Product Management in a Newsroom: Equanimity, Dress Rehearsals and Journalists as Customers

Gautam is a product manager at CNN Digital who leads the team responsible for the content management system journalists use to write and publish stories. She has also taught meditation and mindfulness for about a decade. Host Lenny Rachitsky asks how that practice helps in a place with constant breaking news.

She says product managers are often told to thrive in ambiguity, but in news you must thrive in chaos. The skill she leans on is equanimity: mental calmness and composure, the ability to stay un-rattled at the highest highs and lowest lows. In a workplace this means pausing before reacting, which she calls the root of many workplace woes and a way to break negative patterns.

She says equanimity gives an outsized advantage in stakeholder management, team morale and translating user feedback. You will always hear opinions you dislike, and the real power comes from managing your own reactions rather than trying to control others. A self-aware leader, she says, can serve as a compass in the chaos.

The practical side is constant planning for disruption. Gautam describes a research session with editors across the globe that is cancelled because breaking news takes priority, and says this happens all the time. Journalists are customers who are not there to serve the product team's needs, so the team builds backups and buffers, from a day or two up to a week or a month, into onboarding cycles.

Gautam says talking to editorial staff every day is the foundation of her work. After observation she set up a system with four events: weekly demo days, working sessions, breaking news dress rehearsals and office hours. Demo days are run with her product design lead and tech lead, showing existing features, previewing new ones and recreating workflows, and are open to anyone in the business.

Working sessions are a critical part of onboarding, in which breakout groups of journalists and editors recreate their workflows in the new platform. The team used to call them user testing sessions but renamed them to sound more collaborative. There are usually three to six two-hour sessions per group, since the politics, entertainment, health and homepage teams all work very differently.

Dress rehearsals are scripted simulations of a breaking news scenario that stress test the platform, and office hours are open blocks, weekly or twice weekly during intense onboarding, to troubleshoot friction. Afterwards the team translates needs into functions it can optimize, build new or declare not viable. Because editors have been part of discovery, Gautam says they have earned trust and usually accept a "not viable" answer.

Gautam explains that CNN Digital is separate from television and linear programming, and a separate core content platform powers broadcast. Digital product teams cover content management, data infrastructure, personalization, video experience including the editor and player, and podcasts. Each team works as a squad with product managers, engineers, designers and delivery managers.

Her core platform team has two main goals: build a newer, faster and more flexible content management platform to replace the legacy one, and onboard the whole editorial staff to it. Her role focuses on the tooling and editorial experience and on the onboarding itself. She notes that journalists and editors are customers with whom the team has direct access at all hours, "for better or for worse".

Asked what would surprise people, she says it is the sheer number and size of product efforts sitting behind the publicly visible TV brand. CNN is not Google, she says, but has the expertise and depth of larger tech companies. Planning uses OKRs, with goals two to three years out broken down by quarter, month and week, and daily planning in rapid development phases.

A company-level roadmap ties to organization OKRs, while squads have autonomy over how they pursue theirs, since podcasts, video and core platform are "apples and oranges". She cites the product maxim of staying firm on the goal but flexible on the process. Her team's priorities shift sprint to sprint between features and bug fixes, with critical production incidents always first, backed by a global 24/7 editorial support team as the first line of defense.

For product and design review, Gautam has made a point of bringing her tech lead and engineers into discovery, including user testing sessions, design jams and editorial planning conversations. When engineers understand journalists' needs at the same level as the product team, they define how to build with more clarity and precision. The key takeaway, she says, is to think of engineers as partners, not just resources, which makes the whole process more efficient.

On team rituals, she admits the digital team is not one of the cool ones; the politics and breaking news teams, who work in the newsroom, have more. Her team is mostly remote, and launches used to feel anticlimactic, such as hitting publish to onboard a politics page. They now send each other gift boxes of cheap gag gifts to celebrate successful team onboardings and feature launches.

Her most striking story is from the 2020 election, which she compares to the Super Bowl times a hundred. CNN has layers of infrastructure fallback, and the new content management platform, though still being built, was one of the fallback levels. When a system failed, traffic went to it and it held, which she describes as validation that the platform is stable, strong and secure.

She walks through a dress rehearsal as a scripted scenario: a news-gathering email goes to writers and producers, video and articles are created, the photo desk selects images, and the clock runs until the page is published, all within minutes. Engineers and editorial support observe while she and an editorial lead facilitate. If the platform can't serve breaking news, she says, it is useless, so a three-minute event takes a great deal of preparation.

Asked what she will take to future teams, Gautam says building the platform has taught her team to enable rapid development, quickly test hypotheses and reduce risk. The result is what she calls a unique skill of "high agency under high pressure", which she considers her team's superpower and an asset to any product team.

Returning to mindfulness, she says there is no substitute for meditation, which compounds over time and builds the clarity of thinking that product managers need. This was her first official product role after a decade in data and search infrastructure, and her boss said he hired her for her communication and relationship-building skills, because engineers listened to her and she to them.

She ties communication to mindfulness: being deeply aware of the conversation you are in, only talking to the person in front of you. When a journalist vents about a broken feature, she stays quiet, listens and extracts the root cause. Pausing before reacting lets you speak the listener's language, avoiding content management jargon, since journalists have their own vocabulary and nicknames for features.

Gautam argues that effective communication starts with listening rather than articulate speaking or writing, and that you should check whether you listen to customers or bring your own assumptions. She began freelancing for CNN last year, which gave her more understanding of pain points, but she says she is still only a proxy for the user. This listening, she says, helped unify a structure where product and editorial previously did not talk to each other.

For people who want to start meditating, Gautam says it does not need an hour on a cushion. At its core it is being deeply aware of the present moment, so she suggests taking a daily activity like brushing your teeth and just brushing your teeth, using all your senses for two or three minutes. She mentions the Insight Timer app as a resource, but says all you really need is five minutes and yourself.

On the wider industry, she says product management in news is still in its infancy. CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post have strong embedded product teams, but most newsrooms are short of resources, so journalists take on product, engineering and coding work they never signed up for. During the pandemic people realized many were doing product management without the name.

That led to the News Product Alliance, formed around 2020 by media and news executives, with a goal of spreading awareness and education of product thinking, increasing diversity and making resources available to small newsrooms. It has grown dramatically in three years, and its mentorship network last year drew about 400 applications, accepting 150 mentees matched to 50 mentors. Many mentees hold journalism degrees and are building product practices from scratch.

People can join through Newsproduct.org, which offers a Slack group of a couple thousand members and a job board, with a low barrier to entry. Gautam says it suits product people interested in news, journalists who want to break into product, and audience development, analytics and data science people. In the lightning round she names *Mindfulness in Plain English*, *How To Win Friends and Influence People* and the 1986 HBR article "The New Product Development Game", and her favorite interview question is what would not exist without the candidate's initiative.