Why prioritize segmentation?

Segmentation can be mind-bogglingly complex and wildly impactful.

The word comes from biology, where it refers to the process of cell division from a fertilized egg to a full organism. In business, it refers to identifying the constituent parts of a whole – ideally, a set of mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive groups of customers. It can’t be perfect by definition, but even an imperfect segmentation can massively improve your bottom line.

At its core, segmentation addresses three fundamental business needs:

• Stickier content: By clearly defining  Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), newsrooms learn not just what to write about, but how to speak to their readers so the content truly resonates. If you replicate your ICPs as agents and train your newsroom to use them, you can get endless customer feedback at any time of the day.
• Smarter monetisation: Without segmentation, a dynamic paywall is only based on recency and frequency – which is fine, but does not capture your full market potential. . With it, you are “fishing where the fish are,” targeting the right users at the right time.
• Better marketing: Different segments live on different channels and respond to unique triggers. Segmentation tells you exactly where to find your users and helps advertising brands connect with theirs.

Choose your lens:

To build a complete picture of a user, like “Amanda, 40, VP of Marketing,” organizations can look through several analytical lenses:

Segmentation type	Focus/use case	Signal examples
Behavioral	UX Optimization	>5 visits per month, scroll depth, newsletter opens
Needs-based	Product Development	Prefers summaries, explainers, or opinion pieces
Value-based	Revenue Optimization	LTV, subscription tier, payment history
Technographic	Paywall Optimization	Device type (Mobile vs. Desktop), OS, Referral (LinkedIn vs. Facebook)
Demographic	Ad Sales / Strategy	Age cohort, geography, seniority

> Spektrum’s evolution of audience segmentation and testing

Five tips for succeeding in segmentation

1 – Hire strong analytics: This is the “single most important lever.” You need talent that can bridge the gap between high-level business strategy and deep data modeling.

2 – Make it cross-functional: Segmentation is a “Left Brain + Right Brain” exercise. Editorial, product, marketing, and data teams must own the model together; no single department can succeed in a silo.

3 – Quantify benefits early: You must build a business case or risk losing organizational priority. Use “Napkin Math” to show the potential uplift: for example, if a newsletter with a defined audience grows twice as fast as a vague one, what could the vague one be worth with a properly defined audience?

4 – Remember the customer: Segments should feel like people, not rows in a spreadsheet. Give them names like “Jane, the CMO” or “Joe, the Sales Lead.” Talk to them, build agents around their profiles, and ask, “Would Jane actually read this?”.

5 – Keep it simple (but useful): Aim for 4–6 mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) segments. If your team can’t name the segments from memory, your model is too complex and will fail to be actionable. Even if your goal is to build a dynamic paywall algo – lose (human) control of complexity, and you won’t know what’s working, which means you won’t be able to adjust next time the world changes.

Real-world impact: fewer paywalls, more subscription revenue

A US publisher’s journey from a rigid freemium model to smart segmentation highlights the power of behavioral data. They discovered that just 1% of traffic drove 25% of conversions.

By analyzing attributes, they found that newsletter click-throughs and direct repeat traffic were high-value, while Facebook and Android traffic converted at near-zero rates. By stopping the paywall for near-zero segments and doubling down on high-value behavioral and technographic signals, they achieved:

• A 2x increase in conversion rate.
• 50% fewer paywall exposures, leading to a better user experience for the same number of new subscribers.

Did this publisher get it completely, fully right? Absolutely not. But the model was a dramatic improvement over the simplistic frequency and recency model they were using before.

As statistician George Box famously said: “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. Be pragmatic—start with the data you have, build empathy for your readers, and iterate until your segments drive measurable growth.

We interviewed Johannes Vogel, Chief Product & Revenue Officer at stern (published by RTL Deutschland) about how they relaunched a subscription offering from scratch, with teams & systems designed for digital reader revenue.

TL;DR
- The product & revenue team grew from 7 to 75 people, with early hires focused on product, data, engineering and Ad-/Affiliate and Subscription marketing
- Moving from monthly to weekly pricing lifted conversion, particularly among readers with less prior brand engagement; the app stores were reverted to monthly after weekly renewal prompts created friction
- GEO and Capital perform particularly well on both conversion and retention, with brand profiles addressing very specific user needs

Key lessons:
- For a general interest publisher, personalisation is not a feature — it will be the product
- The article that converts is not always the one that retains. Content consistency matters more than acquisition volume
- Get editorial positioning right before optimising conversion. The funnel cannot compensate for a weak proposition

Hi, I'm Lennart Schneider, Founder of Subscribe Now, helping decision-makers in the subscription economy attract subscribers and keep them happy.

In this article, we look at Duolingo - a leading e-learning app that has mastered the art of habit-forming, something that's essential for subscription success. 

