happened all the time right that is the nature of breaking news I mean you have to be ready to Pivot at you know the drop of a hat I had a big working session plan with my users to do research with them or do user testing and breaking news breaks and it takes so much time and effort to gather a team of editors across the globe to do a user testing session and when breaking news happens they have to prioritize that
over everything right so like what do you do in that situation you can be frustrated absolutely it's frustrating but you always have to have the ability to a pivot of course but also have backup and you know buffers in those types of scenarios welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products
today my guest is upasnagowtham upasna is a product manager at CNN where she leads the team responsible for the content management system that journalists use to write and publish their stories she's also on the front lines of elevating the discipline of product management within newsrooms through her work at the news product Alliance she's also a long time meditation and mindfulness teacher which as we discuss ends up being pretty damn
handy working at a place like CNN we dig into how the product team operates within CNN how they collaborate with journalists for breaking news dress rehearsals and also some simple tricks to build your own mindfulness in your day-to-day work as a PM enjoy this episode with rupasana Gotham after a short word from our wonderful sponsors this episode is brought to you by amplitude if you're setting up your
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your product one schema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product for listeners of this podcast one schema is offering a one thousand dollar discount learn more at oneschema.com welcome to the podcast thank you lady I'm so excited to be here as you probably know on this kind of quest to understand how different companies build product especially
companies that are kind of outside the Silicon Valley just like standard Tech scene and I've always wondered what it was like to build product at a company like CNN which is like very different from where most I don't know Tech PMS work and so I'm really excited to have you on and to give us a little glimpse into what it's like build product at CNN awesome I'm very excited to share as well so I was doing a little research on
you before this chat and I noticed that you've been teaching and studying meditation and mindfulness for I don't know maybe a decade and I imagine that comes in handy at a company like CNN which also I imagine is like quite hectic at times with breaking news all the time and so here's my question what have you learned or brought from that practice to your ability to lead an ability to just like keep your team calm
and focused during imagine many hectic moments I love that question and working in product in news is a very Beast we hear a lot about having the skills to thrive in ambiguity in order to be a successful product manager but to be a successful product manager in news you have to be able to thrive in chaos and Equanimity is the most important skill I've developed I think across my entire life and it's due to all of those years of
practicing uh mindfulness and meditation and Equanimity is one of my favorite words it means mental calmness composure evenness of temper especially in Crazy stressful situations it's you know the ability to remain unrattled in like the highest of highs and the lowest of lows and if you think about it in the dynamic of a workplace or human interaction it's really the ability to pause before reacting and reactivity is the root
cause of so many of our workplace woes and product management frustrations and when you're able to pause before reacting you can start to undo and break a lot of those negative patterns in your brain and in news and especially the world's biggest breaking news organization you can cut through that chaos with Equanimity because it also really gives you this outsized advantage in everything from stakeholder management team morale to the way you're
able to translate user feedback to product development velocity and the thing is is you're always going to hear things and feedback that you don't like and opinions that you don't like and you're gonna get frustrated that's product management that's light but real power to me comes from Equanimity and that comes from managing your emotional reactions and not trying to control others so I think when you're able to
cultivate that level of self-awareness for yourself you're able to chart a clear path forward for your team and like serve as a compass in the chaos is there a story or example that comes to mind where things were just like oh and you were able to tap into that skill that you built to stay calm and focused or even just like help your team stay focused I mean it happened all the time right that is the nature of
breaking news I mean you have to be ready to Pivot at you know the drop of a hat and so I think more than just like the big chaotic moment in those daily interactions when there's chaos I think that's when it really shows its power and helps me navigate those day-to-day interactions when I had a big working session plan with my users to do research with them or do user testing and breaking news breaks and it takes so
much time and effort to gather a team of editors across the globe to do a user testing session and when breaking news happens they have to prioritize that over everything right so like what do you do in that situation you can be frustrated absolutely it's frustrating but you always have to have the ability to a pivot of course but also have backup and buffers in those types of scenarios so anytime we're planning we
build in offers for all of that chaos that's happening on a daily basis wow that's cool is that a real thing that happened you were like in a big meeting with all the researchers and then something went went off the rails in the world oh yeah absolutely happens all the time I don't know how much you can go into all this but what is it that you would do in that case like as a product team what are they looking for you to do
at that moment for us it's not really anything we have to do it is more so okay well our goal of this session was to get user testing done or user feedback from that user testing session with our editors and so what do we do okay well good thing we had a backup plan right we don't actually have to go into that scenario but since our editors and our journalists our customers we're there to serve their needs but they are not here
