Innovation can be productised, INMA Product Initiative Lead Jodie Hopperton wrote in her takeaways from the Product Innovation Master Class: “Be intentional about what you are testing and what you want to build into your business as usual capabilities. Some formats may not work, some should stay unique. Innovation needs trial and error!”

At the recent INMA event, media leaders shared how companies can think about productising innovative formats and provided examples of innovative formats that keep user values at their core.

The Wall Street Journal

Robin Kwong, new formats editor at The Wall Street Journal, shared a case study of a product the newsletters team has worked on in recent years.

An article about rising inflation in the United States, published in WSJ in 2022, served as the inspiration for an innovative newsletter, Kwong said: “The story broke down the Consumer Price Index into its individual components, and explained how different goods, products, and services were driving inflation rates.”

Since the writers had done the hard work of breaking down the information, his team set about creating a way for readers to “interact with the data, choose the goods and products that are relevant to your life, to see what your personal inflation rate would be.” From there, the Personalised Inflation Tracker was created.

Readers can select what’s important to them, he said, which helps to give them a more tailored look at how inflation directly impacts their lives. (A lactose-intolerant person, for instance, “probably doesn’t care about the price of milk.”) Then, because inflation rates can change, Kwong’s team turned it into a subscription service. Every month, when new CPI data is released, an update is sent to subscribers based on their selections.

The personalisation was a “technology-driven innovation that allowed us to do something new we couldn’t have done before.” Kwong said they’re “still thinking about how this newsletter product fits into our overall reader value strategy,” though it addresses both delight and reliability, and it expands on the “conciseness” pillar by being highly relevant.

Financial Times

Competing in today’s market means being able to innovate the way content is presented. Debbie McMahon, product director at FT.com, said the company has developed what it calls the 80/15/5 guideline to determine how it presents content.

“Previously, the vast majority of journalism would just have been an image of some kind and a story,” she said. “Now the floor is raised and 80% [of content] is a regular story with a regular story structure but could have a variety of richer assets in it.”

With the guidelines and standards for the 80% in place, the FT looks at the 15% of content, which McMahon described as “a set of stories that we ultimately want to be widely accessible to the newsroom, but we know are more complex in nature.”

The 5% “is the really interesting stuff,” McMahon said. It offers things like gamification and extreme personalisation for an immersive experience. Much of it is experimental and allows teams to see what works with users and what could possibly become part of the 15% group in the future. It allows the FT to see how people react to different ways of telling stories and different environments and experiences.

The more elements it can pull from the 5% into the 15%, the farther the company will be able to go, McMahon said, adding she looks forward to doing more to make non-linear storytelling features more accessible to the newsroom:

“The ability to segment our content and data strategy has all been about us being really clear about what capabilities we think fit into each of those categories, not guessing where we can’t, using our ability to experiment to help us learn and understand — and then seeing how users respond.”

Advance Local

Creating a new product experience for users begins with understanding what they actually want versus what you might think they want. Nicole Dingess, head of product design and UX at Advance Local in the United States, emphasised the importance of creating a formal process.

One of the challenges within companies, Dingess said, organisations don’t have a shared definition of what discovery is. To overcome that, she shared the Double Diamond framework being used by some organisations.

Creating a discovery process helps publishers look at their problems differently and determine what research would be best suited for users and their habits.

“It really does work to minimise risk,” Dingess said. “It makes sure that your product will be hopefully more profitable and certainly more intuitive to your end user.”

When customers are part of the discovery process, Dingess said, “you will always be increasing your knowledge about [them].” Listening to customers can save costs in many ways, including not wasting time developing a product they aren’t interested in or creating a user experience that doesn’t suit their needs.

That hopefully results in better outcomes, she said: “Basically when you know more about your customer and what they need, you can more successfully build those products for them.”

Team Topologies

In his book Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton showcases how team topologies act as a way to provide language for dealing with flow, boundaries, architecture, and dynamics.

“When we say architecture, we mean architecture of the kind of software systems that we build, but also potentially things like information architecture and the way in which our organisation itself works like organisational architecture,” Skelton said.

“This is obviously particularly relevant for digital products in the media space. It provides some ways for teams to define expectations and close gaps, expectations between teams in particular.”

Building products and setting up teams to move quickly is essential for industries like news media and Skelton says team topologies allows fast flow to be a key driver.

“Team topologies is providing the concept and the terminology and language patterns for helping us think through this continuous organisational tweaking, organisational evolution to match what's happening in the technology space to match what's happening in consumer demand or business demand.”

Another strength of team topologies is it also deals with cognitive load, Skelton said: “We have to deal with cognitive load in a realistic way if we're going to have a chance of doing this stuff at speed. And ultimately it speaks to flow. My hypothesis basically is that team topology is providing a kind of vital language and patterns and constraints for almost all knowledge work situations in the context of fast flow and team ownership.”

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