What you'll get from this article:

> The root cause of slow teams: teams without clarity on organisational purpose struggle with unfocused discussions, overwhelming strategic possibilities, and difficulty prioritising.

> Key warning signs of purpose misalignment: including lack of clear articulation of what makes your organisation unique, vague mission understanding, and strategic decisions that miss key opportunities.

> The "work alone together" technique: a structured alternative to chaotic brainstorming meetings that generates more focused ideas by giving team members dedicated time to work independently before collaborating.

> A complete three-session alignment process: Session 1 aligns on users, problems, and competitive advantages; Session 2 identifies differentiators and decision-making principles; Session 3 prioritises the best approach using multiple evaluation lenses.

> The foundation hypothesis statement: or how to consolidate all team alignment into one powerful framework: "If we help [customer] solve [problem] with [approach], they will choose it over [competitors] because our solution is [differentiation]"

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.

“In product management, empathy for users is key. But in media, success starts with empathizing with  those who create the experience: journalists. Their work is the foundation upon which all product  experiences are built. Without understanding their needs and challenges, no product can truly  succeed.” 

Tell us a little bit about you & your background 

With a product background from the airline industry, I first entered the media industry 5 years ago. Thanks to my understanding of data, I began in advertising before moving into subscription. I quickly realized that editorial newsletters were the best-performing conversion tool, so gradually shifted my focus there, putting my product knowledge to use again. 

At NZZ, where I work now, they were looking for a product manager for their newsletter portfolio – perfect! So I joined 4 years ago. Today, I’m responsible for the entire editorial product development.

What is “Editorial Product Development”? 

Editorial Product Development aims to establish a new way of working that respects journalism while making it more audience-centric.

The concept bridges the gap between editorial and product teams. This takes more than alignment meetings and shared goals. It requires a role that speaks the language of editors while thinking in product principles.

Enter Editorial Product Development! It brings together product- and editorial-minded individuals to align newsroom workflows with audience-driven strategies while preserving editorial independence. It translates the needs of journalists into product  solutions and ensures that decisions empower the newsroom rather than burden it. 

Building this Editorial Product team 

There are 3 editorial-minded individuals in our team. One focuses on digital workflows, such as homepage curation, planning tools, push notifications, etc. The second is the Newsletter PM, who previously worked as a newsletter editor and therefore has operational experience of what works and  what doesn’t. Finally, we have the Editorial PM for off-platform work – an essential perspective for any new product development today. Each of them spend 2 days a week in their original editorial roles and the rest of their time in a more product-focused role within my team. We sit next to the classic  product team, who manage the website and app features – while we focus on making the content come alive. 

A powerful combination

You have strong UX professionals coming from product, who deeply understand user needs and how to act on them. At times, their deep empathy can lead to a strong user-first perspective. Journalists offer a valuable counterbalance. They come with a clear story to tell and a drive to share it, even if it’s not always based on detailed user research. 

Bringing these two mindsets together – such as having a journalist step into a product management role – creates a powerful blend. It’s the kind of balance media companies need to serve both their audience and their editorial mission. 

How to pick the right journalist 

There are journalists who quite simply love the craft – they want to write the story, produce the video, or create the podcast, but aren’t particularly interested in what happens after publication. They are essential! People ultimately come to us for our stories, no matter how great the product experience is. However, they are not necessarily the ones who will thrive in product roles.  

Others are curious to go beyond content creation. They ask questions about target groups, business  goals, and internal processes. These journalists show potential for working in product. Bringing them into product roles not only increases the chances of success but also fosters greater acceptance and cultural change. 

“Media companies cannot afford to treat product development as separate from editorial realities.  The best digital products come from organizations where product and editorial teams co-create rather  than operate in silos. Empathy makes this possible – empathy not just for readers, but for the people  who bring the stories to life every day. If we want to build truly impactful media products, we must  start by understanding and supporting them.”

The team’s work in practice 

When launching a new audience feature, an Editorial Product Manager doesn’t just look at  engagement metrics. They also analyse how it impacts storytelling and how it fits into the workflows and constraints journalists face under tight deadlines. This understanding is crucial for developing products that support rather than hinder the newsroom. 

One case study involves opinion pieces. User research revealed that while some readers – especially younger audiences – prefer unbiased facts, others enjoy opinion-based content. However, many readers couldn’t distinguish opinion pieces from regular articles. One idea was to display the editor’s  face in the teaser when it’s an opinion piece. Here, Editorial Product Managers played a crucial role,  particularly in two ways: 

1. The cultural aspect: We needed editorial buy-in. Not every journalist is thrilled about having their picture attached to an article. But if the idea comes from someone within editorial who understands their work, it’s received much better than if a “product guy” comes along with post-its  and user-centric arguments. 

