Why news organisations need to embrace the cross-functional superpower of product managers

After I finished my master’s now more than two years ago, I had the honour to present my research to journalism leaders a couple of times. Some of them were doing research of their own. One critique that I have faced is that I had highlighted problems facing product managers at news organisations but that I hadn’t provided solutions.

Academic research is a different beast than industry research, and it is about focus, particularly at the master’s level. In academic research, one paper can identify an issue, and another paper then looks at a solution. I am motivated to continue my research because I have heard positive feedback that I have identified an important issue affecting retention and the effectiveness of product management at news organisations.

However, my master’s studies in innovation management and leadership did give me some great ideas for how to improve product management generally, and in news organisations specifically.

Building cross-functional relationships

To develop managers and to increase innovation capabilities, news organisations should identify possible innovation and product leaders and give them opportunities to work across the organisation, across editorial, commercial and technical teams.

What was interesting is that my research found that product managers did this naturally. They reached across the organisational boundaries in their organisations because they were curious about how everything in publishing or broadcasting worked. For those coming up through the editorial side of their organisations, like me, this was just an extension of the curiosity that had attracted them to journalism in the first place. The relationships that they developed via informal, internal networking positioned them to be successful product managers. One highly successful product manager in a large digital news organisation continued this practice in the role, having informal meetings with colleagues he worked with cross-functionally.

This cross-functional curiosity wasn’t always rewarded my research participants and product management friends in the industry told me (and I have experienced first hand). With editorial being the apex culture in news organisations, any deviation from that career path can be a “career-limiting exercise”, to borrow a phrase from a former manager. Many product managers who left the editorial career path struggled to ever cross that boundary back to senior editorial management. Product-minded editorial managers rise in editorial only if they stay in the newsroom. This is all to say that news organisations have a poor track record of rewarding cross-functional work and leadership.

Outside of journalism, it is much different. Innovative companies formalised this relationship and skill-building. They identified cross-functional curiosity and fostered it in future leaders, either product managers or general managers. It allowed them to build up relationships and domain knowledge across the business.

Supporting cross-functional, boundary-spanning work

I think this doesn’t happen enough in news organisations because of the church-state boundaries between editorial and commercial teams. It’s not just church-state boundaries but the primacy of editorial leadership in news organisations. As Lucy Küng says, editorial is the apex culture in news organisations. Editorial teams need to be more collegial and support cross-functional collaboration.

Working across these boundaries is critical for the future of news businesses, but we struggle to do it. Most journalism leaders call it cross-functional work, but researchers call it boundary-spanning. I came to really appreciate the term boundary-spanning because cross-functional focuses on functions and the org chart. Boundaries are a much richer way to analyse the things that get in our way of functioning more effectively as organisations.

Those boundaries can be physical as well as organisational. At one of the newspapers I edited in Wisconsin for Gannett, the commercial and administrative staff were on the first floor, and the editorial teams were on the second floor. A plaque with the First Amendment hung on the wall of a landing on the stairs. It was a clear boundary marker between the commercial and editorial territory of the newspaper.

Yes, there are team boundaries, but there are boundaries of language. I spoke to a product manager outside of journalism, and he described feeling like a translator at the UN or sometimes feeling like he had to have a passport to reach outside of his team.

In media organisations, boundaries exist around deadlines as well. Print journalists used to talk about the daily miracle of putting out a newspaper, and in the era of 24/7 news, deadlines are continuous and rolling. Digital project deadlines can stretch into months, especially with large projects like re-platforming to a new CMS or CRM. I have seen firsthand how these differing timelines can cause friction. If those conflicts aren’t managed, critical cross-functional relationships are damaged. Product managers rely on these relationships to get things done, and the conflict can lead to unsustainable stress that leads to burnout for product managers.

