Q&A: Andrew McGill, Senior PM @ The Atlantic
Last week, the Atlantic launched its first smart speaker skill, the Daily Idea, on Alexa and Google Home. We caught up with Andrew, the product manager behind the launch, to learn more about why the Atlantic is dabbling in smart speakers and what it hopes to learn, and to talk more broadly about what he does as a PM at the Atlantic.
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Can you give us a brief overview of your role and team?
I am a senior product manager on The Atlantic’s product team — for folks who aren’t in product, that’s sort of an opaque term. Basically it’s everything that we do digitally — the product team at large is making our website, but it’s also making our app, and our smart speaker skill, and basically anything that lives on a computer. My job is to think of new things for us to do, and then to make those projects actually happen.
What is an interesting project that you’ve worked on recently?
I have two: one is a public project and one is a fun side project.
First, the public project that we worked on was the Our Towns project — one of our veteran writers, James Fallows, is a pilot, and for several years has done this series of flying around the country and visiting smaller cities to see what’s working in local government that isn’t working in national government. Now he’s launching another journey, and we wanted to build an experience that will let people feel like they’re going along with him. So we built this big digital presence that features all the places Jim has been with this kind of Indiana Jones-style interactive map. It’s got a newsletter, and there’s all sorts of other event-driven stuff that we’re trying to do around it. That was cool because it felt like a part of a full package.
The side thing I was working on is that I am newly addicted to Tik Tok and it’s problematic. I wanted to see if I could wean myself off of [watching viral videos] by making a simple Tik Tok version of The Atlantic just for myself, not for general distribution, that scratches the itch of needing something to flip through in my in-between moments. Every time I’d swipe up in this app, I’d get another Atlantic story. (Ed. note: it’s similar to this Serendipity Google Chrome extension that Andrew also built a few years back.)
I like doing fun things like this that don’t necessarily go anywhere, because they keep your mind fresh to possibilities that could go somewhere, and I also believe that if you have ideas that stick in your mind, that you never let go of to some extent, that it’s helpful to just do them and get them cleared out.
The Atlantic recently launched a smart speaker skill, the Daily Idea. Can you tell us about it and why you chose to do a smart speaker skill?
It’s a news briefing, which basically is a bit of audio we publish everyday. If you ask your smart speaker ‘what’s the news’, and you’ve selected The Atlantic as one of the folks that you want to hear from, you’ll hear it.
It’s a two-minute, always-interesting story: we’re moving away from politics and more into science and family and culture with this, because we looked at the smart speaker landscape and how other news organizations are serving people, and it’s very hard news-driven — it’s very ‘here’s the latest, keep up.’ We thought ‘we do so many stories that invite curiosity … what if we made that the central value proposition?’ to give smart speaker listeners something a bit different.
And we wanted to be in the smart speaker space because we’ve already made such a big investment in audio. I think it’s still being figured out how much news on smart speakers is part of someone’s life, but we wanted to be in that space so we could help figure out the future of it.
What are some of the challenges you see in the smart speaker space right now?
I think discoverability and adoption are twin sides of the same coin that gives me the most anxiety and the least assuredness about the platform. We know people use smart speakers: more are being sold every year, more and more homes are getting them. We don’t know if people use news on smart speakers, and I think that it’s not yet ingrained behavior for someone to say, ‘Alexa what’s the news’, and then listen to a series of two minute clips for 10 minutes while your kids are running around. From my personal experience, I usually use my smart speaker for alarms, timers, music, and sometimes podcasts.
That said, I think it’s so early in the medium’s spread that we don’t really know how people are going to use them, and I think we really have to be in it to try it at all. We’re willing to accept that we might not get the huge audience boost out of any given effort, but we’ll help figure out a strategy that will natively make sense for the platform at some point.
Since adoption and discoverability are ongoing challenges, what would make this a successful project?
We’re looking to set a baseline for how much interest there is for a smart speaker presence from the Atlantic. I had a hard time setting a goal for, ‘we’re going to have this many listens’, because I honestly have no frame of reference: I have podcasts and those are such a different medium, even though they seem similar, that it was hard to say ‘with what I know from [our podcasts] Radio Atlantic and Crazy Genius, we’ll get this much engagement on smart speakers.’ So I’m just kind of owning that, to some extent, and saying we’re using this first foray to set the baseline for what we can expect if we were to do this again and then iterate from there to figure out, ‘okay, how do we double or triple that?’
Switching gears a bit to the more personal, can you tell us how you got into product?
Through a very roundabout way. I was a reporter before I moved into product: I worked at newspapers all the way through coming to Atlantic Media, then at Atlantic Media, I was first at National Journal then came to The Atlantic, where I was on the politics team for a year and a half. My background is in computer science, so I was doing data visualization and data storytelling.
After the election, I wanted to try seeing what the technology of business was like: I was somewhat burned out from working long hours and long nights through 2016, and also had realized that some of the more ambitious digital stuff that I wanted to do would maybe be easier or more fun to do approaching from the product side. I wanted to learn what that side of the business is like, so I switched over.
What is one of the most interesting things you’ve learned from making this transition?
Coming from the newsroom — which is pretty sheltered from a lot of aspects of the business and for good reason — and moving into product, the biggest surprise for me was suddenly hearing about money all the time. I really very quickly got a sense for how our business works and what it needs to be successful. A lot of that is based around a lot of number crunching that I never happened to even think about when I was on editorial — my job was just to write stories.
But it’s rewarding because I really feel like I have a better handle on why certain things matter in our digital space and why we made certain decisions to put an ad here, or a newsletter sign-up there — it’s much more of a whole picture for why the site works the way it does. Plus, it is really fun when you get to work with an excited editor and an excited developer to make something new — that’s just something that is really hard to do on your own as a reporter, or on your own as a developer. But as a product manager, I’m able to know both sides and pull people together, and once that happens, you see that combined excitement and that’s really fun.
What has been one of the biggest challenges?
The timelines are totally different. In editorial, I was worried about a story that I would publish in the next few days, at most before the end of the month, and I never really thought more than a week ahead of time. Whereas with product, I had to actually work on my project management skills quite a bit because you’re working on time frames that spanned months and with teams that could include dozens of people.
So in editorial, I was very much doing my own thing on my own schedule. The only person I was accountable to was my editor when I was a reporter. In product, you are the connective tissue of the entire organization. So you have to keep your time horizon pretty far out, and you have to keep your mind pretty open to all different people that you have to speak to and coordinate with.
What is the most interesting thing that you’ve recently seen outside of The Atlantic?
I’m constantly interested in how people break the traditional article template. That’s my background: I’ve spent so much time writing in article templates that when I see something truly novel that shatters my expectation, I love it.
The New York Times is always on top of this. I’ve especially enjoyed the tap-through stories The New York Times has been doing that sort of emulate Instagram Stories and allow you to page through a visual story in sequence. I think that’s been really cool.
I’m also always impressed by the work that’s put out by an outlet called The Pudding which is kind of a visualization-first storytelling outfit. (Ed. note: we previously did a Subscriber Spotlight with the Pudding’s Ilia Blinderman, which you can check out here.) They constantly find ways to break my computer in good ways. I’m even more excited to see what they do when they move beyond the browser window, because I don’t doubt they’re going to do really cool stuff in terms of installations at some point.
This Q&A was originally published in the June 24th edition of The Idea, and has been edited for length and clarity. For more Q&As with media movers and shakers, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.
