The media industry is in a terrible state. With media organisations plagued by egos, siloes and woes, it’s easy to understand why many choose to leave the industry. Yet, some stay, determined to create positive change. Among the most effective change-makers are audience practitioners and product-minded people who have quietly grown in numbers and influence – despite significant barriers. It’s time we received proper recognition.
Audience practitioners and product-minded people are becoming increasingly influential across the industry. Some have even risen to leadership positions within media organisations.
But the role is challenging – not just from a practical standpoint but emotionally as well.
As bridge rolers in organisations, audience practitioners and product-minded people face emotional and professional challenges:
- Role misunderstanding and isolation: what we do remains unfamiliar to many in the newsroom, including executives, making trust-building and influence a constant mission.
- Resource and morale challenges: we face chronic resource underestimation while managing stretched teams, leading to diminished morale.
- Change management fatigue: we encounter both conscious and unconscious resistance to innovation, which takes an emotional toll.
- Structural challenges: we operate at the edges of defined organisational structures, often without strong senior sponsorship, creating a sense of powerlessness.
Despite these formidable obstacles, audience practitioners and product-minded people persevere. Encouragingly, the industry is beginning to acknowledge our vital work.
This recognition was particularly evident at this year’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia – the global gathering place for so many media professionals – where a dedicated news product track was introduced for the first time.
And you know what? This recognition is not only welcome but overdue. Here are three reasons why audience practitioners and product-minded people deserve celebration.
1. We are the facilitators of strategic vision
Audience practitioners and product-minded people get things done. More importantly, we get the right (strategic) things done and deliver value internally to colleagues and the broader business, and externally to people.
This is no mean feat. Especially in the media, an industry that is typically so hierarchical and where teams are so siloed.
The consequences of this structure are evident:
- Excessive hierarchy often impedes the flow of information within organisations, achieving the opposite of streamlining.
- Siloed functional teams create inevitable internal misalignment.
These factors breed strategic ambiguity throughout many media organisations.
Strategic ambiguity causes various problems:
- Lack of confidence in decisions: second-guessing of decisions by teams and others forces constant validation, which is inefficient.
- Resource allocation failures: pursuing multiple simultaneous goals spreads resources too thin, preventing breakthroughs in any area.
- People pulling in all directions: without seeing the bigger picture, teams work on overlapping or conflicting projects, stalling progress.
Thankfully, audience practitioners and product-minded people are stepping up as proactive leaders, bringing strategic clarity to media organisations.
This strategic clarity delivers important benefits:
- Amplifies impact by multiplying the effect of effort and resources through focus on high-leverage work.
- Reveals transformation opportunities by revealing novel ways to capitalise on challenges.
- Creates competitive advantage over the many organisations operating without strategic clarity.
- Unlocks sustainable growth, moving beyond tactical hacks to deliver consistent, long-term value to people.
Audience practitioners and product-minded people provide this strategic clarity through several means:
- Crystallising direction by translating vision into actionable strategies for teams. We align around clear problem statements rooted in the needs of audiences and ensure colleagues understand the strategic rationale.
- Implementing prioritisation frameworks that address the most critical issues. We focus on outcomes over outputs and use a systematic approach: collating ideas, rating them by impact-to-effort ratio, and creating roadmaps through collaborative discussion.
- Fostering organisational alignment around both decisions and decision-making processes. We manage key stakeholders by bringing decision-makers along early, explaining the “why,” maintaining transparency about tradeoffs, and genuinely addressing concerns.
The media organisations that truly value their audience practitioners and product-minded people are the ones reaping these rewards most abundantly.
2. We foster collaboration
Egos, siloes, woes: this toxic combination breeds strategic ambiguity and its associated calamities. The solution is creating strategic clarity, as we’ve seen. And audience practitioners and product-minded people deliver this through mastery of collaborative working.
Effective collaboration breaks down barriers across seniority levels, functional divisions, and other divides. Its not-so-secret ingredient is empathy – the ability to truly understand challenges from multiple perspectives.
