Stefan Schneiderbauer is Senior Product Manager at Funke Mediengruppe, where he is responsible for product and development across 13 regional news app brands. Speaking at Audiencers’ Festival London in June 2026, Stefan shared a new framework that he developed to make product decisions in a more structured, data-led way. Not to replace editorial judgement, but to better serve the audiences that journalism is trying to reach.
> Product decisions at most news organisations get made by whoever's loudest in the room, or by instinct built from experience. To overcome this, Germany's FUNKE Mediengruppe built a framework to replace that with something structured and evidence-led instead: a KPI tree > Start with one metric at the top, not a dashboard. Funke picked Engaged Time, then broke it down layer by layer: what drives sessions, what drives active users, what drives new vs. returning. Each layer down gets more specific, until you hit something Stefan calls a movable metric, one a single product decision can actually shift > Once you have even a partial tree, run a basic sensitivity check. Move two input variables by 5% each and see which one moves the KPI above it more. That tells you where to run your next sprint, not guesswork > Only after the tree exists, build the org around it. Funke's four pillars (Reach, Engagement, Monetisation, Infrastructure) came directly from the tree's branches > Don't start with the whole tree. Stefan's advice is to instrument one branch, show your team what it reveals, and let that build the internal case before you expand
Paradigms are shifting in real-time: News brands used to compete on access to information. That advantage is largely gone, due to the abundance of daily generated content from all different kinds of sources, AI generated content included. What remains is trust, and trust is earned through the quality of journalism, not the sophistication of the product. How the journalistic core gets expressed and amplified in a digital environment is the job of the product organisation. When the two work in isolation, even the best journalism struggles to build the sustained reader relationships that trust requires. To gain and earn the trust of readers, product and journalism need to work more closely together than ever.
This article is focused on the product side of that equation. Specifically, on how we built a framework at Funke News Apps to make product decisions in a more structured, data-led way. Not to replace editorial judgment, but to better serve the audiences that journalism is trying to reach.
I am responsible for app development across 13 news brands at Funke Mediengruppe. Over the past 12 months we repositioned our apps as a strategic growth pillar, which involved a redesign at scale, bringing development in-house, introducing user-segmented advertising, among many other great developments. I want to share the framework that sits beneath all of it.
