Upasna Gautam: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yep. This is pretty much the foundation of all of my work. We talk 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 form of 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. 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 tried to make sure that 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 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. 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 the health team does, and very different than the way that the CNN homepage 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 dress 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. o 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 just 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 communications, so we do those right now once a week. Sometimes they go up to two times a week if we're in a really vigorous onboarding phase. After those conversations and 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 anew, or we tell them it's not viable. And the good thing 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, I have so much questions about just working with journalists. I feel like pushing back on a journalist is probably extra hard versus other types of stakeholders.…

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