to serve our needs they have a whole nother job that they have to do and so we have to have the ability to adapt and accommodate to those really chaotic schedules across Global time zones and so that happens again like it's not it's not like once in a while it's a very regular thing that we have to be aware of and also account for okay okay I get it's the like this journalist or the ones in the meeting they're like oh they
have to go right about the stuff and cover totally I see that makes sense you said that you built in some buffer time for to kind of account for these things they're like a systematic way of doing that or is it just broadly let's add buffer time is there like a rule of thumb you you think about there it depends on the scope of the work we're doing at that time so one of my main responsibilities is to rebuild our
content management system which also involves onboarding our editors and journalists to it off of our Legacy platform and onto our new one so when we're thinking about onboarding especially the teams our own boarding Cycles very long it involves training testing lots of dialogue and feedback and then only do we actually test and then we onboard and so it is a long cycle and it's longer than it maybe seems like it needs to be because we
have to build in those buffers sometimes that buffer is a day or two and sometimes it's a week or a month and sometimes when we think we need a buffer we get it done in a day and we quickly move on to the next phase and so I think that quick decision making in those times is super important because you have to be able to assess the situation as it and and so I think mindfulness is so important too in practices like this
because being able to objectively see the scenario for what it is make a quick decision and move on to the next phase is is something we have to analyze every single day it makes you think a little bit about a lot of CEOs are very uh busy and pulled into a lot of things and so you have to kind of account for their schedule and it sounds like you have many many people that you work with that have crazy schedules yes I wanted to dig a little
bit deeper into how you or team worked with the news team it's such a unique way of working most product teams don't have a whole set of journalists that they have to work with and as stakeholders so I'm curious to specifically say a journalist has like hey I'd love to build a special immersive experience for this story or I need some special feature to help support this work that I'm doing how does that work did they come to you like
hey here's a road map maybe in the court or any good thing imagine it's like I need this next week how do you how do you work with the journalist team basically on product Yep this is pretty much the foundation of all of my work we talked to our editorial staff every single day and after a lot of observation and learning I implemented a system to manage that kind of intake with four different touch
points or events so we have weekly demo days working sessions breaking news dress rehearsals and office hours so with weekly demo days I facilitate those with my product design lead and my tech lead and we use that as an open Forum communication to Deep dive into features that exist on our platform also to preview or give a sneak peek of new features to come and kind of recreate their workflows and do a show and tell
again we wanted to open that up as a forum to not just our editorial Partners but also anyone across the business who is interested in learning about the product and which is our platform and it was also a great way to kind of evangelize the product too 2 coming off of a legacy system after several years onto a brand new one is a big change at a place like CNN and so we definitely try to make sure that you know smart
repetition in different ways is top priority so weekly demo days is one working sessions are interesting I use the term working session because it's a combination of several things this is a really critical part of our onboarding process Where We Gather breakout groups of our journalists and editors to work with us to recreate their workflows in the new platform this allows us to you know address any friction or issues of course that are
occurring in their workflows but also we're able to gather a lot of awesome feedback from them in those sessions so we used to call them user testing sessions but decided to move away from that and just call them working sessions so they're more collaborative and again it's a really critical part of our onboarding process we usually do three to six of them depending on the size of the group before the team is actually
onboarded for two hours per session so they're like deep dives into their specific workflows so as you can imagine the way the politics team programs content is wildly different than the way the entertainment team does or the way that at the um the health team does and the very different than the way that the CNN home page even even interacts so all of those are separate teams we have to work with when it comes to getting
feedback so in addition to that we also do I mentioned breaking news stress rehearsals and you can imagine this is exactly what it sounds like we create a script and do a simulation of a breaking news scenario to stress test our platform because all breaking news scenarios are definitely not the same either so this gives us a lot of great feedback in that short amount of time at the speed of breaking news and then last
but not least we have office hours which I just started last year and that's also probably what you can imagine open blocks of time where me and my product design partner and my tech lead are this there to answer questions help people troubleshoot any friction they might be experiencing in their workflow get their feedback we just wanted to open up another line of communication so we do those right now once a week sometimes
they go up to two times a week if we're in a really rigorous onboarding phase after those conversation then uh sessions and events happen you know it's our job to translate their needs into the functions that we a either maybe already have that we can optimize B we build a new or we tell them it's not viable and the good thing is is that because they've been along for the ride with us throughout the product Discovery
