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]"

Most media organisations struggle to tap into the creative potential of their entire staff. This guide presents a practical template that helps anyone in newsrooms come up with promising ideas and turn them into strategic solutions, breaking through traditional hierarchical barriers. In doing so, it can reshape organisational culture, creating an environment where each staff feels valued, heard, and empowered to contribute to meaningful innovation.

Many news organisations do offer staff opportunities to share their ideas – usually digital forms with submissions triaged by product managers or product-minded staff. However, these systems frequently result in high rejection rates, with most submissions being dismissed. While some view this as a marker of idea quality, the assumption that rejected ideas are inherently bad is fundamentally flawed.

Most ideas are not. Most ideas stem from genuine experience and intuition, but they often lack critical elements essential for organisational success.

Common reasons for idea rejection are:

• Lack of focus: the ideas are vague in scope with unclear expected outcomes.
• Misalignment with organisational priorities: it’s unclear how the ideas contribute to strategic objectives.
• Insufficient end-user consideration: value propositions are poorly-defined. This is especially prevalent in cases when submissions are from staff who are not the intended end-users.
• Resource underestimation: assessment of implementation requirements (for example, human hours needed) is inadequate.

These limitations create certain challenges: 

• Ineffective use of the organisation’s collective intelligence, which leads to fewer high-potential ideas, which leads to a smaller surface area for creative solutions.
• Erosion of trust in feedback mechanisms as staff perceive the exercise as ineffective.
• Diminished morale as staff feel little institutional appreciation for their ideas.

A template to collaboratively unlock and execute ideas

Product managers are uniquely positioned to address those challenges by socialising idea generation, design, development and even deployment.

Product managers have the skills to problem-solve in a strategic way, work across functions, create alignment, and more. They are also conscious that execution is fundamental – and that executing effectively and efficiently is enhanced by the right frameworks and templates.

Here, then, is a template I created for use by product managers in news organisations for this very use case.

The template is an adapted design sprint that gives staff visibility and agency over the design thinking process.

There are three sets of collaborative exercises which respectively create alignment about goals and key challenges to overcome, develop hypotheses for solutions, and validate the hypotheses with research.

People who have gone through the sprint come away with three main benefits:

• Alignment and focus. The sprint creates a shared understanding of objectives and problem-solving approaches. “The sprint helped us comprehend a problem more clearly and break down the solution into manageable chunks,” wrote a commissioning editor who went through the sprint.
• A repeatable system. The sprint converts abstract ideas into concrete requirements for strategic execution in a structured way. “I feel we will be able to integrate this streamlined approach to planning into all aspects of our work, not just this project itself,” a senior editor said.
• Collaborative empowerment. The sprint motivates staff and ensures equitable participation. Another senior editor said: “we all got a chance to contribute and feedback, it wasn’t dominated by more senior team members …”

Assembling a good team

Before you use the template, you need to assemble a team of half a dozen members or so. Your aim here is to form a team that will work collaboratively in a creative, productive and fulfilling manner.

There are three considerations to keep in mind as you assemble a team:

• Establish strategic alignment. It enables the team to move more quickly through the sprint without the need to rehash key decisions. And it ensures they are more focused on, and able to, deliver value to end-users. Having a certain desk or department department heavily represented in the team is one way of starting with some strategic alignment.
• Incorporate cross-functional expertise. The breadth of knowledge and perspectives is conducive to a cross-pollination of ideas, which puts the team in a position to execute holistic solutions. So, while the majority of your team might come from a certain desk or department, ensure you also have representatives from some other functional groups.
• Ensure team empowerment through stakeholder representation. There’s no point going through the sprint if any execution will be blocked by certain stakeholders. The team should be empowered to deliver. It is for this reason that bringing a decision-maker into the team can be valuable. They are typically more senior staff who may not have the bandwidth to go through the sprint. But ensuring they have visibility in the process and are kept informed about decisions should make it easier to get their backing, empowering the team.

Once you’ve assembled the team, you can start the sprint.

How to use the template

The product manager’s role is as a facilitator. They ensure that team members understand how to carry out each exercise, and how each exercise fits into the larger objectives of the sprint.

