Hearst Tech and Cornell’s Leadership Development Program
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by Johann R. Rodriguez & Caitlyn O’Loughlin
The Hearst Technology & Magazines Digital Media Leadership Program is an innovative leadership program offered through the Hearst Magazines/ Hearst Technology Learning and Development team in partnership with Cornell Executive Business Education.
Over the course of this highly interactive and collaborative 10-week leadership development program, 40 managers and team leads from Hearst Technology and Digital Media explored strategies for leadership presence, candid conversations, team collaboration, design thinking and more.
The heart of the program was a 10-week group project in which participants worked together in cross functional teams to solve some of Hearst’s top business challenges. On Wednesday, July 27th, 2016, the teams presented their projects to key stakeholders and business leads in a Shark Tank-style trade show at Hearst Tower.
Attendees of the Shark Tank (managers, directors, VPs and execs from Hearst Tech and Digital Media) selected as the top three winners those projects that addressed the below three business challenges:
- Tech That Powers Editorial
- Leveraging Bot Technology
- Creating Alternative Revenue Streams
Learn more about the teams and their projects below:
PROJECT 1 — Leveraging Bot Technology
Tell us about your challenge.
Chris Papaleo says,
“We looked at how Hearst brands could leverage bots to have conversations with the massive audiences using messaging apps. We found that while advancements in natural language processing and machine learning have made limited interactions possible, there’s great potential to improve on automated conversational interfaces. We think there’s a real trend in users wanting to engage with brands and businesses in a conversational way, whether via voice assistants or messaging apps so this is an important area to prepare for.”
What did your team propose?
Chris Papaleo says,
“Hearst can advantage itself in this space by organizing its content and data in a way that leverages the intelligence of machine learning algorithms. This will allow us to deliver content and information contextually in a conversation rather than just delivering links to a webpage of pre-packaged article content. After testing a few bot use-cases, our editorial teams will be better informed on what techniques and formats work in conversational products (voice assistants, messaging bots, etc).”
What did you think of this collaborative experience?
Chris Papaleo says,
“Being able to brainstorm and collaborate with people with different backgrounds and skill sets was such a valuable experience. We each have unique perspectives that should guide future product development and general problem-solving.”
PROJECT 2 — Attracting Hearst Talent
Tell us about your challenge.
Jai Grant-Samuels says,
“Team Talent was tasked with making Hearst a more attractive company for current and prospective employees. It was a broad mandate, and after conversations with people inside and outside the company, we decide to focus on Hearst Technology. We realized that Hearst Technology wasn’t even in the drop-down menu under Divisions on the Hearst Careers page, and there was no centralized location for finding jobs and other information related to technology at Hearst. HR team members often pitch Hearst as a “well-funded start-up,” emphasizing both the stability and innovation at the company, but the name Hearst doesn’t always lead to people thinking of Hearst as a technologically advanced company in the marketplace. Our challenge was figuring out how to change the perception of the brand and recruit new talent to Hearst Tech.”
What did your team propose?
Jai Grant-Samuels says,
“Our group proposed a portal devoted to Hearst Technology that is both a standalone site searchable via Google as well as linked off the main Hearst Careers page. We realized that to find all of the information we would want to know about Hearst Technology — what it is, who’s on the team, what the culture is like, job openings, news — we had to go to multiple sites rather than one destination. And the presentation on those sites wasn’t as engaging as the presentation on other start-up sites (like Kickstarter or Refinery 29). This proposed site would also be helpful for current employees looking for other tech opportunities at the company.”
What did you think of this collaborative experience?
Jai Grant-Samuels says,
“Our group agreed that the best part of this experience was getting to know people in other divisions of the company. It was certainly a challenge to work with teammates in different cities and to make time to work on this project in addition to our full-time jobs, but we also liked learning about a challenge the company was facing and trying to tackle it with a fresh perspective. In a way our solution sounds simple, but we determined in order for people in the tech space to view Hearst as a cutting-edge leader, they need to easily access information about what we’re doing.”