2. The process aspect: We had never used photos of editors at article level before. We needed  support from the photo editorial team to source consistent images. Because Editorial Product Managers already know these workflows and backend processes, defining requirements and  moving forward took half the time. 

What does success look like for Editorial Product Managers? 

Our work contributes to overarching business goals, such as increasing subscription or advertising revenue. Success is measured using journalistic performance metrics, depending on the initiative – such as article completion rates, content recirculation, or user feedback. Ultimately, engagement is our  key success indicator. It drives conversions and prevents churn. Engagement thus serves as a proxy for harder KPIs like subscription sales and cancellations, which it significantly influences. 

Success is also about empathizing with journalists: helping their stories gain the value they deserve from both audiences and the business. Journalists sometimes feel that their role is becoming less important – when in fact, the opposite is true.

At the World News Media Congress (WAN-IFRA), four media CEOs — from Poland, Canada, India and South Africa — laid out their top strategic priorities for the next 24 months. From editorial expansion and platform play to public policy lobbying and smart monetisation, their responses differ — but their ambitions echo the same challenge: building long-term sustainability in a structurally broken market.

The Globe and Mail (Canada): Independent ownership as a competitive edge

Andrew Saunders leads The Globe and Mail, a 180-year-old privately held national newspaper, read by 10 million Canadians per month. The group also represents CNN, The Guardian and Hearst in Canada, giving it a 20M/month commercial reach.

The context:

• 41M people, GDP $2.4T, 1.8% growth
• Highly concentrated market, strong public broadcaster (CBC)
• Platforms dominate digital spend
• Bill C-18: Google agreed to a $100M fund; Meta exited the market
• Canadian ad market shrank from $53.5B to $9B in 10 years

In this landscape, the Globe has made heavy investments:

• Dynamic paywall since 2012
• Sophi, its AI-powered editorial and commercial suite (launched 2015)
• Proprietary UX and direct-to-consumer infrastructure

“We believe in reader pay, but also in smart portfolio diversification — events, travel, premium education.”

Top priorities for the next two years:

• Strengthen direct reader revenue
• Monetise premium brand extensions (events, education, travel)
• Stay ahead on tech and data innovation
• Continue to make use of pricing power (The Globe & Mail increase price by 8-10% annually) by finding that value equation with high-value content and products
• Community building with two-way interactions

> On this topic: Audience, engagement and community at The Globe and Mail

Malayala Manorama (India): From deep roots to digital reinvention

Mariam Mammen Mathew leads Malayala Manorama, India’s largest regional-language media brand, based in Kerala — the smallest state in India, yet with 35 million people. And:

• 87% print penetration (national avg: 35%)
• 98% smartphone penetration (vs. 65%)
• 1.7 million subscribers
• A diaspora of 5 million abroad

Manorama launched manoramaonline.com in 1997, even before Google. Still, the bulk of its revenue comes from print. Yet its digital transformation is in full swing:

Diversification strategy:

• 2 TV channels, 1 radio station, 1 OTT platform
• 40–50 niche publications across life stages
• Educational spin-offs (Manorama Yearbook, learning platforms)
  
• Transactional platforms:
  
  • Informatica (matchmaking)
  • HelloAddress (real estate)
  • QuickerNow (500K SMEs, ticketing, bookings)

Monetisation is a mix of subscriptions, ads, microtransactions and events.

Editorially, the group focuses on “human touch journalism” and hyperlocal reach, with community education programs for digital literacy.

“We don’t compete on scale — we compete on trust, depth and local relevance.”

Top priorities for the next two years:

• Convert loyal print audiences to digital by building habits
• Continue to build and develop products that better serve their audience groups
• Monetise niche services with built-in trust
• Fight misinformation and platform disintermediation with proximity and credibility
  

Daily Maverick (South Africa): Fixing the market, not just the product

Styli Charalambous, CEO and co-founder of Daily Maverick, makes the case for a blunt truth: market context matters more than internal innovation.

His research shows:

• A South African media outlet gets 8x less return for the same investment as a Nordic one
• Local players are structurally disadvantaged vs. global media brands

So instead of tweaking the product, he co-authored a national policy plan with 18 recommendations, now under review by the South African cabinet.

Among them:

• Tax deductions for readers subscribing to public-interest journalism
• Incentives for advertisers backing quality news
• Easier donations (without requiring charity status)
• Redistribution of asset recoveries from investigative journalism

Safeguards include:

• A legal definition of public-interest publisher
• Mandatory Press Council membership
• Indirect redistribution via citizens, companies or investors
  

“Journalism is a public good — but it’s not funded as one. We need a new policy architecture.”

> Learning from Membership models: Daily Maverick’s superpower database

Four CEOs, one shared imperative

Whether managing legacy empires or building policy from scratch, these four leaders are aligned on one point: journalism can’t be saved by editorial pride alone. It needs:

• Direct reader relationships
• Diversified revenue portfolios
• Technological and data fluency

And, when needed, a rebalancing of the rules themselves.

