A good product strategy requires long-term objectives and thinking. But news organizations are often rooted, out of necessity, in the here and now. Too often, journalism’s culture of immediacy puts product teams into a reactive position: focusing on launching a new subscription banner, adjusting the ad map to help advertising teams meet quarterly goals, or launching a new story page feature for an upcoming editorial project. Bigger changes to audience and product strategy — shifts that reach new audiences or radically increase subscription conversion — can fall to the wayside. Memos and decks collect dust as many news organizations pursue short-term optimizations that feel tangible or shiny objects that signal an “innovative” position.
My partner Jessica Gilbert and I started The Composition Collective (in part!) because we wanted to do product strategy differently, partnering with the talented people already working for news organizations. Our approach helps our clients — mission-driven organizations in and outside of news — go beyond optimizations or shiny objects. Here are five tips you can steal to get off the hamster wheel and turn your strategy into reality.
Visualize your strategy
Few product and audience strategists — especially those working in media — can execute strategy on their own. To make your vision real, you’ll likely need to convince a lot of your peers in marketing, sales or editorial to go along with you.
I personally love a well-crafted memo and well-organized Jira board (really!) But written materials often fall short when you’re recommending something that’s never been done before. That’s where design can help.
Many people think of design as decoration — something you do after all the decisions have been made. But product design is a key part of strategy, not a response to it.
Imagine that you want to recommend building a new app for your publication. In this scenario, you could spend your time writing a long memo, crafting a deck or in many meetings with all the stakeholders involved. Or you could partner with your design team to prototype what this app could include, exploring a feature set that will meet audience and organizational goals. The process of designing (especially with integrated user testing) will help you challenge your assumptions and identify gaps in your strategy. It will also give your stakeholders something tangible (and hopefully exciting!) to react to — allowing you to get much richer feedback and shorten the time from idea to build.
Embrace design sprints to solve your “vortex” problems.
If carving out time for exploratory strategy and design feels impossible, you’re not alone. For the uninitiated, design can feel fuzzy and time consuming. Few news organizations have the time (or budget) for endless, blue sky experimentation. Thankfully, creativity and structure can go together.
I’ve led design sprints for almost 10 years, starting as a trainer back in the heyday of design thinking (~2016). I worked with cross-functional teams at McClatchy’s local markets, utilizing Google’s Five Day Sprint model to complete an entire product cycle in one week. Some concepts from McClatchy’s design-thinking sprints went on to launch — from a new travel microsite in Miami to a Belleville docuseries and film screening on racism in America — and others were tossed aside quickly. In my mind, the “failed” concepts were just as helpful as the successful launches. Without the structure of the design sprint, these concepts may have sucked up six months of valuable newsroom time with the same end result.
In my current work, I find design sprints and hackathons are a really effective way to “co-build” with our clients and build trust within cross-functional teams.
Design sprints and hackathons enable deep focus and help teams move creatively and quickly. They’re especially helpful to solve “vortex problems” — those big challenges that spark endless meetings, working groups or internal arguments. The next time you’re sitting in the middle of a vortex, consider tackling the problem with a cross-functional design sprint. Dedicating 3-5 days of focused energy will save your team endless hours in spin.
Beware the shiny object
Too often, design sprints and hackathons are centered around a technology or pre-defined solution, not an audience or business problem. The result? “Shiny objects” that may look cool but don’t solve a real problem.
Consider a question many of us in product and audience strategy have been asked or proposed ourselves in the last year: “How might we use AI?”
It may be tempting to run a design sprint around this question. And yet…this prompt is focused on a solution, not a problem, leaving out other technical (and non-technical) solutions that could address your audience’s problems more effectively.
When choosing a “starting point” for your strategy, make sure you have a strong problem statement — one that’s rooted in real audience needs. If the “shiny object prompt” is coming from above (also known as the CEO pet project…) make sure you’re reframing the challenge before moving into design.
Be ready to kill your darlings
Most writers have heard the advice to “kill your darlings” — forcing yourself to remove clever bits of writing that don’t serve your overall narrative. The same holds true in strategy and especially in design.
When you “design” your strategy, you’ll inevitably find areas where your original idea isn’t working. Once something looks real, it can be easy to fall in love and resist change.
In working with clients today, I use a mix of prototyping methodologies, from quick sketching to quick coding, to ensure we’re not getting too attached to unproven ideas. Design software like Figma (in the hands of a knowledgeable designer) can help you quickly visualize and prototype an idea. AI-development tools like Replit can allow you to build an app in hours with no coding experience.
In using these tools, set appropriate expectations and trust the expertise of your colleagues. If you’re showing a sketch to a designer (but aren’t a designer yourself), listen when they recommend changes to meet UX best practices or accessibility standards. When showing an AI-generated app to an engineer (but aren’t an engineer yourself), trust their technical feedback. It’s called “vibe coding” for a reason. Just because you could design it in a few minutes doesn’t mean it can be launched into production in five minutes.
Remix and reformat to reach your internal audiences
Not all strategies can be fully encompassed in a prototype or design. As a product or audience strategist, you probably already think a lot about how different audiences require different things. One person may require different formats throughout the day — listening to a podcast on their morning commute, swiping Instagram stories over lunch or diving into a long form piece at night.
Our colleagues are the same. Different (internal) audiences appreciate different formats and care about different aspects of our strategy. Consider the “quarterly roadmap share-out” — a fixture of many product teams in and outside of news. While these checkpoints can be helpful in updating our colleagues in editorial, sales and marketing, they can also be a major source of stress for everyone involved. If you feel like your strategy checkpoints are causing more harm than good, consider how your audience strategy skills can apply to your internal challenge.
Start with defining your audience. You’ll need to go beyond “team level” descriptions for this to work, as you can’t please everyone. Don’t ask “What will resonate with the newsroom?” but rather “What resonates with the editor who attends our roadmap meetings?” From there, you can put together a targeted plan for disseminating your strategy and getting buy-in.
Re-formatting strategy materials can easily take up too much time, so utilize technology to keep things efficient. Tools like Coda help you create different roadmap views while utilizing the same base data. Chat GPT can help you synthesize memos into bullet points. Gifksy can turn your prototypes into quick gifs. I once worked with a client who rarely read emails and would never read a memo, so I turned written materials into short podcasts using NotebookLLM.
Conclusion
Bringing a product strategy to life requires more than a strong idea, especially in fast-moving news organizations. By visualizing your ideas, leveraging tools like design sprints, and tailoring your messaging internally, you can execute (not just propose) strategies that meet real audience needs. If all this feels daunting, please reach out. I’d love to talk.
About Abby
Abby Reimer is a product, UX and operations leader. She is a founding partner at The Composition Collective, a product, design and storytelling studio that partners with mission-driven organizations in and outside of news. The Collective also hosts art and journalism events in Chicago. Before starting The Composition Collective, Abby held product leadership roles at Huge and McClatchy. She loves working with cross-functional teams to move from analysis to action.
