Before it launched Gigantes, a monthly publication meant for children, newspaper la diaria of Uruguay started by sending a survey to its reader base to see if there was a need for the product.
In Argentina, the website Cenital started with a newsletter, to understand what interested its audience. Nowadays, thematic newsletters are still its main form of communication, and each is designed to reach a specific audience.
Rádio Novelo, in Brazil, uses its main program, Rádio Novelo Apresenta, to build a community through its weekly episodes, while, in parallel, it features other activities that benefit from this main program.
According to Ana Soffietto, director of programs for Latin America at the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF), they all have at least one thing in common: using a product approach to improve how they perform with audiences.
The approach consists of a set of strategies and best practices that advocate making decisions based on data and valuing testable ideas, promoting management that seeks to meet specific needs.
According to Soffietto, the arrival of the approach in Latin America is relatively recent.
"The most relevant thing today in the region are the organizations that are beginning to incorporate these roles within media and that are beginning to think from this perspective,” Soffietto told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
According to Joseph Lichterman, from the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, and Anika Gupta, from Google Ventures, “a product can be anything a news organization creates to solve a problem or meet a need. An effective product serves a well-defined audience, and is often pegged to a specific way of earning revenue.”
In journalism, a product can be, for example, a newsletter, a magazine, a podcast or a new section of a newspaper. Side projects, such as event series or books, also count.
Adopting a product mindset in journalism entails a significant transformation in the way media outlets approach the creation and distribution of content.
This change occurs in the middle of a crisis in journalism sustainability models and greater abundance in the supply of information, Soffietto said.
"Before you did one thing, right? For example, producing content through a website and publishing stories without thinking so much about how that audience consumes it, what specific audience needs they have, what my specific audience is. There was a more linear way of communicating with audiences,” she said.
LJR spoke to three experts on product approaches in search of fundamental tips. Below, we present seven recommendations.
The consultants' first suggestion sounds simple, but requires important transformations: incorporating a product mentality implies a change in perspective from the traditional view of journalism.
According to Soffietto, thinking in terms of a product goes beyond just creating something new. The task is to understand journalistic work as a service that must meet the specific needs of its audience.
“Introducing the product perspective in organizations, even the smallest and youngest ones, has to do with thinking that what we do is a product in the sense that it is a service that we offer to an audience and that it has to fulfill a need,” Soffietto said.
The main challenge, according to her, is not to do new things, but to understand what the particular audience really wants, and what they are willing to pay for.
“Before it was, ‘good, I want to publish this information because I think it is relevant from my point of view,’ and that is often not what people need,” she said.
The first concrete step to preparing a product is to review the market to check if there are previous studies in the field where you want to work,
according to Germán Frassa, an Argentine journalism consultant who works as product director at the Spanish group Prensa Ibérica, in addition to acting as a coach and trainer in product programs in Latin America.
According to him, especially in large markets such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina, there are usually a lot of available reports produced by consultancies, research institutes and universities, which can serve as a knowledge base.
“That would be the minimum. I'm going to look at what knowledge others have generated on this,” Frassa told LJR.
Then there is a second step, which is to identify the gaps in your project, since the studies were not tailor-made to your project.
“So by analyzing these studies, doubts will naturally arise, things that these studies do not answer and I believe that these doubts should be part of a second step of research through online surveys,” he said.
Conducting quantitative online research to get targeted responses is an important step in understanding the public's unmet needs and spending habits.
This research aims to understand how your product will adapt to the public’s habits.
“The search can be a query on social networks or via Google Forms. The goal is to understand how your product will fit into that person’s daily life. Will it come in the morning, when the person wakes up, or in the afternoon? Is it in audio or video format?”, Brazilian consultant Luciana Cardoso told LJR.
According to Frassa, the costs of this research have dropped considerably.
“With social platforms, it is relatively easy to launch an online survey and distribute it by demographic segments, geographic segments, etc. and obtain high-quality segmented responses,” he said.
Once you have the statistical data, there is, according to Frassa, a third very important step, which is to understand, in qualitative terms, the user’s needs.
“It is very valuable to sit down with even a single user, a potential user of my product, to understand their habits regarding information through a conversation that is not so guided, not too controlled,” Frassa said.
The objective of this conversation, according to the consultant, is not to ask the user if he likes the product being developed, nor to question him about which product he would like to see developed, but rather to talk to him to understand how he relates to information.
“It's almost like a therapy session, making the user talk so we as detectives can find little pearls of knowledge,” he said.
According to Frassa, “this is something that isn’t done much, but it has immense value.”
The next step is to test your hypotheses through a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
In entrepreneurship, an MVP is the simplest version of a product that can be launched with a minimum amount of effort and development, avoiding wasted time and resources.
This concept is crucial to understanding the logic of launching products on the market.
“What you have to do to make a good product is not to invest large amounts of money and put together a perfect mega product, but on the contrary, start with something very, very small,” Soffietto said.
Next, testing the idea in an economical way is crucial.
"Instead of saying 'we're going to spend all our resources' – and by resources I mean not only money, but also time, since that makes us tired and frustrated – we simply have to go out and test if this idea works,” Soffietto said.
Luciana Cardoso said that, based on the MVP, it is necessary to measure the results, analyzing audience data.
“You need to understand what is working and what is not working, what is being consumed and what is not,” she said.
Measuring results is necessary to understand whether you’re on the correct path, so, you need goals and objectives.
Cardoso said she likes a goal management methodology used by organizations to define and monitor objectives and their results. It’s called OKR, which means “Objectives and Key Results.”
“You define the main objective and establish your key results. You monitor these results, defining, for example, an objective with three key results and monitor it weekly,” she said.
This monitoring allows you to know whether or not you are achieving these objectives.
“From the beginning, it is important to be clear about the objective, which is one of the biggest challenges. Having a clear objective of where I want to go and not simply saying, 'I want to launch a website,'" Cardoso said.
Along the way, while testing the viability of a product, it is necessary to seek to understand specifically what is not working and how the product can be relaunched and improved.
As you measure, you need to constantly adjust and repeat practices after changes, Soffietto said. The term used by experts for this expedient is iteration.
"Iterate is a word we repeat ad nauseam in product. Before, it was very difficult to evaluate whether a product worked or not because there was less information. Now, we have thousands of ways to know whether things work and specifically why they don't work,” she said.
The consultant gave the example of a hypothetical newsletter that does not reach the expected number of followers or subscribers.
Instead of giving up, if you really believe that there is potential there, it is important to try to see what can be done to better engage readers.
"It is a continuous process, so for me the crucial thing is to always build community and a permanent connection, and then understand how you can improve what you are already doing," she said.
For anyone who wants to find out more about the topics above, consult the website of the non-profit organization News Product Alliance, the organization's Slack channel, the website of specialist Marty Cagan and the Membership Guide website, available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