process we've earned their trust and respect so that when we tell them something like it's not viable they usually get it man there's so many questions about just working with journalists I feel like pushing back on the journalists probably extra hard versus other type of stakeholders it is can we zoom out a little bit and you talked about what you work on at CNN which is the content management system and things around that can you just talk
about whatever you can share just like what does the product team look like at CNN how many PMS are there how's like a product or structured and where where do you fit in there yes so I mentioned earlier my team sits on CNN digital and I think when most people think of CNN of course you think of TV and linear programming I have nothing to do with that I'm CNN digital is digital and it's made up of several teams that are
structured around a lot of different product areas it includes everything from the content management platforms that I work on to data infrastructure to personalization to video experience which includes like the products of video editor and the video player to podcasts there's a lot so each of those are product teams and so we also split out you know the way CNN is split out into CNN digital is because there's a
separate core content platform that power is broadcast and linear TV and the one that I work on Powers CNN digital so on my team the core platform team are stakeholders and our customers are like I mentioned our journalists and our editors which presents a really unique Dynamic and it's one that I love we have direct access to our customers at all times of day for Better or For Worse and they're embedded into our product
development process and each of those teams under CNN digital is kind of like a squad very similar to how it is at other larger tech companies we have PMS we have Engineers designers and delivery managers embedded in those Squad and since my team is a core platform team our main responsibility is to a build our newer faster more flexible content management platform to replace our Legacy one and be on board our entire
editorial staff to it and so even more specifically my role is focus us on rebuilding the tooling and the editorial experience of that platform as well as doing the actual onboarding of our journalists so we were cross-functionally because our team kind of is the umbrella over a lot of different teams so we truly work cross-functionally to make sure that you know we're serving our journalists with the tools that they need to do their job
in the most efficient way possible what would surprise people most about how product is built at CNN I think the most surprising thing may actually be that there's just so many different types of products that we build like I said I I think when most people think of CNN you see TV and you think of Anderson Cooper and all of the things that are very publicly you know visible there is most of our product work and product
teams all sit behind the scenes and so I think just that in itself like the sheer size of that is is surprising to a lot of people so I mentioned like all of the different teams right product teams that are based off of function content management platforms infrastructure personalization video podcasts linear TV and I think that in itself the like the sheer size of it like we're we're not the size of Google by any means but at
the same time we have the expertise and the depth and brat of a lot of those larger companies I'm curious about the day-to-day operational work of how you build product at CNN so a first question here is just these like okrs you know who cares with like key objectives and outcomes and 70 of a goal of success yeah absolutely we do we've used okrs for a long time and they've served as an anchor for my team over the last three
years I kind of already I can't go into specifics on like what are okrs are but I did kind of cover the two main parts of it which is you know rebuilding or content management form and onboarding our users to it so again it's a long game at CNM when you're working on on a core platform to replace a legacy one and so we break those okrs down of course even further into you know we look two to three years out and build
goals based off of that then we break them down by quarter and month and then out of that for my team and what I do I need to for my own sake and my team's sake break those down by the week and when we're in Rapid development phases we're planning on a daily basis how about in terms of just planning broadly how far out does the product team it's in and plan in detail like have an actual roadmap and is that
standardized across teams or can each team kind of do their own approach It's a combination of both so we have one that is an overarching you know roadmap that tracks to like our company okrs and our product organization okrs and then from there I mentioned we have our squads product teams and we have okrs on those as well track up to the larger broader ones and so once we get down to that level though there is flexibility
and we have autonomy to tackle those how we want which is really great because the scope of work across our different product teams is drastically different working on core platform like I do versus working on video experience versus podcasts I mean you it's apples and oranges and so so it's really awesome that we have the flexibility to kind of make it work for us while also having these larger goals that we know
that okay this is what we need to work towards and that makes you know I mean it's like the saying we always hear in product right of say firm on the global flexible on the process and like we've definitely been able to to use that and leverage that in the way that we track against our goals something else that a lot of people are always curious about is product review meeting design review meetings you talked about a couple of
these meetings that you have but do you have standard product review meetings where folks get together and just review stuff in progress and if so how do they work like who runs them who comes to them how do you make decisions things like that we have multiple variations of those some are standing ceremonies of course and some are ad hoc again it's really based on the work we're doing in that in in whatever phase we're in but