PROJECT 3 — Collaboration Platforms
Tell us about your challenge.
Jason Boulware says,
“In essence, the challenge was to determine the best way forward to promote better and more efficient collaboration across the company as a whole and within teams.”
What did your team propose?
Jason Boulware says,
“We proposed a fairly comprehensive solution that involved maximizing and enhancing the collaboration tools that are already available to employees, provide a means whereby new/different collaboration tools could be employed by teams that would integrate with each other and be able to educate users and proactively encourage the use of collaboration tools across the company.”
What did you think of this collaborative experience?
Jason Boulware says,
“I enjoyed it. While stressful at times, I liked being involved in developing solutions for business problems that are outside the scope of what I would typically be working on day-to-day, and interacting with other Hearst employees that I would not typically work with. It was very enlightening and I feel that the end result is that we were able to provide the company with some new ideas — or at least validation of the direction the company is moving in — and also come away with some practical skills that I can apply to make me a better leader and team member.”
PROJECT 4 — Knowledge Sharing & Dashboards
Tell us about your challenge.
Dave Kaczerski says,
“Our challenge was to provide a solution for knowledge sharing and dashboarding for Hearst. We knew the toughest part of this challenge would be addressing the existing culture that doesn’t really encourage and foster knowledge sharing.”
What did your team propose?
Amy Laine says,
“We proposed investment in the Hearst Labs effort. Hearst Labs is rebooting as Hearst Today with enhanced features for knowledge-sharing, and we see great value in the platform and the team’s plans to make it even more robust, encourage greater adoption with a focus on the on-boarding process, and market the platform throughout the company to create a stronger, smarter tool. In time, we see both a customizable home screen dashboard and a mobile application with beacon technology to ID teams and responsibilities at Hearst offices as features that would be appreciated by our colleagues.”
What did you think of this collaborative experience?
Jacqueline Kelly says,
“I was very excited to be a part of this experience. I was able to work with and meet people from different divisions within Hearst that I probably never would have had the opportunity to work with if I wasn’t involved with this program. Through our research, I was also able to get an understanding of the processes within other divisions which I found very interesting. Overall, it was a great experience and I definitely learned a lot!”
Ali Abelson says,
“This experience was a wonderful example of teams coming together here at Hearst to collaborate, network, share information, and most of all learn from each other. The program empowered us to reach outside of our immediate networks and find out more about what is being worked on on other teams. Not only did this help us accomplish our goal for this project, but it has had a positive impact in our ability to do our jobs better, and opened our eyes to all of the amazing things happening here at Hearst.”
PROJECT 5 — Forward Thinking
Tell us about your challenge.
Miguel Mesias-Acosta says,
“We were tasked with looking at the future of Hearst. A challenging concept that involved taking a look a current trends, predictive analysis, future technologies and “moon shot” ideas.”
What did your team propose?
Zach Parker says,
“We proposed building Hearst Concierge, which is a data-driven recommendation engine to power personalized content experiences across multiple media channels.”
What did you think of this collaborative experience?
Zach Parker says,
“It was a great experience to tackle big, open-ended challenges faced by Hearst Media with a group of colleagues from across media, marketing, and tech disciplines. Also the leadership development sessions were extremely valuable, helping us all self-assess and grow as professionals.”
Miguel Mesias-Acosta says,
“It was a great experience to be involved with totally different areas from my day to day activities. During the effort we were exposed to many efforts and divisions we knew little or nothing about.”
PROJECT 6 — Creating Alternate Revenue Streams
Tell us about your challenge.
Brooke Edwards-Plant says,
“We had to ideate a new revenue stream for Hearst.”
What did your team propose?
