How I . . . featuring Jessica Morrison
This is Tony Elkins for the News Product Alliance, welcome to the extended edition of “Hi.”
This week we’re featuring the full interview from Jessica Morrison, senior product manager for Chemical & Engineering News. She also works with News Catalyst as a product lead. Before moving into product she was a policy reporter for Chemical & Engineering News as well as Nature, The Charlotte Observer and The Chicago Tribune.
Jessica had so many thoughtful things to say about how she got into product work and building a product culture from scratch, we wanted to share the interview in its entirety.
Tell us about how you made the transition from reporter to product?
We all have these bizarro stories about how we got here. I was a policy reporter covering environmental chemistry, water, nuclear waste, fracking — those sorts of things. I wanted to be a science writer — and then I burned out. I used to joke it was the “nobody wants to talk to me beat” because nobody wants to talk to you and it’s just hard. So I was starting to look around and think about what I wanted to do next with my career.
I started looking at tech, and I saw project management first. That was not a role that existed in my newsroom, but I saw a place for it. Like many others who wind up in this field, I did a lot of work with our creative team and with our web development team, and I saw a place for project management. I started thinking about how I might bring that kind of role, a coordinator-type role, to work on some of our large enterprise projects, particularly ones that we did every year. I saw there were pieces that were repeatable, but we were spending a lot of time digging through emails trying to remember how we did stuff the year before. We could invest in project management to handle those repeatable pieces. And so, the news org created that role for me. I became our newsroom’s first project manager.
I did that for not quite a year before I, with my manager, started thinking about product development. We were looking at what tech was doing and created a product role. My role was created at the beginning of 2018 to bring a product mindset into our newsroom to act on a strategic plan that had been developed by our editor-in-chief a few years earlier.
You mentioned digging through emails for how things get done year-after-year, almost like documentation doesn’t exist in newsrooms. How did you start the process of building a product team?
I stopped reporting in 2017. I work in a non-profit and time moves very, very slowly. So creating a new position takes time. I think I first pitched the role to my manager in 2015, which in internet years is a long time ago. My husband is a software engineer, so I have a window into tech and know how tech companies operate. At that moment in news, “project management” was starting to be a thing. And then right after that “product” became the word of the day.
I went through that same journey looking into tech. I saw project management first and thought, “Oh, this is a thing that we could definitely benefit from.” We do have people who are doing that work, who are coordinating projects, but they’re desk editors and that’s not their job and they don’t enjoy that part of it. Their job is to commission, shape and edit stories. It’s not to wrangle art and web deadlines. It’s also not the job of the people creating our web packages. Basically there’s just this hole. I think a lot of newsrooms have been in, or are still in this place, where you’re kind of in functional chaos. You get the work done, but it’s always difficult.
I’m an Order Muppet through and through, so I look at these things and I say, “Okay, how do I start to untangle this chaos? How can I help? How can I help all of these people work together better?”
Journalists are used to working on deadlines and they’ll work on the deadlines they have. If you have one day, you’ll get it in a day. If you have a month, you’ll get it done in a month. We can build these timelines out. A lot of the project management work was bringing in that mindset. Let’s work together on our timelines. There’s things like bringing in the idea of a kickoff meeting for projects. Meetings have always existed but people weren’t getting together early in the process to survey what is going to be happening to us next month. That was what a lot of the project work was. I had this window into tech, and how tech operated, and I wanted to bring that into my newsroom.
So you started with product management and now you’re doing product work, what does your day in product look like?
Every day is different. The thing that is the same is, I am definitely on a meeting schedule. My days are all meetings. That was not the case when I was a reporter, I barely used my calendar when I set up interviews. I didn’t do calendar invites. I couldn’t imagine not sending a calendar invite now. I 100 percent live by my calendar.
We work in two week sprints, so I do sprint prep early in the week. I make sure our sprint board is tidy before we go into a planning meeting. We keep vacation time on our board too, so I’ll go in and make sure that kind of stuff is cleaned up. I’ll look at our backlog and compare tasks that are on it to our roadmap. I’ll check to see if there is anything that’s timely. We have a stakeholder group who prioritizes our work by business needs pretty regularly, but I’ll go through and do passes just to see if there are any time needs that need to be elevated. I run the stakeholder prioritization on Mondays. If any new product requests come in, I will collect all of those and send it through our prioritization process.