when it comes to product review and product Discovery or design review meetings in addition to my design lead I've made it a point to bring in my tech lead and Engineers along for this product Discovery Ride and that's definitely been a game changer as well when our Engineers are able to understand our journalists needs at the same level as we are they're able to define the foul to do it with so much greater Clarity and precision and so my
tech lead is embedded also in our product Discovery process he joins our user testing sessions and our design jams and our editorial conversation planning sessions and it's helped him and the rest of our Tech and engineering team become experts on the why are we doing this and what are we working towards to better determine technical feasibility and he's done an amazing job of also passing that knowledge down to
the rest of our Engineers on our team so it's really like this mentality of getting that important feedback from our journalists under sanding their pain points and then sharing and teaching it across the team and I think you know the key Takeaway on that is it's so important to think of your engineers as partners and not just resources and when they are embedded you know into the process right up front it makes the
whole process in general more efficient so it sounds like that was maybe an evolution of the of the way the team works is engineering has been looped into a lot of this early stuff more recently totally yeah recently meaning I mean we again long game right so it's been it's been a couple years got it going in a slightly different direction I'm curious if there's any fun or unique Traditions or rituals that the CNN
product team has is always fun to hear about so I'll be very honest we are not one of the cool teams the politics team like and the breaking news teams have all these cool rituals and fun things that they do what kind of stuff do they do it's different also because they're usually in person in The Newsroom and I work remotely and so and actually most of my team Works remotely and so you know they have their rituals
I will say one of the things that we started to do is so onboarding teams has been a big goal of ours and that we've slowly checked off the list over 2022 and anytime we successfully onboard a team or launch a new feature you know it's not anything crazy or fun like there's always so much you can do when you work remotely but we definitely make it a point to celebrate and it's been hard to figure out ways to keep team
morale up when you're all remote and it started with we knew we needed to start doing something when we would have a big launch and it was so article epic and it would literally hit publish an onboard onto like a politics page and we're like oh okay so I guess that's it so one thing we started doing is sending like like these gift boxes of like random shotkeys and stuff that would that mean things to us from the whole year and
it's like just cheap little like gifts and stuff that we send to each other they have like random stuff all over my over my desk I don't even know if I can share some of it but um so we try to make it a point to at least like share and celebrate and then when we're in person we do too but again being remote there's definitely there's definitely a challenge there are you ever able to get like a cameo from an Anderson Cooper or someone else on on
air to uh thank the teams that feels like a cool feature potential so one of my uh key stakeholders she is a she leads the video team at CNN and she is uh We've we've had some discussions about doing a Sizzler reel for our content management platform as since we're onboarding people and you know building new features and there have been discussions with her about getting a celebrity to come and promote product
for us so working on it yeah it feels like a missed opportunity you had so much talent around totally this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate growth if your business stores any data in the cloud then you've likely been asked or you're going to be asked about your sock 2 compliance sock 2 is a way to prove your company is taking proper security
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v-a-n-t-a.com Lenny to learn more and to claim your discount get started today coming back a little bit to the way you all built product I'm curious how you balance uh new product work and new features versus maintenance and bugs do you have kind of a is there like a philosophy at CNN how much goes to bugs maintenance versus new stuff or is it per team and just how do you all think about that it's certainly team specific
because again the scope of work across teams really varies but since my team's product is an entire platform it's my job to ensure we're crystal clear on our goals because like I said they may change on a week by week basis one Sprint might be high priority feature development and another Sprint maybe we're focused on medium priority optimizations and Bug fixes but we know that anytime there's a critical incident
in production it also takes critical priority over everything else so it's a balancing and juggling act that relies heavily on intuitive decision making but I will say we're also really fortunate to as a global 24 7 editorial support
team that we work really closely with so they are the ones who handle troubleshoot escalate incidences incidents up to the relevant teams there are a lot of layers to that protocol when it when a critical incident occurs
and so our editorial support team is that first layer of support whereas my team might be the second or third depending on the level of severity and who it gets escalated to so there's definitely a lot of processes in place we're not always that first line of defense which is actually it alleviates a lot of stress to know that we have an entire team Around the Clock globally dedicated just to that are you talking
about these like incidents and moments and makes me wonder is there a memory of just like a wild time of something happen in the news of just like oh man we got to get on top of this thing like is there like a memory that you think of like wow that was crazy it's funny but also crazy and amazing is so our new content management platform you know it where we've been building it for a while and stress testing it for a while and