Scott Both says,
“We proposed a user engagement widget to be added as a feature for editors to use in Media.OS. Upon a user interaction with the widget the editor created on the site data is pushed into Hearst’s Data Management Platform and into MediaOS analytics. Data in the Data Management platform is then sold in an anonymous data marketplace and insights in MediaOS help recommend relevant content for users and inform editorial teams about users feedback.”
What did you think of this collaborative experience?
Scott Both says,
“This was a great program and a good learning experience. It was a challenging project given the short time frame and schedules of the group for their normal day to day jobs.”
Ken Murphy says,
“This was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences I have ever been a part of. I learned so much about Hearst and other divisions within Hearst, than I would have ever learned performing within my normal work boundaries. I was also fortunate to meet some really intelligent people in the process. I call my team functionally dysfunctional, but we really pulled together and developed a really nice plan in the end. It’s amazing really, you go in thinking collaboration as a group must look like one thing, but leave with an understanding that there are many different ways to collaborate and interact as a team. I honestly believe the entire process has made me more self-aware, and a stronger manager and employee. I plan to use what I’ve learned with my team, and in my everyday life.”
PROJECT 7 — Tech That Empowers Editorial
Tell us about your challenge.
Mike Nececkas says,
“We were asked to empower editorial through technology. It was an interesting project because we know how much data comes at editors every day and making sense of it while pitching ideas to your editor can be a difficult balancing act.”
What did your team propose?
Betsy Fast says,
“As editors, we love data — we want to know when our stories resonate with our readers (SCORE!) and when they flop — it helps us create and refine our ideas. We also need to know what’s hot on social all the time. That said — we’re using so many different tools! We’re in Omniture and Chartbeat and Crowdtangle and Dataminr all while refreshing Instagram and monitoring breaking news notifications on our phones. So our team’s idea was to streamline all of this information into a dashboard — a one-stop shop — that lives within our enterprise platform, MediaOS, where our editors are spending most of their time anyway. Building on that, we’d add functionality that would allow our editors to see how topics perform over time to empower them to make smart choices on the spot.”
Rahel Jhirad says,
“We proposed a product for editors called ForeSite that amalgamates articles and topics tailored to her interest, i.e. her site (sites of interest at Hearst to her), buzzing articles across Hearst, topics that competitors are surfacing, topics that are trending on Social (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) and allow the editor to also surface unusual traffic amount celebrity (influencer) social accounts. ForeSite will also be able to display performance across time and allow the editor to compare topics, look at multiple site metrics and have an exploratory tool that would allow editors to navigate the knowledge graph of a personality (similarly to Google’s Knowledge Graph), and be informed about trending topics. The tool would send messenger type alerts to the editor to suggest topics she may not have known about.”
What did you think of this collaborative experience?
Rahel Jhirad says,
“I thought the program did an incredible job at surfacing character traits that were conducive to winning teams. She also highlighted factors that made teams dysfunctional. I think the combination along with self reflection helped make this collaborative experience useful not simply for the end result but a good set of lessons for the future. I think that the collaboration between Hearst Magazines and Technology was extremely valuable for innovating at Hearst. I think a key aspect of technology is to build products that really ‘do’ power Editorial, and having machine learning and data science group talk directly to the end user is a key component to innovation.”
Betsy Fast says,
“I won’t lie — it was challenging. It’s hard to carve out time in the day for a project that isn’t my day job. That said, it was rewarding in the end, and not just because we won some cool books recommended by the folks from Cornell. Highlights for me included meeting and working with Hearst-ees whom I never would have met if it weren’t for this collaboration, and learning how what they do relates to what I do. Oh yeah, and the winning.”
Mike Nececkas says,
I think we all enjoyed it. It was a chance to meet routinely with people in other groups within the organization that we might otherwise haven’t ever met. I think by spending this time together we we’re able leverage each other’s knowledge to scope out an idea that is feasible to build and would directly help editors from day one.”
Interested in joining the innovation at Hearst? Check out opportunities at hearst.com/careers!
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