The FT Untangles Tension Between Editorial, Product Teams

Newsrooms tend to be isolated from the rest of media organizations. There’s a good reason for that: to keep the moneymaking away from influencing the coverage.

But it also creates a blockade from understanding what your audience wants and then creating the products that will keep them coming back. To fix that, newsrooms are increasingly creating “bridge roles” that connect the editorial, commercial and product divisions.

The Financial Times, in particular, created a new role in late 2023 for an editorial product director—held by Hannah Sarney. She had previously stepped into the role as head of audience engagement, itself a new position, and saw the product job as an evolution. We spoke to Sarney about the need for the position and what she’s actually up to.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Italicized copy is from Sarney.

Where did this role come from?

I’ve spent a lot of years leading the audience engagement team at the FT in the newsroom, with the mission to grow the reach and the impact of our journalism.

This role, as I workshopped it through, really felt like the essential next step in that mission, and that was because I really wanted to tackle a problem that we thought was blocking us. And the easiest way to describe it is the tension that came from seemingly disconnected editorial and product strategies.

That disconnected feeling between newsrooms and product teams, it isn’t a problem that’s unique to the FT. I spent a lot of time trading notes with peers around the industry, and especially in my little area of the niche area of editorial product bridging roles. There are very common themes that really speak to the need for the role.

Across the departments, we’re speaking really different languages. If we use the same word, it’s often got a different meaning. We work on different timelines. We have different work cultures. We have different organizational structures, and all of that has the potential to tangle together and create some misaligned priorities, and create that frustration, that tension, and ultimately slow us down.

Sometimes editorial will ask for one thing and then what comes out the other side is something completely different. There is a temptation to give that shopping list, but it leaves a lot of room for assumptions. It’s not surprising that down the line we end up off somewhere else.

I can really focus my time on making sure that we’re very clearly articulating the vision, the problem statement, the big bets, the focus areas.

Sarney cited Kat Downs Mulder, the GM in SVP at Yahoo News, posing the question of who is the product? To editorial, it’s content. To the product team, it’s the experience. The reality is that it’s both. 

One really big picture example of a problem Sarney found is that between product development and editorial, going back for years, she found 11 versions of the vision and mission statement for the FT.

Language matters so much. But the key point is it’s not just getting the right words, it’s making sure that we all understand. What is that vision? What direction are we all trying to go in? Can we keep it in mind when we come up with new ideas?

So they came up with a new mission statement: The Financial Times is unrivaled and essential to those who aim to lead. Unpacking that:

• Unrivaled in the sense that they don’t want to be playing catch up
• Essential in the sense that they know that a lot of readers read them for work, but they also want to be essential to readers as individuals—that well-rounded FT person
• Aim to lead speaks to the spectrum of the FT subscriber base, from CEOs to aspiring managers

Talk to me about products that have been developed or changed because of your work.

I don’t want to dodge your question, but I have to remind myself that my role is most effective when I take that step back. I’m in the world of what’s happening next year and the year after. Doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention. I’m still across everything that’s happening right now.

My role is more about change management and sometimes simple, sometimes supercharged, facilitation. The line that I’ve shared with people is that I’m there to facilitate collaborative problem solving across the departments.

This is where it’s a challenge for news media industries, is that it’s reflecting the ambitions of your senior leaders, but also the changing needs of the news agenda and the audience. The role is less about creating tangible products. I often describe my role as being half sales, half diplomacy.

Do you work across different FT products? I’m thinking the B2B products because it would seem that there might be cross over there. 

I’ve made it quite a big part of the role to be one of the primary people from editorial making sure that I have a clear understanding of what the commercial teams are doing. So, B2C, B2B, what are the ways that we break our teams down? What are the internal products teams doing? I’m interested in what our live events team want to do, what our specialist titles from the wider FT group, what are they interested in? What can we learn from them?

We’re on the same team, we’re working for the same company, and so we will be much more effective, faster, impactful, if we genuinely work together.

Sarney and peers are doing annual strategic planning, trading notes to be very clear on what their ambitions are, where overlaps might be found—or not found, which may mean they need to do more groundwork to bring that together and see whether it is actually something they collectively want to do.

We could have all the good intentions in the world to roll out quite an exciting product, but if, say, the product team hasn’t been fully briefed, and we don’t have the capacity to do the build that we need to, it’s going to go slowly or fall down. Or likewise, you could have editorial and product really bought in, but the marketing teams haven’t factored in at all.

The thing I hammer on about at work is our overall aim: what are our objectives? What are our measures of success? Are we all on the same page? What’s missing? Who’s worried?