you know politics and election season CNN is is Super Bowl like times 100 and so we have to be you know all hands on deck like all layers of support in intact and so we have also a lot of layers of fallback in case something happened right like there's layers and layers of infrastructure fallback if CNN.com goes down or another service goes down and so and actually did happen a couple of years ago in the 2020 election and one of the fallbacks at
that time because we were not we were you know we're still on our current content management platform but we had our new one as we're building it as one of the levels of fall and if XYZ fails then it goes to our current platform and it did and so that's actually happened where our new platform saved the day even though it wasn't fully ready but that just goes to show we think about that kind of stuff like in granular
detail when we think about everything that could possibly go wrong because it has been and it will happen and it does go wrong so that was kind of cool it was validation to know that the platform we have is really stable and strong and secure that it was a fallback for the election damn that must have felt good that feels like a promotion material right there that you're working progress system
saved the day yeah I agree you talked about how you have these like breaking news stress rehearsals uh I just noted that and I thought the quality just revisit that briefly like what is that how does that work you just like get the team together and like here's here's a new story that just broke what do we do like how does how does that work it is scripted right so we could only get so close to the real thing but one thing we
do is I think we script everything right like the teams and the players that we need involved in it what the incident is and it usually starts when breaking news occurs with an email the news Gathering team sends an email it to our writers and our producers and then from there it goes out all the places it needs to go there's a video that needs to be created there's an article that needs to be written if they're you know and again
the TV side I have no insight into it's like a foreign land to me but as far as the digital scope goes there's a lot of work that has to be done even things like Photo and imagery right like we have a whole team dedicated just to selecting photos like the photo desk is very involved with that process and so that is all scripted out and so we say okay here's the news here's how it's gonna break and then we we run it and so
we use you know interpersonal communication tools that work of course email and like we run the whole thing from the minute the email is sent to and of course since we're testing the platform with this breaking news dress rehearsal to the minute you hit publish on that page and there's a lot of stuff that goes on in there and it all happens in the span of minutes and so while that is happening while that dress rehearsal
is happening we have our engineers and our editorial support team on hand as well so they're observing what's happening while it's usually me and one of our editorial stakeholders and leads facilitating the actual rehearsal part and you know getting user feedback on okay what did something raped and everything work as it was supposed to work and also allows us to understand like how far we can go with stress
testing different features on our system so each one is different but it's a crazy amount of stuff and information you can gather in such a short span of time because it cannot serve the needs of breaking news then it's useless so it's it's a lot of work that goes into it for you know this three-minute event that is cool it feels like just a cool tactic you could use anywhere yeah and that's a good segue to the next question I had is
just having built products at CNN and seeing how the product Team Works what is it that you think you'll take with you to Future product teams and future companies that if you ever move on to anything else so like the course can't speak for the entire CNN product team but I can speak for myself and my specific team so in order to stay competitive in our modern news landscape building this content management
platform and the technology behind it has taught us how to enable rapid development and integration of new features and workflows and we've been able to quickly test hypotheses while reducing risk and again time is of the essence right when it comes to breaking news and when you layer that with a very complex content management technology there's a lot of moving parts and we've been able to do that successfully and
it's pretty amazing and because of that we've developed I think this unique skill of high agency under high pressure and I really think that that skill or combination of skills is our superpower and that is something you can take anywhere that is something that that is an asset to any any product development team the circle is back to our original topic about mindfulness and meditation rather than just living through it and either
becoming a meditation expert or having worked at a company like CNN that has a lot of this is there any I don't know a tactic you could share something that someone could take tomorrow and be like okay I'm gonna get better at dealing with crazy unexpected events based on the experience you've had two parts to this so one I would be remiss as a meditation educator if I didn't say that there is no substitution for meditation
so you just gotta do it it takes a long time and it's a lifelong work in progress but the good thing is is that it also like the more you do it and consistently you do it it compounds over time and I always yeah okay if you think of any job description for a product manager right it's mostly the same core stuff you need to be able to lead a team without having Authority you need to have great communication skills you need
to be able to thrive in ambiguity you need to be able to work with a lot of different people on the technical side business side all of the stuff that we hear all the time right but like how do you actually become better at those things right like there's only so much you can gain from reading a book to me it's either a you gotta go do it and B meditation has helped so much because of the clarity of mind and Clarity of