The exercises are ordered in eight rows. Most of those eight rows are the equivalent of 60- or 90-minute work sessions.

The first two sessions are all about finding alignment and focus for the sprint.

The first session is strictly focused on end-users.

• The first exercise  (Who are our users? Research) helps team members develop a shared understanding of end-users by sharing and reviewing any information they can find.
• The second exercise (Who are our users? Decision) then helps the team zero in on one target segment they want to be valuable to, using a decision-making matrix.

The second session aligns the team on why they’re doing this work, the challenges to overcome to be valuable to the target segment, and ultimately the scope of work during the sprint.

• The first exercise (What is the longterm goal of our work?) helps create a goal to aspire to.
• The second and third exercises (What are some of our possible challenges?; What are some key themes from our possible challenges?) identify challenges to overcome to reach the goal.
• The fourth exercise (What does the current experience look like?) recentres the team on the current state.
• The fifth exercise (What are the first steps we can take now itself?) helps identify what the team can work on during the sprint.

By this point, the team is clear on the long-term goal and the key challenges to work on. The team is now primed to move to develop hypotheses for solutions, which it will do over the third and fourth sessions.

The third session is all about idea generation. 

• The first exercise (What are our hypotheses?) encourages brainstorming of hypotheses for the identified challenges.
• The second exercise (Which hypothesis do we prioritise?) allows for prioritisation of hypotheses, using a prioritisation matrix.
• The third exercise (How are we defining success of the ideas?) establishes a criteria for hypothesis validation.
• The fourth exercise (What are some of the risks involved?) helps risk mitigation by encouraging the team to think through the assumptions and risks associated with the hypothesis.
• There are two additional exercises which the team can go through if it appears like they are favouring working on a prototype. The exercises are competitor research and heat map.

At the end of the third session, the team has clarity about the hypotheses they will work in an attempt to deliver value to the target segment.

The fourth session is concerned with planning the work. 

• The first exercise (What do we need to do to action the idea?) helps the team break down their big idea into a series of manageable jobs to be done. 
• The second exercise (When do we do what?) is roadmapping.
• The third exercise (Who does what?) is resource allocation.

The team is now ready to go and execute. Following execution, the team needs to decide whether they want to stop, iterate, or deploy what they’ve worked on or built. This decision relies on validating their big idea or hypothesis. To do this, the team needs to conduct research. This is covered by the fifth and sixth sessions.

The fifth session:

• For hypotheses that can be validated by looking at performance metrics, the first exercise of the fifth session (What do our metrics tell us about the idea?) allows comparison with a baseline.
• For more product-related work, user research is needed to validate hypotheses. In this case, the exercises help organise the research and set it for success.

The sixth session helps make sense of the output from the user research.

• The two exercises (What is the feedback from the user testers?; What can we learn from the user testing?) provide canvas for feedback capture and synthesis into actionable insights.

At this point, the team can make an informed decision about how to proceed with what they’ve worked on or built. If the research has not provided enough evidence that it is working, there is no shame in stopping and moving on to something else. (Some teams set fail criteria to help decision-making be more rational.) If the research has provided ample evidence that what they’ve worked on or built is working, the team can choose to iterate and eventually deploy at scale.

The seventh, and last, session (Does the prototype meet our standard?) is meant to act as a final internal check before deployment to reassure the team, and the wider organisation, that what the team worked or built is ready for the big time.

By following this structured approach, product managers can transform the idea generation process in their media organisations, creating a culture of innovation that values and leverages collective intelligence.

Which can in turn help shift the culture to one where creativity can flourish, staff feel heard, and meaningful innovations can emerge.

Village Media’s North Star: 25% of the total addressable market should be brand lovers

As a media dedicated to “making community news sustainable”, encouraging readers to return, engage and stay is essential to Village Media’s mission. They therefore defined their North Star around the goal of increasing the percentage of brand lovers – anyone who visits their site more than 15 days/month.

This is easy to understand, specific, measurable, and can guide action across the company.