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.

Evolution

Digital product management has always been a balance of art and science where the art involves understanding customer needs, market trends and crafting a well-defined product vision while the science focuses on data analysis, metrics and optimizing workflows. However, with the rise in data from customer interactions, product usage and competitive landscapes, the science aspect has grown exponentially.

Today, as products generate over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, AI has revolutionized the ‘science’ aspect. Modern product managers don’t just analyse data, they harness AI to predict trends, automate decisions and personalize experiences at scale.

AI in Action: Transforming Core Product Management Areas

AI is reshaping digital product management by turning data into intelligent decisions, reducing guesswork and empowering teams to make faster, more precise choices. From understanding customers on a deeper level to prioritizing features that bring the highest ROI, AI is transforming how product managers plan, execute and optimize products. Below are some of the areas where AI is shaping Product Management

Market Research and Customer Insights

Understanding the market and customers is fundamental to product success. AI enables product teams to analyze massive datasets instantly, unlocking insights that would take weeks or months to extract manually.

• Behavior analysis: How Users Interact with Product

AI helps product teams decode user behavior, such as how people navigate, engage and drop off, which offers a clear roadmap for improving usability and engagement.

• AI tracks and analyzes user movements, such as navigation flows, clicks, session durations and feature adoption rates.
• It detects patterns of engagement and friction, pinpointing areas where users drop off, hesitate or repeatedly interact.

Example: through AI tracking, Netflix realizes that users abandon searches mid-way, leading to frustration. The team implemented an AI-powered autocomplete search feature, resulting in a 30% reduction in drop-offs and improved content discovery.

• Trend Detection: Spotting Opportunities Before Competitors

Staying ahead of customer expectations allows businesses to build the right features before they become mainstream.

• AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) scans customer reviews, social media and forums to identify emerging trends before they gain traction.
• Detects shifts in user preferences, allowing businesses to pivot before competitors.

Example: Peloton, a fitness app, noticed a surge in conversations about mindfulness workouts. AI highlights this growing interest, prompting the company to launch a guided meditation and recovery feature, increasing engagement by 40%.

• Customer Segmentation: Tailoring Experiences to Different Users

A one-size-fits-all approach no longer works. AI segments users dynamically, allowing teams to create hyper-personalized experiences.

• AI clusters users into groups based on behavior, purchasing patterns and preferences.
• Segments continuously evolve in real time, ensuring that businesses deliver relevant content, promotions and experiences.

Example: A subscription-based e-commerce platform segments users into “bargain hunters,” “brand loyalists,” and “impulse buyers.” AI then automates marketing campaigns, offering discounts for bargain hunters, exclusive perks for brand loyalists, and limited-time offers for impulse buyers leading to a 25% increase in conversions.

Feature Prioritization and Roadmap Planning

Beyond understanding users, AI is also transforming how teams decide what to build next.

Choosing which features to build is one of the most challenging tasks for product managers. AI simplifies this by analysing data to predict feature impact and align priorities with business goals.

• Impact Simulation: AI models forecast how new features will affect user behaviour, retention rates and revenue.
• Dynamic Roadmaps: AI-powered platforms like Productboard adjust roadmaps in real time based on user feedback and competitive market shifts.

Example: Amazon identified that cart abandonment rates were rising due to long checkout processes. AI-driven simulations showed that adding a “1-Click Checkout” feature would significantly reduce friction and increase completed purchases. The feature was rolled out and resulted in a 20% boost in conversion rates.

The Future of AI in Digital Product Management

As AI capabilities accelerate, its role in digital product management is shifting from task automation to strategic orchestration. It is no longer confined to assisting with documentation or analytics AI is now embedded into product workflows, serving as both advisor and executor. 

• Generative AI will evolve beyond content creation to become a creative ideator; producing user stories, experience flows and design mocks tailored to strategic goals and historical user data.
• Agentic AI will take on more autonomy, not just recommending product directions but actively testing assumptions, running experiments and adapting features based on continuous feedback often before human teams even detect a shift in user needs.
• AI-Powered Collaboration Environments will allow distributed teams to simulate entire product scenarios aligning engineering, design and marketing functions in a shared space where decisions are modeled and optimized in real time.

By 2030, AI-powered product management tools will increase revenue growth for tech companies by up to 50% (BCG, 2023).

Conclusion

AI is revolutionizing digital product management, offering smarter decision-making, hyper-personalization and real-time adaptability. Companies that integrate AI into their product strategies will outpace competitors, deliver superior user experiences, and build data-driven products that scale.

As AI continues to evolve, product leaders must rethink their processes, tools and teams. Are you ready to lead the AI-driven product revolution.