thinking you're able to cultivate because of it especially when it comes to communication and this comes back to another tactic I think right so meditation is one I you can't get around it it's a very very powerful tool I will die on that hill but thinking about workplace tactics communication is so essential when I started at CNN it was a very new chapter for me it's my first official product management role after
working a decade in Tech in data and search infrastructure and it was really scary to make that change so far into my career but when I asked my boss why he took such a big chance on me he said it's because of your communication skills and relationship building skills and that I've seen you in a room where Engineers listen to you and what you have to say and you listen to that and he was like that in itself is really
really hard to teach and I was like okay yeah I can do that so when I think about what communication means I also attach that to mindfulness like mindful communication is so critical for successful product management no matter what type of product environment you're in and it means being like deeply aware of the conversation you're having and when I'm having this conversation with you I'm only having this conversation
with you when I'm talking to my design lead I'm only talking to my design lead when one of my journalists is venting because this feature is not working the way we told them it was going to I am shutting my mouth and I am listening to that vent and then I'm extracting what the root cause of the problem is and I think the takeaway in the tactic is that goes back to exactly what we talked about in the beginning is the ability to
pause before we acting is the key to mindful communication and being a successful product manager I think a lot of times we are taught to like have all the answers or we're expected to have all the answers and people assume we have all the answers so it's a really frustrating sometimes place to be in but if you listen and you know where to go to get the answers that in itself is like a tremendous place to be so I
think the power of meditation being able to pause before reacting lets you do things like conversate in the language of The Listener so when I'm talking to my journalists worked I'm not using technical terms or like content management technology terms they have whole different vocabulary that they use they have shortcuts that they have you know lingo for in our content management system they call things nicknames and so
you have to speak many different languages as a product manager and there's one thing that you know learning and teaching mindfulness has like strengthened it is that communication yes it's very important how do you become an effective Communicator I think a lot of times we think of speaking articulately first and foremost or we think about writing well which those two are really really important things but those can't be effective for us as
product leaders if we're listening so I think listening and being able to Converse in the lane language of The Listener is the utmost importance and how do you like do that in your day-to-day it's like okay if you're having a conversation with your customer are you actually listening to what they say or are you going in with your own assumptions because maybe you're a user of the product and it was very
interesting because I actually started writing freelance for CNN this past year and I was like oh okay I'll be user now and no I'm not I I'm not gonna say that it helped me understand their pain points so much more and where they're coming from in a whole different light but again I am merely a proxy I'm not actually the user what they do is still drastically different and so when like having those like customer interactions
and stakeholder interactions the priority should be to listen and I think that is one of the most important things I've learned and it's also helped build trust and respect between a previously fragmented structure where product of editorial didn't talk to each other and now we're a unified you know partnership oh I love that I love the reminder that a lot of communication is incredibly important for product managers and so much of it
is not actually you talking it's you being really good at listening and that makes you a better communicator imagine some people listening to this are going to be like yeah meditation that's how I should be doing that what's like one thing someone could do to move forward on the path to starting to meditate is there a resource you recommend the tip of just like getting starting to do something there totally I
think when people think of meditation you immediately think uh sitting on a meditation cushion like a monk for an hour and that doesn't have to be true especially if you're just starting and there's also of course social media has commercialized what meditation is a lot as well but at its core all it is is being deeply aware of the present moment right so I always tell people who are for example like really busy moms who
have no time right in the morning for an hour-long meditation is okay take something in your day that you do every single day you brush your teeth every morning right okay take brushing your teeth can you brush your teeth and just brush your teeth and when you're brushing your teeth you are engaging all of your senses and being fully present and aware of how it feels how it smells how it sounds that's you know two three
minutes of your day that's meditation and I think it's an amazing way to in an easy way oh sorry not easy simple not easy way always to think about what meditation actually is is like instead of like having to uproot your whole life and the way you live to like bring meditation in think about what you already do every day and how you can just be more present like fully present and Glenn's one of like core examples I
give is start with brushing your teeth and just brush your teeth there's a old app I've been using for a long time if you're into that I stopped using it recently but it's still amazing it's called insight timer the free version is amazing it started as like a single frame app about 10 years ago and it's turned into this they've done amazing things with that product so that's what I recommend but again you don't I think again when people
have a vision of meditation in their mind they're like well I need these tools and I need these resources and I need these things and I need knowledge you don't need anything you need five minutes and yourself and that's it amazing I imagine many people listening to this coming into thinking I'm going to learn about CNN and how they build product and then get a free meditation lesson what a bonus that was awesome I'm
