This presentation is a thorough introduction on how to work with your product and technology teams, and how vice versa to work with editorial team members, in order to ship effective software quickly. The specific subject of this presentation would be how the FT shipped ‘autoposts’, a system for editors to put data-heavy time-sensitive liveblog posts together in a few relaxing seconds rather than several frantic minutes. It was built for election year, and was iterated on between the 2024 UK elections. The whole product took about three months to ship, with plenty of cool tips to learn about what the process adopted in putting this together, and the important things not to do in order to iterate quickly.
The general focus is on how to successfully bridge the gap between product managers (typically in the technology part of the media organization) and the newsroom, which can prove a major challenge: combining the traditional top-down thinking and tenured management styles of the newsroom with the iterative and experimental mode of working in product teams.