Nation Media Group’s North Star: to become Africa’s premier news destination, with a 500 million daily interactions across all digital platforms by 2027

Speaking to WAN-IFRA, Pamela Sittoni, Group Managing Editor, says their North Star will see the company “transforming into the most trusted, empowering and innovative content platform in Africa; we want to reach 500 million daily interactions or engagements across all our digital platforms.”

Research and analysis into this target suggests this could be achieved thanks to two major transformation moves: newsroom integration into a single team with one editorial direction and central decision making, and a “quality over quantity” content strategy.

This North Star helps inspire the whole company, not just business teams, towards becoming truly digital and continuously thinking about how to ensure the customer is the central focus.

The Irish Independent’s North Star: secure the future of independent Irish journalism, reaching X digital subscriptions by 2025 and generating X revenue

Although slightly outdated, this example from The Irish Independent (shared at an INMA conference) provides a nice visual of the North Star framework in action.

To reach its North Star goal, teams created metrics and then broke them down into smaller, achievable tasks.

Financial Times’ North Star: from engagement to LTV to Global Paying Audience

Since 2016, Financial Times has defined a single metric that matters, a North Star, that they consider essential to digital transformation – the process of evolving an organisation to a point where it can use technology, data and strategy to fulfill its mission, as Tara Lajumoke, Managing Director of FT Strategies until August 2023, shared in an interview.

When defining this first North Star, the team considered the biggest factor that determined whether an FT subscriber would continue to use their subscription. The answer was determined as their level of engagement with content and amount of value they’re getting out of it. 

Thus, FT’s first North Star: RFV (recency, frequency and volume)

The metric looks over a 90-day period and calculates a score based on the number of days since a user’s last visit (recency), total number of visits in that period (frequency), and the number of “counted content pages” viewed.

A user is considered engaged when their RFV score is more than 18.2, and becoming engaged leads to a 10 percent reduction in cancellation rates. 

This became a very concrete, strategic piece of information that people across the organization could understand, use to prioritize their work and rally behind.

For example, with this North Star in mind, the team set out to build a feature called myFT, a simple but effective personalization mechanism based on a subscribers preferred topics. They discovered that the mere act of becoming a myFT user increased engagement by 86%.

Evolving towards a more comprehensive North Star

From a focus on engagement from 2014-2019, FT has since developed their strategy to develop a North Star metric of lifetime value (LTV) in 2020.

Although, it’s worth noting that LTV didn’t replace RFV, but built on it, especially as the latter is an important predictor of the former.

LTV does however support better decision making when assigning resources or prioritizing tasks for acquisition vs retention, or B2B vs B2C for instance.

> Get started with measuring LTV

GPA: Global Paying Audience

From 2023, the North Star was developed to Global Paying Audience, designed to help grow audience revenue beyond its core journalism offerings and across its broader portfolio of products and services, aiming for 3 million by 2028.

The GPA metric encompasses not only the core digital product but also live event customers, FT Specialist and print newspaper circulation, seeking revenue from across a range of sources.

> 100k downloads later, what I learnt from launching FT Edit

Metrics that matter

The Global Paying Audience North Star is part of a wider framework called “metrics that matter”, outlining a range of metrics that sit underneath GPA and used more regularly by different teams across the organization.

In short, Metrics That Matter (MTM) gives all departments at FT a shared framework & common language so everybody in the company can see how their day-to-day work impacts GPA.

• Reduces focus & pressure on the North Star
• Mirrors a simplified customer lifecycle
• Put more focus on retention
• Encourages evaluation of costs
• Links volume and value in all pursuits
• Uses existing metrics where possible

The new metrics “solar system” framework:

This has been established for 7 departments, hosted on FT Intranet for full visibility, with links to the Data Cataglogue (a space to support consistency and ownership of definitions across the business). KPI checklists help measure performance and take action using data.

For example, the consumer revenue group (B2C): (GPA = Global Paying Audience, FT’s current North Star as of 2023)

And Editorial team:

Looking to get started on Metrics That Matter? FT Strategies has created a dedicated playbook!

Eric Le Braz is a journalist, previously taking editor-in-chief roles at Harvard Business Review & Prisma Media, as well as a consultant, reporter and lecturer.

I’m no “locavore” (a French word referring to someone who only ‘eats locally’, consuming things from the region in which they live). For years I lived in Bordeaux without subscribing to Sud-Ouest (the main regional news media in the south-west of France). Of course, I’d buy the odd paper when a headline caught my attention. But, although subscribed to half a dozen other publications, I’d always stood my ground with Sud-Ouest and forced myself to deal with all the premium content that I couldn’t access. 

I admit that, as a wanna-be Bordelais, I should really be reading Sud-Ouest in all its full glory. But I was never quite convinced. 

It didn’t have that spark to make me click.

Then, one day, I cracked. I clicked-through and subscribed… and it was all thanks to a single article. A few perfectly curated lines of text persuaded me into an impulsive purchase. And it’s at this moment that I discovered the impressive force of ‘the hourglass’. 

• What happened? 
• What made me click? 
• And what do you mean by ‘the hourglass’??

To find out more, you’ll have to subscribe to The Audiencers! ;) 

…

I’m only joking. But imagine – right after my smiley, the text fades into a paywall, only available to those who fork out some cash. No subscription, no access. Just the introduction to a story that stops on a cliffhanger. It’s this that makes the hourglass effect so effective. 

The fact that I subscribed to Sud-Ouest that day was down to this technique. I was caught, hook, line and sinker, to the point that I needed to pay to read on.

Let me explain. 

We were mid-lockdown, vaccines were starting to be rolled out and I was desperately trying to find a slot in Bordeaux to get my jab. The only option however was to hop on the train to Arcachon (a small town an hour from Bordeaux). Otherwise no vaccine. But why Arcachon, I wondered. So, I decided to look it up, typing “Arcachon + vaccine” into Google. Which is how I came across this article: 

“

“Why Arcachon has become the champion of vaccination”

It’s simple, not very glamorous, but highly efficient. Intrigued by this title that felt like it would answer my question, I continued reading – a lot of information but no direct response. 

“At Tir au Vol, Arcachon, already more than 22,000 vaccinations had been completed by Wednesday, including nearly all the town’s population and every inhabitant aged 70+ or suffering from underlying health conditions. An impressive efficiency as the mayor, Yves Foulon explains.”

The lead-in isn’t bad either – eliciting just the right amount of fear – efficient, with one piece of information per (short) sentence, taking the form of a report. A sample that tempts me into the subject but still doesn’t answer what was promised (why Arcachon became a vaccination  champion), ending with an offer to subscribe to Sud Ouest’s premium offer.

In paywalls as in love, you have to attract without revealing too much of yourself. 

And so I subscribed to discover the rest, to find the answer to this promise. I was drawn towards the bottom of the hourglass. 

If this was written like an inverted pyramid, I’d already have had my question answered (why Arcachon?). 

But in an hourglass, the publisher only specifies the angle from the title, often in the form of a question, but never provides readers with the answer before the paywall. They’ll outline the who, what, where and when whilst reserving the main answers to the premium part of the content – why, how, and what next? 

I can already hear people in the room whispering that this hourglass is not revolutionary and that good editors know how to harmoniously distribute the three pillars that are so central to starting an article (title, subtitle, lead-in). And also that they know how to combine incentive with information to provide subscribers with additional value.

Yes. But no. 

Just a quick look online and you’ll find that for an overwhelming majority of paywalled articles, the hourglass is blocked. 

• Firstly because we often provide far too much information in the title and subtitle (the 5 W’s in the inverted pyramid), which ultimately reduces our desire to scroll down. We’re blocked at the top of the hourglass
• Secondly because the lead-ins are often forgotten and tend to to be a simple rephrase of the subtitle
• And finally because the paywall cut off is often badly placed. Either its too high and we barely have a chance to taste the value of the content, or it’s too low down the article and we’re already full (our questions have been answered)

There’s worse – I won’t name names but these sites are easy to spot. They’ll throw a title and a heading at you without giving a single lead-in to whet your appetite, an overall off putting strategy that only really works for the Financial Times

The hourglass is a creative constraint. I won’t deny it: an hourglass construction requires more time than an inverted pyramid. But it’s above all a new habit to form for editorial teams, which comes back to the fundamentals of journalism – journalists must make people want to read without sharing everything. It’s useless to show the whole store just in the window.