In my research, many product managers said that their boundary-spanning, cross-functional work wasn’t valued or supported. It might well be that managers don’t understand product management. That was another issue that product managers raised. Of course, it is different for most large organisations like the BBC and the New York Times, and Dean Roper of WAN-IFRA just teased on LinkedIn that news organisations say product management and R&D are their biggest priorities in the annual Press Trends survey.

Managing emotional labour in the workplace

Of course, my research identified another issue: the emotional labour that women in product management experienced. As I pointed out in my newsletter last week. this wasn’t work that the business expected of women, but the women all spoke that they thought supporting their colleagues emotionally was important work. And they didn’t see others stepping up to do it. This was the most unexpected finding of my research, and it made me aware of how this happens in the workplace. It is like something difficult to unsee once seen, and I am very aware of it now.

Another thing that my research sensitised me to is women taking conflict in the workplace personally. As my research unfolded, I began asking the men and women in the research how they interpreted conflict in their cross-functional work. One woman said:

Another woman working at a small digital publisher said she felt a lack of understanding of her role and her team’s role and their contributions. She took this personally particularly when it was directed at her team members.

Taking conflict personally wasn’t universal amongst the women in the research, but it was common amongst those women who left jobs or the industry. But this was almost entirely absent from the men in the research. When men spoke of conflict in their work, I asked them whether they took it personally. One man working at a small broadcaster said he didn’t take it personally and kept in mind they were all part of the same team.

My suggestions to news organisations who want their product function to be more effective and who want to attract and retain product talent:

1. As I wrote as I opened this series on my research, senior management must be aligned on high-level goals and priorities. This will mitigate the conflict around cross-functional work.

2. Managers need to be aware of issues around emotional labour, particularly women in management roles. I don’t think that this impulse is limited to product management roles.

3. Women most often talked about engaging in emotional management when they sensed conflict. Their managers need to be aware of conflict that arises in cross-functional, boundary-spanning work.

On that last point, that is an area that is ripe for additional research. It was one of the shortcomings of my paper that I didn’t leave myself enough space to discuss where to take my findings next. Managing cross-functional team conflict is well-researched, and it’s a way that academic research can support product management in news organisations. I’m going to look into the research a bit more and will add more here.

And now onto the links for this week.

The classic interview question: What do you want to be doing in five years? The Washington Post believes that the job many journalists will be doing in five years currently doesn’t exist. She is the Post’s first senior editor for AI Strategy and Innovation. The profile and interview outline her career journey and the work that she is doing now with teams across the Post to integrate AI into their work.

Reach in the UK is seeing some bright spots in their revenue situation as they start to see digital revenue growth for the first time since 2022. The group has seen traffic drop from Facebook, which had been key to its strategy, particularly at their national titles. Programmatic rates have stabilised. It provides insights into how volume publishers are finding some opportunities.

El Nacional’s experience with SEO jibes with what I have seen for several publishers: Google Discover is driving a lot of traffic for them. The group’s focus on content makes so much sense with Google’s Helpful Content Algorithm update earlier this year. It benefits distinctive content and will punish ‘spammy, low-quality’ content, Google said, not mincing words.

At El Nacional, they talk about playing offence with their reporters producing original, investigative journalism and defence, journalist producing lifestyle content and their designers, creating great user experience. Their ‘defensive midfielders’ are their SEO staff, working to make sure that their great content is discoverable.

It has been a tense few weeks in the UK after the shocking murder of three girls in Stockport. Communities across the UK have seen anti-immigrant violence with attacks on police and journalists. Another element of this is not only how social media and messaging apps have played a role in fomenting violence but also how EX-Twitter owner Elon Musk has inserted himself into the situation, levelling a charge against the British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer that is common amongst far-right agitators. Across the political spectrum, those who have used the platforms to make threats and stoke violence are facing the full force of the law in the UK. Fighting words aren’t protected speech in the UK or the US.

A cool bit of inside the Olympic games with a look at how Getty is getting those incredible images from the games. Private 5G networks, underwater robots and more.