gonna be brushing my teeth very mindfully today love it my takeaway love it final question around something that I know is important to you that is uh basically there's this growing shift of product thinking in the new industry at large and I know that's something that you're passionate about and something you're trying to create is just to kind of move the media industry in the news industry towards more product thinking
so I'd love for you to just talk about what you're doing there what's happening there and then maybe there's anything people can do to help in that effort compare it to the rest of product management as a discipline and the tech industry product management and news is still if it's I will say infancy and that's just because it hasn't been an integrated role for as long as it has been in big Tech but it is starting to
become more and more not just prominent now but people are realizing the value and power of it because especially in smaller newsrooms I mean see it like CNN places like New York Times Washington Post we have great embedded you know strong product teams but that is not the case for the majority of newsrooms across the country and the world newsrooms are strapped for resources they are struck and all all resources including financial resources
and so first bringing in product and Tech Talent is extensive and that in itself has forced editorial staff and journalists to take on other jobs that they never signed up for and so they've had to learn how to do things product management and engineering and coding hacks because there was nobody else to do it and so it's interesting because a lot of times when you talk to editors and journalists
they're they're doing so many other things other than just their reporting of the news right they've had to take on other roles because of those restraints in The Newsroom and so there was a group established in a community established during the pandemic called the news product Alliance and there was like a realization occurring all at the same time that wow there's a lot of us doing this work like um what do we call it is this
product management and it was it's product management at so many different levels and so the news product Alliance was formed during the pandemic in 2020 I Believe by several media and news Executives who had been there and done and have seen people in their newsrooms do that and the goal of it is to increase the awareness and education of product thinking and product management in newsrooms while also increasing the diversity of thought and
the and the diversity of people in those positions as well and making the resources more readily available especially for those smaller newsrooms that don't have the money to hire Tech talent and that in itself has so that group the news product Alliance has grown dramatically in the past three years since I've been a part of it since the beginning that we regularly produce you know the resources that are catered
product management resources that are catered to working in a newsroom because it is different it is very unique but there are of course Frameworks and processes that are still relevant right like editors who have been cobbling together how to make this thing that they want but maybe this PRD framework will help you just to keep it you know and on on on track so like these very simple like rudimentary types of things have helped
them so much and so last year we kicked off a mentorship Network in which we had about 400 people apply there's we accepted 150 mentees from across the world and matched them with 50 mentors from different newsrooms across the world in leadership positions and each mentee defined a goal that they wanted to work on and all of course having to do with product management and some of them were creating a product management role for
themselves in The Newsroom some of it was creating a product managed practice maybe they were given the title product manager and said okay you can hire a couple people but it was all on them and they had no idea what to do right and so some of it it's it's across the board and it's amazing to see people doing this from scratch who never in a million years thought they'd like walk into it you know they're not coming
from Big Tech they don't have startup backgrounds they had journalism degrees from around the world and they're learning how to do product and build not just learning how to do it they're building product practices they're actually building and developing products and features and they're creating more leaders in the space as well and across their newsrooms to empower each other so it's been really amazing to see and it's the most
valuable Professional Organization I've been a part of just because it is so Niche that you know talking about product management is always fun but when you talk about it at a level that specific it becomes even more believable that is some really impactful product work where can people find that if they want to maybe participate maybe apply if you're doing another cohort in the future go to newsproduct.org there is a
very active slack group with a couple thousand people in it a very active and popular job board as well and you just have to submit an application on the website a form sorry on that on the website to join this lock and then you'll get an invitation to join the slack and then you'll have all of the resources um your fingertips it's very low barrier to entry we want everyone and everyone who is interested in in the intersection
of news and product to be a part of it and the cool thing about it is like mentioned it's it's a Global Network we have people from from the biggest newsrooms across the world to all the regional ones to you know even big tech one of my fellow board members was you know doing news at Twitter one was working on the Google News initiative so it's a really really awesome group of people and everyone is so hungry and
passionate about sharing and paying it forward we'll put a link to this in the show notes one last question what kind of people are you looking for who should apply they're listening if you are interested in working in news and have a product background or the the inverse of that if you work in news and you're interested in breaking into product so either side of the coin or any combination of that news media product