How do you gauge audience engagement?

The FT has a wealth of data. They use the “Metrics That Matter” framework, which maps out the metrics that matter to each department. Those are visible to everyone so no one might be surprised.

The other benefit is really understanding, how does the work that you’re doing on the ground in editorial ladder up to the big North Star? Because we have a North Star metric that’s at the top that’s called Global Paying Audience. It’s the metric that we made that is looking to measure the total global paying audience across the FT groups. It’s very much a volume metric. But the way the framework functions is that you always match volume with value.

Those value metrics include subscriber engagement, time spent, volume, habit rates and habit scores. It can be hard to understand how individuals are moving the dial. Commercial and product, in general terms, have user based metrics. There are ways to connect them together, but it’s quite hard to take, say, the subscriber engagement score and directly link it to an individual article. You can do it to topics and themes.

What we’re working on at the moment is a version of the user needs model to try and knit those two together. So it’s thinking about: what is the user need that you’re serving for that particular piece of content. Why have you commissioned that piece?

I slightly dodged a question earlier around products. Things take a while. The stuff that I’ll have more of a hand in doesn’t exist yet for subscribers, it’s in the works. But the threads through that are the audience data, the audience participation, building community. That’s the work I’m most excited about in this increasing AI age of everything being so disconnected.

I can hear the jargon coming out of my mouth, but those sort of authentic experiences where we can really connect people, that’s the part that I’m looking forward to.

Sarney is clearly looking to the future and particularly matching the high quality content with the experience to match. It’s what the FT is calling adaptive formats: the concept is trying to do flexible storytelling. What does that mean? Making better use of what they already have to reach more people in more places. For example:

Maybe specifically a use case is, ‘I’ve got five minutes before I’m meeting my boss. I roughly know the topics I want to go into. You jump into a story, and you’re like, can you just summarize it for me? Or English is not your first language. Can you translate that quickly for me?’

Because there is a high bar of assumed business knowledge at the FT, in theory, having a conversation with the FT, could you then say, ‘Hey, I don’t quite understand that part. Can you explain it to me and just be able to break it down a little bit more?’

So you’re the one adapting the content. You’re transforming the content to suit your needs, but we have that high quality, trusted information, and you can rely on us to make sure that it works. But again, it’s all theory.

It’s not all generative AI-driven, but in the AI space, Sarney said.

She’s also very attuned to the topic of community. Whereas old school media was one-way, new media goes both ways, from the creators to consumers and back again. The company does Q&As with journalists, but the experience isn’t good enough yet.

The question is, how can you create the two way environment for the audience? It’s not just us saying, Here you go. It’s also asking them, What do you think? What’s the gap in our reporting that our readers can help us fill and the experiences that they can fill?

We have a really healthy commenting community at the FT. It’s not perfect, but that is a space where we know that—these numbers have burned into my brain—but the subscribers who read the comments are 11 times more engaged than those who don’t, and then it absolutely skyrockets—those who write comments are 47 times more engaged than those who don’t. But there is a really meaty problem in there that well over half of our audience reads comments—it’s a smaller proportion actually write them.

How can we invite more people through the door to be a part of that conversation? How can we make it a space that they ought to be there, that they want to be a part of it, that they’re a part of that community, too?

Can they create moderated spaces where people can have conversations? The FT already has a team of comment moderators in Manila who spend their days making sure that readers are adhering to our community guidelines, which are very easy to find, and written in plain language on purpose. It’s still the internet, and people still aren’t always polite and respectful.

What else am I not asking that you think is important?

We’re really in a war on time. While I really admire and I’m keeping an eye on other news media organizations, I spend half my time, if not more, looking beyond that. If the news media industry is to continue to compete, we have to be realistic that our competitors aren’t just the other publishers or broadcasters that we typically pit ourselves against.

There’s all the social platforms, but I can speak for myself personally, the slightly unnerving Spotify wraps told me that I spent 40,000 minutes with Spotify last year, which is enormous.That is time I haven’t spent on news platforms. It is not time I haven’t spent consuming news because I’m listening to books for work and I’m listening to podcasts, but I’m not on the news organizations websites, seeing their ads and paying their subscriptions.

That is something we have to keep in mind and asking that question of sort of why? What’s taking me off into that space? And in my opinion, the thread through the platforms that are winning a lot in the war on time, they tend to have a very clever use of data, and ultimately, it means they serve up extremely convenient and seamless experiences of the content that they’re housing.

This story has been updated to reflect that Sarney listened to 40,000 minutes on Spotify not 40,000 hours.