is taken to a page summarizing their terminated contract. They should be able to verify the information and, if needed, make any necessary changes. »

3rd click: “Finally, the consumer must be able to confirm the cancellation by clicking on a button or link « Confirm contract termination »… this must be directly accessible from the page summarizing the terminated contract.

The company should then confirm the reception of this cancellation and specify the date from which the contract is no longer valid. »

How have publishers in France been responding to this legislation?

Reginald Costa, Product Manager at Mediapart, an independent French investigative online newspaper, kindly reached out to share their experience on building an unsubscription journey that both abides by the restrictions in France and supports high levels of retention:

We had proposed a simple unsubscription journey as early as the end of 2016, only to backtrack, thinking we weren’t equipped enough to proactively monitor cancellations. And also out of fear of uncontrollable waves of online cancellations.

At the start of 2019, when we redesigned our tunnels, we came back to this issue. Having greatly simplified and shortened our subscription path, we didn’t think it fair not to offer an equally simple and short cancellation path.

Especially since, during user tests, some non-subscribers cited the alleged complexity of unsubscribing as a reason for not subscribing.

We took the gamble that the user experience was paramount, and that a subscriber who can leave without friction and frustration will be more likely to return. This feature has been marketed to as strong, reassuring argument in the subscription process – we almost always write « cancel online at any time ».

And so far it’s been a winning bet at every level, including for our subscriber customer service lines, which used to receive numerous calls and emails asking how to cancel.

Reginald Costa, Product Manager at Mediapart

The user unsubscription flow on Mediapart:

Click-to-cancel in the United States

There’s been a lot of talk about « Click-to-cancel » in the states, with the Federal Trade Commission proposing a formal rule in March to offer straightforward self-service subscription cancellation:

Specifically, “if you can sign up online, you must be able to cancel on the same website, in the same number of steps,” according to the FTC. Sellers must also “take ‘no’ for an answer” instead of continuing to pitch new offers when customers call to cancel a subscription.

“These companies are betting that customers will be too impatient, busy, or confused to jump through every hoop,” FTC chair Lina Khan wrote about the proposed rule.

To cement their standing on the subject, the FTC recently sued Amazon, accusing them of using deceptive practices that make cancelling subscriptions intentionally difficult for consumers, enrolling consumers in Prime without consent. An FTC chair pointed to « manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs know as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions. »

Reuters has talked about these so-called « dark patterns » before:

“Dark patterns are manipulative or deceptive practices built into user interfaces by developers that have the effect, intentionally or unintentionally, of obscuring, subverting, or impairing consumer autonomy, decision-making, or choice. Dark patterns are often carefully designed to alter decision-making by users or trick users into actions they did not intend to take.” 

Common examples of dark patterns include:

• Bait and switch: when information says one thing and a different action takes place upon clicking
• Hidden costs: the cost shown is different initially but increases as the buyer moves ahead with payment
• Triggering fear: when a user is asked not to opt-out of a subscription or feature as it can lead to negative consequences

Arguably, by making unsubscription more difficult than it needs to be, such as by adding in dark patterns or making it necessary to phone customer service in order to cancel, publishers are actually shooting themselves in the foot rather than increasing retention rates. Even if the reader may have been tempted by a reduced offer or month of subscription on-the-house, they’re so frustrated by the cancellation process that they’re put off the brand altogether. 

For example, an ex-subscriber to The Arizona Republic told Nieman Lab: 

“My wife wanted to go from twice a week to full seven days. Can’t do it by email with Republic. Told we have to call. Number to call seems to be regional phone center, constantly busy. Called Republic directly but were told to try to call earlier in the morning and maybe the call center wouldn’t be so busy. Always busy. Tried sending a letter to Republic, no answer. Tried sending letter to billing center, no answer. Finally went to bank and had auto withdrawal for monthly subscription canceled. Only response from Republic was that payment request was denied.”

Thomas Baekdal discussed this in his recent newsletter:

If you create an annoying canceling experience, like forcing people to ‘call us’ (which is now illegal in many places), you can turn an already bad situation much worse. For instance, if people are merely bored and you annoy them as they cancel, you push them into a « pissed off » mode instead.

You don’t want to ever do that. In fact, every single thing we know about churn indicates that the better the experience people have canceling, the more likely they are to either not churn if given the right incentive, or come back later.

So, you need to be incredibly helpful and respectful to mitigate churn.

To evidence this point, The Minneapolis Star Tribune found that allowing online cancellation, as it started doing in December 2021, hasn’t resulted in more cancellations. Instead, it may actually be helping the paper keep more of its subscribers who are on the fence. The Star Tribune’s “total online save rate” is 18.5%, while the “call center save rate” — where you have to talk to a person who tries to persuade you to stay — is only 8.8%.

Making it easier to leave convinced more people to stay in Norway

Norwegian Consumer Protection Authority determined that “it should be as easy to end a subscription as it was to subscribe in the first place”.

So, to adapt, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten made the unsubscription user journey shorter than ever – reducing the number of steps from 5 to 3, cutting all unnecessary steps and questions that might confuse subscribers and, contrary to all intuition, they made the cancel button available on subscribers’ « My page », meaning it is visible to them at all times in their account.

The subscriber cancellation flow:

When initiating their cancellation, subscribers are first met with information that they’re sharing their subscription with a friend and that their friend will also lose access if they cancel. (This only applies to those subscribers who share their subscriptions.) We know from previous analysis that this is a strong incentive to stay.

In the next step they will immediately be exposed to the holdback offer: “Can we convince you to stay with us for a little while longer?” The offer we’ve seen the best results with, in terms of volume, retention, and income is three months for the price of one. They are then presented with two choices: stay or continue unsubscribing.

If they continue, they are asked to choose between four reasons for their cancellation, amongst them an unspecified option to reduce the mental load, and afterwards, they get a confirmation.

This has actually had an impressively positive impact on their revenues: in six months, over 5,000 subscribers have been convinced to change their mind after starting the cancellation process, accounting for an estimated €320,000 (or US$344,000) in yearly revenues.