technology even odd we have a lot of audience development and analytics and data science folks in there too it's just an amazing Community for knowledge sharing in Tech and news so there will be a fit for you some somewhere or to learn something or at the very least to meet other really amazing people well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got five questions for you and are you ready I'm
ready all right what are two or three books that you recommend most to other people or that you've recommended most one mindfulness in plain English two how to win friends that influence people I have to attribute a lot of my communication skills to my dad forcing me to read that book when I was like 10 years old and 10 years old intense he was an engineer and they were in their very uh beginning phases of introducing
well at that time there was no product but product type stuff into his engineering practice and so he had to read the book and it was like you need to read this book so I never forgot about it and then the third one is actually it's it's not a book but it's an article that I think is still very powerful and relevant to this day it's the new product development game published by Harvard Business Review in 1986 and it looks at a really
different approach one that I resonate a lot with because it's a lot along the lines of how we work at CNN around rapid development and you know time and flexibility being like key anchors of successful productive so I threw that in there as well favorite recent movie or TV show and it can be White Lotus okay I haven't even seen that show okay great that's come up so many times it's not allowed anymore TV show is a toss-up
between the Mandalorian and Ted lasso I know it's not very new but I don't watch tons and tons of TV and I usually find like the few that I latch onto and then I get obsessed with and then I gotta take a break for a while so those are my last two obsessions movie is everything everywhere all at once last amazing one that really really struck a chord with me if you like Mandalorian check out the best Star Wars thing okay I've seen
it okay great I I still love Mandalorian more I do like that one too my my husband is obsessed okay okay wow contrarian uh favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates what's something that would not exist without your initiative and what do you look for in an answer that's a sign that this is someone you may want to hire the whole point of the question is like do you have and can you exhibit High
agency and especially again working in news that's so important and so there's not like a specific answer I think the ability to actually Define something specific and tangible in itself is a really really really good sign I think a lot of that you know people definitely get startled by that by that question sometimes because it requires you to kind of have to know what it is that you put on the table right so
um yeah it's it's different every single time but the fact if they can define something out of that question it's it's it's usually a positive sign cool thanks for sharing that additional detail next question what's something relatively minor you've changed in your product development process at CNN or on your team specifically that's had a tremendous impact on your ability to execute Bridging the Gap between product
and editorial at Mutual trust and respect has had an outsize impact on our success as a high performing team sadly and that's something other people can use but that's cool to know they'll have to hire some journalists now I think to take advantage of that learning I can add on to that to make it relevant for for others which is it just goes back to you know there's there's no substitute for having those
direct conversations with your customers and your users right and it's like when you understand that the assumptions you make are not one-to-one or ever going to be one-to-one with their actual feedback and developing that line of communication with your users and your customers is of utmost importance I think you know that in itself is is the key takeaway right it's like how do you bridge the gap between collecting that feedback having those
conversations like how far are you from your users how frequently are you having conversation how consistently are you having conversations and I always think the more frequently and the more consistently and earlier on in the process that you're having those conversations the better final question maybe you were to answer this what's the most crazy or most memorable story from working at CNN every election season is absolutely
crazy in the best way possible it's incredible to see our democracy and action and watch History unfold and while that's happening using the platform you had a direct hand in building and it's never lost on me that my work impacts the world every single day and on the crazy frustrating stressful days like that is what serves as my anger awesome plus this was amazing I learned uh how to brush my teeth more mindfully about elections
downtime Trump all these things final two questions working folks finding a line if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you it's very easy to find me online I'm pretty active on Twitter and Instagram I recently became an amateur content creator so I share lots of stuff here and there on on social so any social platform well not any only on Twitter LinkedIn and
Instagram so any any of those three is is good and I always love to hear feedback on stuff that resonated and made sense and the stuff that you know there are further questions on always love having conversations around that so yeah DMS are always open I know a link to this in Mission but just what's your handle on these networks it's my first and last name very creative I thought about it all by myself awesome and then I don't
know if you answered the second question how can listeners be useful to you it's the feedback right like I love to hear what you found valuable what has how what helped you what was the tactic that you took away and employed that helped you things that made sense things that didn't make sense what you'd like to hear more about any any specific topic that would be valuable to do a deeper dive on all of those things are very
valuable to me amazing again thank you for being here and um adios thank you thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode