The steps senior leadership must take to support collaborative, transformative, product-led cultures

I am back after a week’s break and an incredible trip to Porto. I promised my wife I would take her there and originally had hinted that I would take her there to propose. We celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary in February so it took me a while. However, this is the quintessential case of better late than never. I first went to Porto almost 20 years ago with my parents, as an anniversary gift to them. I thoroughly enjoyed it then, but my wife and I loved it this time. The city is a foodie and wine lover’s delight with plenty of exceptional food and wine at reasonable prices - case in point, the Mercado do Bolhão. Right, this isn’t a food or travel newsletter so I’ll return to your regularly scheduled programming.

In my last newsletter, I wrote about product managers’ cross-functional superpowers, and that’s true whether they are working in news organisations or other industries. Working across silos is key to managing large complex projects, whether that is editorial or the commercial-technical-editorial work necessary to sustain news organisations in the volatile markets of today. Product managers are naturally inclined to cross-functional work. They explore and cross the internal and external boundaries of their organisations out of natural curiosity. (I am finding that the boundaries I enjoy exploring most are external to the organisation, with customers, partners and suppliers, which is common to market research and partnerships.) Product managers built up expertise, relationships and trust across the organisation before they transitioned into formal product roles.

Transformation projects and product operations are imperilled when that trust is damaged or when frustrations build over delivery, which can be a product or project management issue. When I was at The Guardian, we were in the midst of a massive re-platforming, R2 - re-design and relaunch. It absorbed almost all of our technical and delayed delivery on near-term priorities from the editorial teams. That created a lot of conflict internally between the technical team and the various editorial centres of power, which were legion and fractious.

That is now a long time ago. I was at The Guardian between 2006 and 2010, but these issues still exist, even at large, well-regarded, product-led news organisations. In my research, I thought I would find that large news organisations would be better at cross-functional product operations, and they were in general. However, with the volatile media market right now, several large news organisations are going through major transformation projects - CNN, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The industry press if full of stories about the challenges and internal tensions involved. If you look at the Washington Post, before its current conflict with its new CEO, it was in crisis with losses and layoffs. For those in the product community, the Post lost several well-regarded technology and product leaders.

Silos that are busted can be rebuilt. Fortunately, there is excellent research on how to work in collaborative, cross-functional teams. Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson outlined how leaders build collaborative teams in the Harvard Business Review. Teams are increasingly “large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly educated specialists”, but these characteristics “make it hard for teams to get anything done”. To counter these factors and support collaboration, “requires thoughtful, and sometimes significant, investments in the capacity for collaboration across the organization”.

They reviewed 55 organisations that demonstrated highly collaborative working practices and found several common elements, several of which I found in my research as well.

• Executive support - I found that high-level alignment was necessary. This research found that executives also needed to “invest in supporting social relationships, demonstrate collaborative behavior themselves”.

• Invest in signature relationship practices - Collaborative companies invested in “building and maintaining relationships throughout the organisation”. This is critical. Product managers in my research naturally created these relationships. Companies that were able to build collaborative cultures intentionally fostered and nurtured these relationships.

• Modelling collaborative behaviour - The senior leadership in these companies modelled collaborative behaviour. I have seen the inside of a lot of media organisations. Some have collaborative cultures, but I have also worked for and seen many that have high degrees of internal competition amongst fiefdoms.

• Create a “gift culture” - Leaders need to engage in mentoring and coaching behaviour and make sure that it becomes embedded across the organisation.

These are the things that leadership need to do. It goes beyond simply aligning around goals and outlines the continual, intentional process of modelling a collaborative culture that is necessary for complex, cross-functional work, of which product work is an important element. Now onto the links for this week.

Doug McCabe at Enders Analysis looks at ways that publishers can find their next source of growth. He sees a shift from generalist to niche publications, and I would add that those publications need to ensure that their content is distinctive and adds value.

This is a great example of how smaller, more engaged audiences are the key to success for modern news organisations. Dennik in central Europe provides a great playbook on how to achieve it.

The common theme in the application of AI in journalism is humans in the loop. Ultimately, they assist but do not supplant journalism. I always thought of it this way. I would outsource to machines (or to lower cost labour) tasks that freed up journalists to do more original reporting, a thing that AI cannot do.

We’re going through a phase in journalism in which large media organisations have cast off huge numbers of staff, and some of them are creating their own publications and supporting themselves on platforms like Substack or Beehiiv (which I use to publish this newsletter).

The Boston Globe hired three staffers to create a podcast, but they are now redeploying them because they have found that podcasts do not drive subscriptions.

In this year of critical lessons, journalists are working to fact-check candidates. Research has found that journalists gain more trust when confirm claims rather than when they debunk them. That may prove difficult with certain candidates - not naming names.