Also, I don’t have to lead all of the meetings, and that was by design. I want to be able to go on vacation, or be sick or whatever, and I want the same thing for everybody else. I coach the team to know which direction to go. I do a lot of coaching for our product owners. In my role, I am the only full-time dedicated product person. We have this product team of 15 people, but it’s cross-functional. All those people have another job. I’m the only person who’s dedicated full time.
I don’t do beginning-to-end product development management. That is a product manager job, but I don’t do that because our portfolio has 60 products in it, and I can’t possibly do the management for all of those products. The way we handle it is we have product owners who are responsible for the strategy of their individual products.
Those product owners are editors, reporters and directors. They’re the same people who have always technically owned things, but we’ve never called them that. We’ve never explicitly said, “You are the owner of this thing. It is your responsibility to think about the long-term strategy for it. And I’ll help you. I’ll help you remember to do that if it’s not the most important thing on your plate.” I do a lot of coaching with that group.
We have a staff-wide roadmap that has annual initiatives on it that comes out of product. I do a lot of the guiding, shepherding and development of it. I also take care of our product portfolio, which is the big list of all the stuff we consider product, who the owners are and whether it’s in ideation, discovery, growth, development or maintenance.
I oversee all of these things — things I’ve built in this role. I built out all of this product infrastructure for the newsroom to help us build products, manage them, make decisions about what we should build and what we should not build and what we should say goodbye to, which is an important thing people forget.
Can we backtrack and talk about prioritization? How does it work in your org?
We take product requests through Slack. Anybody on staff can submit a product request and there’s a channel for it. There’s a product stakeholder group that’s part of our product team made up of the heads of our business units within the newsroom. Our editor-in-chief is at the top, she is ultimately a stakeholder for everything, but she’s not part of this product stakeholder group. Basically, all the people right under her at the director-level are product stakeholders. It’s the head of editorial, revenue, creative, operations, and engineering.
Every Monday I collect all the new requests that have come in since the previous Monday and drop those into a Slack DM and say, “Hey, here are the new requests for this week. Please leave your prioritization by 1:00 p.m. EST.” Our big product team meeting is at 2 p.m, so I give them until 1:00 to get that done.
The way we do it is, I put each of the tasks as an individual line and they vote by fruit emoji in Slack. If it’s a high priority to you, you put an apple. If it’s medium, you put a tangerine. If it’s low, you put a lemon. And if you think we shouldn’t be doing this work at all, you put an X on it. Those are the options and they do this individually and asynchronously. They have a couple of hours to put their priority there.
As you can imagine, depending on what the work is, the priority might be different for the head of operations versus the head of revenue. Or operations versus creative. If the task is creating new logo art for a LinkedIn launch the person in creative might care more about the priority of that than the person in operations. If it’s an editorial project that’s going to launch in two weeks, the editorial person might be like, “This is definitely an apple.”
If there’s a disagreement I will start a conversation on that ticket. The disagreement would have to be something like three people put apples and three people put lemons. It’s not necessarily mediums. The average is not the priority. If it’s four apples and two tangerines I’ll put it at the bottom of high priority. It’s pretty easy to make those choices. It’s pretty quick and not another meeting. It’s a way those people all come together and they all get to have a say in the prioritization.
I’m so glad you explained that because I hear journalists who think product is a black hole and they don’t know what happens, or how decisions are made.
I’m gonna say one other thing about that, that part happens in private, not necessarily trying to be private, it’s just a DM with that group of people. Once things have been prioritized, it’s all in the backlog and that is visible. If someone wants to see where their task is, where their request is, they can go see it.
We use Asana for all of this, so if you put a request in and it gets prioritized and is in the next sprint, you’ll be tagged in the ticket. Even though you’re not on the product team, you’ll know that people are working on it. There’s also a good chance if you own the product we’re going to need input from you. People get brought into the process from outside the team.
Because we’re situated basically right in the middle of our newsroom, we’re not a black hole. Each one of those stakeholders are the head of all of these other teams. So they represent their teams, they report back to their teams. We are not walled off, we’re right in the middle and everything’s flowing through us in a lot of ways.
Did you run into any friction, or was it hard to introduce these tools like Asana to journalists?
Yes and no. I think it was a new thing and we have all been inundated with new things over the last decade. There’s been just so much change and I think a lot of people are a little apprehensive when you say, “Okay, we’re going to do another new thing.”
I chose Asana because the interface was very much like a to-do-list, which I thought was approachable and accessible for journalists. It was appealing to me, and I was still effectively a journalist. What I didn’t want to do at that time was do something like go into Jira, because I knew that everyone would scream and run from it.
Once we decided on Asana I tested it by using it on a project. I was running a couple of our big enterprise projects. I took one of those and talked to the editor who was in charge of it and said, “Hey, I want to test this project management software that would allow us to timeline out the whole project from the very beginning, assign roles and be very transparent about it.” She was on board and so we tested it, and now our production team uses it, our big projects are run in it now — all separate from the product team.
Other parts of the newsroom use it. I wouldn’t say writers are using it every day, but people who work on projects are using it. I think there was some friction, but it was really just, “What is this? Why are we using it? How’s it gonna make our lives better?”
Then there’s the ticket thing. That was a work in progress. Now, I’d say it all works pretty well, but the stakeholder team did a lot of messaging early on reminding people to submit requests. We always had requests but we didn’t call them that. There were always people who would run into a developer in the hallway and say, “Hey, I want to do this mapping thing.” Or say, “Hey, can you build this thing for me really quick?”
Our developers were stuck trying to prioritize, but they didn’t have a way to prioritize work or assess business needs. It was all flowing around and there was some work to remind people, “Hey, put this in as a product request.” Even our editor-in-chief, she would come to me or someone else with a great idea and I would say, “Hey, will you put that in as a product request?”
I know we’re asking you to do another step, but it’s so we can keep track of your request and it doesn’t get delayed. These conversations just used to happen out in the newsroom flow and certain things got lost, and people got mad. Now I love that we’re starting, as an industry, to really track and be responsible for this.
That seems like such a unique way to build a product team. It seems so simple, but it also seems revolutionary at the same time, to give your product owners agency, ownership and responsibility.
Yeah, one of the things that allowed this to be successful is that our product team is the same people who are reporting, designing and building. Product is not a team on the side where no one understands what we’re doing.
We are effectively the same people. It’s a core unit of the newsroom completely connected. The writers and editors are connected to the product team through the editorial director. The designers and UX people are not all on the product team, but they’re connected through the creative director. We don’t have a production editor on the team, but they’re connected through the head of operations. We’re sitting right in the middle and we’re doing the same kind of work that we’ve always done. We’re just doing it differently.
And it’s being managed by an Order Muppet, but one who absolutely values creativity. I think order allows us to be more creative because you order the things that are necessary. Let’s not do all of that stuff in chaos.
Let’s organize these things so that we have more space in our heads to do the more exciting things.
That’s how I think about this work. There’s the piece of knowing your audience very deeply — which we haven’t gotten to yet — then there’s this other stuff that’s internal that I get really excited about, which is how can I help our teams work better together so that they’re not just spinning their wheels.
You mentioned the audience, so let’s dive into that. How do you approach the idea of consumers as you’re building your product team?
Our product team is responsible for three things — product strategy is building out the infrastructure, product development is the building and the third piece is product research.
This is another thing that came with the creation of this role. We have a product research group of about 400 people and whenever we want to test an idea for a new product, feature, service or event we will go to that group and pull people testing, interviews or surveys. It helps us build faster and smarter. That was a pretty big shift for us and we’ve been doing that since 2018.
We were definitely a traditional waterfall organization. Historically, whenever we built things, you might spend a year building it, then you launch it. Now we’re more agile, lowercase agile. We’re pulling research in, getting user feedback. It’s beginning, middle, middle, middle, end, beginning again. We’re constantly learning. That was not a hard sell for the newsroom. I’m very lucky that I work in a news organization that is full of scientists. Doing discovery interviews is a completely obvious thing for journalists to do. When I first started doing this, it was the part of the job,it’s still the part of the job I enjoy the most.
It’s the same work I was doing before, I’m just writing for a different audience. I’m writing for an internal audience now instead of the external one. I get to be very close to our audience and then one of the things I always like to say about that, which like everybody knows at this point, is one of the best things about doing product research is that it allows you to test your assumptions.
We like to think we are our audience, or we have been our audience in the past. I was a chemist, many of our writers,editors and production editors were chemists. So of course we know what they want and what they like (Editor’s note: Jessica was shaking her head in an emphatic “no” while saying this).
Having the ability to do research allows us to stop and say, “Wait, why don’t we just ask them?” We don’t need to spend time thinking about, and talking about, what they like. We can just ask them.
Let’s talk about the work you’re doing coaching. So many of us are doing this work without a framework for reference, so can you share what you’re doing with News Catalyst?
I started working with News Catalyst a couple of years ago, right around the time they were starting up. Aron (Pilhofer) brought me on because he saw some of the work that I’d been doing at C&EN.
I did a prioritization activity at SRCCON with a packed room. I think there were 60 people, and I gave them a list of product requests to prioritize as a group in 10 or 15 minutes. I basically ran the live version of my Slack DM.
It was super fun. Everybody had a role. They all had cards where they were assigned either by revenue, creative or whatever, and they had to embody the role and prioritize this list of requests. People were sweating. I heard people say, “This feels very real.” But they also got to the end of it and were like, “Wow, we just did this in 15 minutes. You know, we’ve felt all our feelings about our stuff, and we did it in 15 minutes.” Aron saw that, learned more about the work I’d been doing and brought me on to share some of it through News Catalyst.
I’ve been consulting on projects with other newsrooms and helping coach this style of product-thinking and infrastructure. I’m working on something for them that we’ve been calling Product Kit, which is a writeup of the product strategy, the development of the research as the responsibility of the product team and how it works in a small-to-medium size organization.
The other thing I worked on last year with them was the development of the Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms program.
I worked on curriculum development, helping sort what you would want to learn if you were new to product, if you’re looking to get into product and how do you do this stuff, particularly in a small newsroom. I also have run their team module a couple of times sharing how I built my team and how it works in a way that’s a lot more relatable for people in small newsrooms than say the Washington Post and New York Times.
Those places are aspirational, but they’re not going to be achievable. I don’t see my team having even a handful of product managers, let alone 20, 30, 40, whatever exists in these larger organizations. We’re not ever going to be at that scale and we don’t aspire to be. We will always be a medium, small-size news organization. It’s about giving some of these smaller news organizations a view into that process and helping them see what they can do with the resources that they have.
What’s the appetite for this introduction to the product world from these medium and small organizations.
They have a huge appetite for it, in the same way that you and I could probably talk about the nitty gritty details all day long of how to run these things or how we run them. The same thing happens when I’m running these workshops. Every time I do this, whether it’s in-person or remote, I stay half an hour after just talking because people want to know how to prioritize, set up an Airtable or Asana or get people to buy in.
“How do you get leadership to buy in to do this? How do you recruit people for the team?” There’s all of these questions, but I’m not Dr. Jessica Morrison, knower of all things. I’m Jessica Morrison, an experimenter with processes, here’s what I’ve figured out and here’s what didn’t work.
What piece of advice, or how would you guide someone who’s in their newsroom that may be running these project teams without a product title or framework? How do they start controlling all the chaos?
The thing that helped this team form was building the stakeholder team. That happened before we had a product team. Initially it was just me. I wrote a charter for a team that didn’t exist yet. I wrote processes for a team that didn’t exist. I was just kind of doing this thinking work. “How would I organize this, If I could.” I looked at our org chart. I started there. This is a mess, but how would I change this org chart to do the work we’re doing today?
Before I started doing the product work I just started being a project manager and could see all of this chaos in our newsroom. I felt fairly strongly it was, in part, a result of our org charts being kind of duct-taped together after years of layoffs and different kinds of disruption in the industry. Jobs everybody had been doing in newsrooms for years and years and years and years didn’t make sense anymore.
We were still trying to fit ourselves into these roles that just didn’t fit anymore. I think the product team, the way we have it in the middle of our newsroom, is very much born out of this idea of looking at the org chart and just moving things around. Maybe we’re not working in the best ways together. It’s doing that work and getting your leadership onboard. I was very, very lucky because my leadership wanted this. They created the role right before they even had any idea what I would do in it.
They gave me this role and said, “Okay, Do something.” If you can get your leadership onboard, start with one person, then grow that. Grow your sphere of influence to get everybody moving in the same direction.
How do you see product and product-management shaping the news industry over the next few years?
We use the word sustainable all the time.
I hope sustainability extends not just to the business being sustainable, but to individual people doing the work so they can persist without as much chaos.
The work is always inherently going to be stressful because many of us cover things that are stressful, but the systems that allow us to do the work don’t have to be stressful. I see my work in product trying to figure out how to remove some of that.
And again, there’s the two different sides. There’s the audience facing part of product, and setting up your teams, which maybe isn’t even product. It’s possible that’s something else. I just happened to be doing it through product.
Product teams have a sort of unique ability to be at the center of everything and can help change our internal cultures to change the way we work. We can drive that kind of change.
If you found this via Twitter or someone forwarded it to you, be sure to sign up for the newsletter at newsproduct.org. If you’re interested in sharing your path to product I would love to talk to you. You can fill out this form or reach out to me on Twitter.
Talk to you soon,
Tony Elkins,
NPA Creative Director, Gannett Director of Innovation
