The Dow Jones Tech Journey

After four years as Chief Product & Technology Officer at Dow Jones, an institution with so many iconic brands —WSJ, MarketWatch, Barrons, Factiva —I have been both impressed and humbled by many things. When reflecting on how far we’ve come and how much we’ve accomplished, I wonder what has had the greatest impact. What should we be the most proud of?

When I joined the team, the need to comprehensively modernize was imperative. Five years ago, we risked falling behind if we did not act quickly. The media industry was in the middle of significant disruption — consumers had gone digital and smartphones had become the most widespread means to consumption. Traditional advertising models were being overhauled, and content paywalls were still an emerging business model.

At Dow Jones, we were fortunate that our core was strong. With over 130 years of experience, Dow Jones has never been a stranger to technical evolution. We founded our business on print and ticker tape, helped birth newswires and financial reporting, and created one of the internet’s first paywalls.

Our customers have always valued our world-class publications and products, including the flagship Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and Dow Jones Newswires. But, maintaining our leadership in the field was going to require total transformation. That’s why, looking back, there were a number of things that we did that positioned us so well.

Cloud Evolution

Six years ago the cloud was pretty nascent for established corporations, and cloud-based tools were far less sophisticated than they are today. But our leadership team understood the cloud’s potential for our data, and saw how it could fuel innovation that would ultimately benefit our products — and, most importantly, our customers.

Like many large organizations, we were managing a significant amount of technical debt. In order to successfully and sustainably transition to the cloud, we had to reimagine our technical architecture and focus short-term investment on upgrading our legacy systems.

It also led to some hard conversations with stakeholders around why we might not be able to deliver a new feature or tool. They understood the urgency and believed that by investing in solidifying the foundation, they would reap the benefits of faster innovation down the line.

After the bulk of our systems were upgraded and those that could be were moved to the cloud, we shifted from focusing on reducing legacy to optimizing resiliency, implementing regular upgrades and adding incremental improvements. This enabled us to control our costs and freed up bandwidth and people to build out new features more rapidly. We also consolidated our data, positioning us better for collaboration and capitalized on other teams’ work.

People Empowerment

As we moved into developing more customer-facing features, we realized that we needed to evolve our culture as well. Many of our product and technology leaders had been accustomed to receiving directions rather than partnering with stakeholders to identify solutions. At the heart of it we had to empower our people and our teams, and trust that by empowering them, great solutions for our customers would follow.

Empowerment is a combination of autonomy — the ability to make independent decisions, balanced with accountability — the ability to be responsible for those decisions. We granted our people autonomy and accountability as expressions of trust: trust that they will make thoughtful decisions; trust that they will take responsibility for their choices and actions; and trust that they will come to leadership when they need help or make mistakes.

We made it very clear that our leaders’ performance would be evaluated on two things: how successfully they empowered and grew their own people, and how well they partnered with business stakeholders to make technical decisions and influence delivery timelines.

Make data and technology everybody’s responsibility

An unexpected benefit of empowering our people, is that it increased creativity across the Technology department organically. We wanted to further democratize innovation and amplify the organization’s ability to develop new, relevant tools and products in every department — not just our own.

To engage both our technical and non-technical colleagues alike, we launched the Dow Jones Data Academy — a series of courses taught by our own internal data experts covering a range of topics from entry level to expert. Course offerings ranged from ‘Demystifying Data Science’ and ‘Personalization 101’ to hands-on design thinking workshops and Python training sessions. In a matter of months, people started talking in terms of data. They wanted to understand how they could access data to make better decisions and uncover new learnings and insights about our customers and products.

I had no idea how successful it would be. There is a waiting list for nearly every class — hundreds of colleagues are voluntarily learning and upskilling. Innovation can happen anywhere — and if it’s working, it will start to happen all over the business.

Applied Innovation

One key to achieving our digital businesses growth rate was through applied innovation, meaning we specifically targeted areas of our business to accelerate new product development. We wanted to encourage our teams to start thinking differently and get involved in the process, so we held hackathons and blue sky workshops, and also utilized design thinking tools. All this creativity was anchored by clear linkage to business outcomes. We evaluated ideas to see if they would realistically move the needle, rather than just seem impressive.

We used this methodology to transform our digital advertising technology business, which enabled us to develop data-driven ad products that surpassed our rivals and positioned us among digitally native organizations — no mean feat.

Biggest learning

Ultimately, the true test of success is measuring the increase to customer benefit and business growth. We saw expansion in every area of our business and we became a subscription powerhouse, with digital subscriptions growing to more than 3.9 million in the past 2 years.

I’ve learned from experience that a CPTO’s most important contribution to an organization has surprisingly little to do with technology. They must adjust their focus toward creating a culture where both people and innovation can thrive.

As a technology expert, your ego must be tabled to allow people on your team to build their own ideas and solutions — and make their own mistakes. It is critical to success. I’m proud to be able to look back on my time as a leader, and see that our talented team moved the company forward.