Consider resistance to change. Rather than defaulting to frustration when facing opposition, audience practitioners and product-minded people dig deeper to uncover the real concerns:
- Loss of control: often interchanged with loss of power but also includes a threat to our sense of autonomy.
- Too much uncertainty: people tend to choose familiar misery over an unpredictable path.
- Too massive of a difference: when the change feels too big, people lose their bearings and the new normal feels impossible to navigate.
- Fear of losing face: people become defensive when what they worked on gets changed.
- Insecurity about competency: change can make people worry their skills are outdated – or worse, no longer needed.
- More work: change is too often linked to giving people even more work.
- Unintended consequences: the fallout may hit those who had nothing to do with the decision.
- The vibe is off: sometimes, they just don’t like you, sorry.
We excel at detecting these underlying concerns to inform collaborative work.
Audience practitioners and product-minded people systematically embed collaboration into organisational DNA through:
- Purpose-driven cross-functional teams that unite diverse talents (and perspectives) around shared goals. We assemble teams that work together physically, share objectives, and are rewarded by common outcomes. We maintain teams small initially (no more than 7-8 people) with regular touchpoints to ensure adequate support and alignment.
- Structured documentation processes like Product Requirement Documents (PRDs) that build credibility bridges between technical and non-technical groups. We implement review processes with peers to preserve strategic cohesion.
- Project frameworks that connect individual contributions to broader strategic objectives. We deploy design sprints and hackathons for problem-solving sessions.
By serving as collaboration catalysts, we don’t just facilitate better teamwork, we fundamentally transform how media organisations function – which gives them the strategic clarity they so desperately need.
3. We bring newsrooms closer to people
The media industry has grown too disconnected from the people we’re meant to serve. And we see the consequences all around us.
It would be naive to think that the rise of fascism, a loneliness epidemic, an increasingly fracturing web aren’t at least partly due to our failure to connect with people in a positive way.
Audience practitioners and product-minded people strive to rebuild this broken connection. We believe that truly serving people requires deeply understanding their needs, expectations, and problems. And then ensuring this understanding permeates into newsroom decisions.
Audience practitioners and product-minded people reconnect newsrooms with people in various ways:
- Championing perspectives of audiences: we build organisational empathy by democratising audience understanding across teams. We support colleagues to deepen their understanding of audiences with AI tools.
- Elevating audience value creation: we ensure that creating genuine value for people becomes central to every conversation – not just editorial discussions but also business strategy. We map content directly to the needs of different audiences, creating high-value content pillars.
- Anchoring product development in audience insight: we ground every product firmly in our understanding of real people – which we achieve through audience research – rather than building based on assumptions. We maintain internal research backlogs and help connect audience research to decision-making.
This systematic integration of audiences-informed thinking transforms both media organisations and the communities we serve, not least by enabling the creation of true content/product-audiences fit. The remarkable successes of newsrooms that implement the User Needs model – an audiences-informed way of creating content and experiences –demonstrates this approach’s power.
Here are a few ways in which newsrooms can better leverage audience practitioners and product-minded people:
- Empower us: get comfortable allocating us more resources while maintaining ROI accountability. Our influence delivers greater impact per dollar than most other investments.
- Support us: have our back, especially at the onset of projects. Your backing builds confidence – both ours and the organisation’s – resulting in quick wins and early momentum.
- Trust us: our work can take time to bear fruits. Embrace iterative experimentation and substantial longterm gains it produces.
By bridging the gap between newsrooms and people, we don’t just improve media business models, we help restore the essential social contract between journalism and society.
By facilitating strategic vision, fostering collaboration and bringing newsrooms closer to people, audience practitioners and product-minded people are defying the odds to breathe fresh air into an industry struggling for oxygen. The organisations that elevate these roles from peripheral to central will be the ones that not only survive but thrive. In an industry desperately in need of reinvention, we are the architects of a more sustainable, audiences-informed future.
