Automobile Journalism to Product Management: Is it worth it?
Do what you love they said…
2017
A: Think twice bro!
B: Loosaa nee? Editorial la thaane nalla career growth irukkum inga? enna aachu unaku? (Are you stupid? Why would you move from editorial that has promises a good career growth?)
C: Ithu oru trap da. Vendaam! (Don’t do this. It’s a trap.)
D: If I were you, I wouldn’t do this.
These were the comments from my well-wishers when I said to them that I am moving completely away from a stable newsroom job at my organization(Vikatan group) to become a product manager in the same org. Back then, there was no product team in our company, and I was the first PM… tasked with building a product that was like an anti-thesis of our core business. It was the first such product in India.
Rewind to 2015
Vikatan was getting ready to become a completely digital first, mobile-first company. From 2012 to 2015, I was happily driving all sorts of cars and bikes in India’s amazing roads and was being paid to write(Motor Vikatan, Our Automobile Magazine) about the experiences. Talk to any auto-enthusiast, he/she will say Automobile Journalism is their dream job. I sucked at studies throughout my school/college years but still landed with a job that most can only dream of. It did come with its limitations. But hey, some sacrifices are necessary right?!
I was doing some new stuff with the digital portals of our Auto magazine, and it did garner some eyeballs as they were a bit polarizing for the place that thought ‘print-first’. In the same time, our office was suddenly full of youngsters. Eventually, our management decided to take in six youngsters and train them for digital. I was one among them.
Company’s plan for us was very simple.
We will fund you. You build a non-legacy branded digital product, You own it, You run it.
It means we have to ideate and launch a product. Own it and run everything from content to revenue, including advertisements, branding, analytics, product, etc., all by ourselves.
[Later, When I was talking to a famous startup investor, mentor about this, he said this is the best example of entrepreneurship inside a legacy company. He said I was lucky as this was something not every company does.]
Thus began TamilFlashNews. A short breaking news app from a company that never had a ‘breaking news desk’ in its past 90 years. (we eventually became the ‘breaking news’ desk for our digital first workflow.)
As months progressed, I could clearly see the whole media ecosystem was light-years behind tech companies in-terms of ‘thinking-digitally’. This is important as I was thinking this way in a company that was one of the firsts in Asia to launch an online paywall to subscribe and read content.
Let’s sort out ‘digital thinking’ first.
Nope.
There is no such a thing called ‘digital thinking’. There is only ‘user-first thinking’.
The mistake many legacy print media houses made back then was they were bending and breaking their backs to fit into the digital market. Basically, they started losing the core thought process behind the print strategy(i.e. curating the stories for the user) when it came to digital.
Suddenly, they had to tell stories in many mediums. Unfortunately, there were many stories and not much ‘story-telling’.
This is a completely different topic to think upon, and I’ll write about it in another newsletter. For now, let’s jump back to our baby, TamilFlashNews.
I was taking care of the analytics and product part of the project. Obviously I knew nothing about these back then. So I spent two hours every day to read and take notes about what’s happening in the digital media industry.
Each and every day my concern for the overall media ecosystem in TN started growing. Social Giants should’ve helped media companies get closer to readers, but they were only concerned about hosting the content on their platforms.(I wouldn’t completely blame them. They did what they set out to do.) This resulted in making the content fit into the specs of technology and medium, which in turn resulted in the loss of user focus.
I had this gut-feeling that user obsession was being lost somewhere in the conveyor belt of content delivery. While the phrase ‘conveyor belt’ feels demeaning to write, such was the ecosystem back then.
I couldn’t do anything as I knew back then that I knew nothing enough to pinpoint on.
But subconsciously I was getting convinced the Product Management could be my future and proper ‘products’ will put the users first again and take the whole media ecosystem to a better place.
Content is King; Product is Queen.
I mentioned previously that we did a product that was an antithesis of our core subscription business. That product was APPAPPO. A product that put story-telling and user-focused-curation first than the tech, medium and money. It opened a world of learning to us about what really user wants from a digital media product.
If you notice deeply, media companies kept learning the same lessons time and time again. Users always thronged to providers who did the ‘story-telling’ better.
While everyone at digital media presentations said the digital audience can’t keep their attention on a thing for 8 seconds straight, I was seeing readers spending more and more time on good stories(articles with great narration, story-telling etc.) in APPAPPO. It was so crystal clear that users knew what they want, and they are ready to spend time and money if we empathized with them.
In the last decade, Every media company struggled(still) with the tech giants’ algorithms and their engines, which indirectly affected their content strategy. Most were quick to re-adapt and concentrated more on story telling. Better Products started rolling out.
Yet, True user-obsession is the missing piece when products are the actual ‘enablers of content’.
Dmitry Shishkin says from a different perspective.
Content is Product and Product is Content.
Somewhere along the way when we were doing APPAPPO, I became convinced I should stay in the Media business and I should stay in the Product Roles. No other role in a media organization will get you so close to your users, to your content, to your tech, to your data and to yourself. This is one role that will feed your value system if you prefer curiosity over the comfort zone and empathy over observation.
Trust me when I say this.
Future product managers in media companies will be coming from editorial backgrounds, supported by true product professionals.
I always believe a good product is like a good story. Thus, good story tellers can help build better products.
(If you are a digital publisher, You might already have a PM in your own newsroom working as a Journalist. How to identify them? What they want? I will explain more about this in another newsletter.)
Unplanned Roadmap
When I was six, I wanted to become a road-roller driver.
When I was 12, I wanted to become a pilot. [even though I was bad at math :-) ]
When I was 20, I wanted to become a professional rally driver. (Sebastien Loeb, Blue-Gold Subaru, Ralliart Mitsubishi Evo, WRC Highlights… those were the days.)
But I became an automobile journalist, and I am now a product manager in a digital media organization.
Every single person who knows me says I plan too much. But my life clearly shows my career never went according to my plan. [I didn’t joke around when I said want to become a pilot, rally driver etc. :-D ]
Yet, being a product manager goes hand-in-hand with my values. Curiosity, Empathy, a deep desire to know the unknown and an unhealthy amount of patience ;-)
And every single day I am getting to know how much I don’t know!
And that’s why this is worth it.
Now I know I could end up anywhere tomorrow. But my mind is at peace knowing that today could be just a beginning.
Be curious.
Raja.
[P.S: I always feel weird when I read my works a year later. They always felt incomplete and had a lack of understanding. Maybe it is because of my mental progress but I can’t bear to have such works under my name after if I get such thoughts. So whatever I’ve written here is written only with my perception and understanding till the day. I might not feel the same about all of this in the coming years as my experiences will change my perception of the above-written topics. Let’s see where this goes.]