• Titles should be enticing without sinking into the “clickbait” hole (questions are still welcome as long as you don’t provide all the answers in the initial paragraphs)
• The sub-title should be informative without being a simple summary of the article. On the contrary – with an hourglass, subtitles hint at the facts, insisting on the consequences without evoking the causes. Or the inverse. 
• As for the development, it should be attractive, breathtaking, funny, and create interest in the article or metaphor. The development section is definitely not an introduction. And that’s good because an article is not an essay either. To create a cliffhanger effect, it must activate the plot’s mechanisms… In short: be intriguing.

Isn’t that storytelling? Yep. And it’s not a taboo word. Albert Londres and Joseph Kessel, two famous French journalists and writers from the early 1900s, already knew all the tricks. 

“In Haïfa, I received the first Israel state entry visa”

“And my plane was the first to touch down in free Palestine”

Magnificent hourglass, with no real title (the technique at the time was to deliver complementary information to the title in the subtitle), but with a breathtaking development that immediately makes you want to slam down 5 Francs to discover the rest…

“Hello, hello, Haïfa Tower? Hello, hello, Haïfa Tower?”

The 6 passengers in our little plane (named Petrel), rented in Paris to help us reach Palestine during these tough few days, listened anxiously to their pilot calling the control tower at Haïfa. On the horizon, in the haze of the heat, we could make out the coastline and the snow on Mount Hermon. 

The pilot held his headphones tighter to his ears, before turning his bird-like profile towards us. 

“The orders are to land at Haïfa” – he said. 

I looked around at my fellow passengers and felt the worry that each of us shared. It was Tel-Aviv where we wanted to land. Tel-Aviv belonged entirely to jews. In Haïfa, the boarding place for British troops, what would be done with us? Those who had been refused a British visa. 

“Insist that we land in Tel-Aviv” – I pleaded to the pilot. 

He turned his head, telling me that it’s a fact: Haïfa or nowhere. 

A dark-haired man, sitting behind me all nervous, almost groaned. To have waited for this for 2000 years and maybe for nothing…

I’ll stop here because there are at least the same number of sentences until we get to the scene where he receives the visa, as announced in the title… My point is that 20th century press were already using hourglass structures, plus they didn’t hold back from storytelling techniques… and didn’t produce impoverished journalism profiled by algorithms and SEO.

SEO, let’s talk about SEO. It’s not necessarily the enemy of this form of editing, because the hourglass naturally meets several SEO criteria (and it was indeed by typing “Arcachon + vaccination” that I found my article).

• If the title includes your promise, it’ll look very similar to the question being asked by a user when searching on Google. The URL, in particular, will therefore be very effective for search. 
• Even better: it’s obvious that keywords have their own place in editing. The richness of vocabulary created by layers of complementary information will be a priori seen clearly by these algorithms

And what about the inverted pyramid? It won’t likely have the same fate as the one of Cheops (which remains largely intact), more likely it’s destined to be forgotten like the festoons of the copyist monks or the Nokia 3310. 

It may only survive in unique situations: 

• The pyramid will always be useful to write short reports, but publishers with only this kind of content won’t likely gain individual subscribers
• It can also survive in free media, but sparingly. Because the pyramid is as suitable for reading on a cell phone as a reproduction of Veronese’s “The Wedding Feast at Cana” in paperback. It just doesn’t work. The text that used to flow naturally in print quickly becomes unreadable
• New formats such as ‘listicles’ or ‘smart brevity’ (popularized by Axios) as well as their multiple variations

I digress. But new formats aren’t necessarily incompatible with the hourglass construction. But that’s another story…

This article wrapped up:
- A decision tree, such as the one produced by our consultancy team, can prove invaluable for deciding whether an article should be free or premium
- Consider the goal of each content type (free vs premium, and even different content types within these categories)
- Traffic on paid content can be tracked and analyzed to verify your decision

It’s a common question for publishers launching a freemium model, one of the most popular approaches for employing a subscription strategy where content is divided into free and premium.

For a metered paywall strategy, the answer’s pretty well defined (although this still depends on the publisher’s strategy)…

• Some publishers block after a user has accessed a certain number of articles
• Others present the paywall once the quota of sessions is reached
• And the Peruvian publisher, El Comercio, defines metering as blocking content 24 hours after a user’s first visit

Hard paywall models are equally clear-cut: all content is blocked.

• Financial Times is perhaps the most well recognized example of this model
• Whilst others employ a softer version where the hard paywall is preceded by a soft conversion step, as is employed by Alternatives Economiques who first block a user with a newsletter wall before a paywall on the second article.

But, for publishers employing a freemium model, it’s a little trickier. Given that content needs to fall into either free (unlocked and available for all) or premium (blocked with a paywall and reserved for subscribers), the question comes down to how to best place an article.

There’s a few things to consider, best summarized by this decision tree:

It goes without saying that this tree should also be adapted to your individual strategy, content and audience.

The goal of free content:

• Increase engagement
• Prove the value that you have to offer
• Encourage re-circulation
• Promote your premium offers
• Optional: generate leads for subscription through soft conversion strategies, including registration and newsletter sign up

The goal of premium content:

• Encourage readers to convert, especially with the content above the paywall
• Provide additional value that your readers can’t get for free
• Increase engagement for subscribers to avoid churn
• Be a product in itself

How can you know that you’re making the right decision between free or premium?

There’s an extremely useful KPI that we’d recommend tracking to ensure you’re making the right choice…

Traffic on paid (premium) content.

The basis behind this indicator is simple – out of 100 articles consumed…

• How many are free (not blocked by a paywall)?
• How many are premium (blocked by a paywall)?

Note that this metric shouldn’t be confused with the quantity of premium content produced. You could, for instance, make 80% of the articles published into premium but only have 5% of traffic on this type of content, especially if you don’t work on the visibility of these articles.

Why is traffic on paid content an important KPI to track?

The first edition of The Digital Media Review, a study run by Poool and GESTE, revealed a correlation (to a certain point) between traffic in the subscription funnel/conversions and the visibility of premium content.

If a publisher has less than 10% visibility of blocked content on their site, they won’t have any, or very few, visits to their subscription page. However, if we move to 10-40% visibility of paid content, the amount of traffic in the subscription tunnel and the rate of conversion will both increase.

Notably, though, results suggest that anything above 40% of traffic on premium content leads to the correlation no longer being valid, something that shows the importance of other factors in a successful conversion strategy, such as the publishers value proposition, user experience or engagement.  

Although we’re focussing here on a freemium strategy, this metric is applicable and valuable to any premium model. For instance, with metered approaches, traffic on premium content allows you to understand whether you’ve set the optimal quota of free articles offered prior to the paywall.  

How can you track this indicator?

Unsurprisingly, the first step is to identify the different types of content in your analytics too to be able to compare the two.

• For Google Analytics: create a personalized group and filter based on free vs premium content
• For AT Internet: use a website indicator to do the same thing as above
• Track this indicators for regular readers as well as for subscribers
• We’d recommend tracking both over time and comparing the results with you user-to-subscriber conversion rate.

You’ll end up with a graph looking something like this:

Added bonus: How can you increase the visibility of premium content?

The assumption is that you should produce more premium content to increase the visibility of this type of content. But this isn’t necessarily the best option.

Instead, you can work on making sure that the premium content that you do produce is clearly displayed and fore-fronted on your site.

• Place premium content on the homepage
• Recommend premium content within free articles
• Add a ‘tag’ to premium content to show that it’s reserved for subscribers, alerting the user to this fact before they even open this page

• Promote premium content in newsletters, on social media, etc
• Build personalized journeys for users accessing premium content through a partner’s website such as news aggregator sites, just like JDD did with upday