Tips and Tools for Building Next-Generation Products

Espen Sundve, VP of Next Generation Publishing at Schibsted, and Matt Galligan talk about working with Destination Next, their innovation publishing product as they navigate through rapidly changing markets. How do you test and react quickly? What environments do you need? How do you foster those environments?

Know your “Why?”

Get an understanding of what you’re trying to achieve and why. For Schibsted, this included asking a basic question, “Why does journalism exist?” This ranged from anywhere from informing people to entertaining people. Setting a clear understanding across the team, at the very least, means working towards a clear product vision. From there, creating disruptive products involves asking what needs to be changed to achieve your vision.

Disrupt yourself to stay relevant

Invest in a testing ground for radical learnings. Working in established industries or as an established player means working in the limelight. Create a safe ground, as a spinoff product or even under a hidden name, to test out new features, new ideas, and maybe even entirely new products. Staying on top isn’t easy!

Keeping it open

To react to rapidly changing environments, team members must know what is happening as soon as possible, in the least time possible. Ambient awareness means teams are aware of other teams. However, achieving this at scale in a time efficient manner is difficult. Matt Galligan shares with us his favourite tool to keep information sharing open and transparent, using Quip. Having collaborative documentation tools reduces the need for meetings and creates more time to get things done! However, clear guidelines for tool use will help reduce renegade use and too much noise:

• Define what kind of documents should be shared (e.g. Team Meetings)
• Have formats and templates for documents to make reading easy
• Disruption requires good ideas, synchronised teams, and fast reaction time. These factors are easy to identify, but difficult to execute. Check out Espen and Matt’s full speech to hear their journey and the challenges they face in building Destination Next.