Books that have made me stronger in my work. Part 2. Content and Product alignment

I am continuing to share recommendations for the best non-fiction books I have found useful in my work. This is chapter two out of four, and the next entry (on all things innovation) is going to be published next week. Thank you for your interest and feedback to the first article, on personal development. 

 Each entry covers five books and I am grateful for your suggestions off of the back of  the first article. Once again, I invite you to contribute your recommendations on the subject in the comments. So, let’s dive straight in. 

 Having worked in journalism and digital publishing for over 20 years, I have been a firm believer that content and product,, that used to be so vastly separate in the past, are moving much closer together. It’s imperative that digital journalists get to understand the product side of their universe in the same way they expect product managers to be much more aware of content and news sector sensibilities. An article I wrote on content/product integration was enthusiastically received by my network, and the books I am recommending below have been selected pretty much to stress the importance of that alliance. 

 The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand is a great book to be read by people from both sides of the aisle. It tackles content strategy at its core, and analyses the reasons behind the trap many publishers find themselves in while trying to transform. Almost always that trap is set with their own hands, either by blindingly following ‘best practice’ guides from the industry or by holding on to outdated concepts no longer viable in the current circumstances. The author, who teaches strategy at Harvard, shows through a number of high profile and successful examples, how organisations can transform themselves if they concentrate on connections between just a few important things - customers, products, functions - and how these connections create a competitive advantage.  This book really spoke to me, as I was developing my thinking about satisfying user needs via content. 

Quote: Content businesses everywhere tend to define themselves by their content. This is the trap. The power of content is increasingly overwhelmed by the power of user connections, of which network effects are perhaps the most potent form. 

Now, that you have got your content house in order, you’ll have seen how integral the product side of your business strategy is. After all, to put it bluntly, you might be telling the best stories around, but if you deliver them not in the way audiences find useful, you are not going to be as successful as you could have been. Content is product and vice versa, and users will inevitably compare your offer and experience to the ones of Amazon, Instagram and Netflix - noone within these companies specifically delineate content from product components. Users do not do either.  

Hence the second book, which is mainly aimed at product managers, but, I’d argue journalists and editors alike should pay close attention to it - Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. Dealing with non-editorial colleagues, working in an agile way in ‘squads’ means you have got to be able to be comfortable in a different universe, understand the processes, the language, the priorities of the other side. Many of us do already, and I am delighted that many colleges and universities are adding product management training into journalism courses. This matters to the audience, so it must matter to us all.      

Quote: One method is to try asking the question "why" as many times as it takes to get to an emotion. Usually this will happen by the fifth “why.” This is a technique adapted from the Toyota Production System described by Taiichi Ohno as the “5 Whys Method.” Ohno wrote that it was "the basis of Toyota's scientific approach ... by repeating ‘why?’ five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.  

For me, organising an effective and successful digital publishing process should not be any different to running a startup - an obsessive focus on audiences and willingness to test and iterate, ownership of initiatives, an ability to disagree yet commit to a decision, building trust across stakeholders - all of these principles point towards my next entry - The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries. 

This book made my transition from a corporate, yet public service environment of BBC News to a fast-moving nature of a travel startup called Culture Trip so much easier. It helped me a lot, and many journalists working in digital will learn plenty from it, too - another strong entry, helpfully yet again making my point that nowadays content is product and product is content.  

Quotes: We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek. When in doubt, simplify. Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem. If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is. Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop is at the core of the Lean Startup model. 

Now that your content and product alignment is in place, at least on paper (let’s not pretend it’s that easy!), you also need to get things delivered, which can be tricky when you deal with conflicting priorities, complicated deliverables and a myriad of stakeholders. A very effective way of achieving that, across the company as a whole, is to introduce OKRs in your operations and goal setting - Objectives and Key Results - a system many great Silicon Valley companies were built. And why not learn from John Doerr, the father of OKRs himself, by reading his Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth. 

Yes, it normally takes a few quarters to get properly going with getting OKRs to work, but it's worth it - your focus and concentration on what really matters will be guiding everyone. OKRs is a very empowering system: whilst the leadership tells the company where it wants to get to (by setting Os), the individual teams working in close contact with others to capture dependencies and roadmaps, agree on measurable key results (KRs).    

Quotes: Ideas are easy. Execution is everything. We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing. When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated. An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts. Early on in your career, when you’re an individual contributor, you’re graded on the volume and quality of your work. Then one day, all of a sudden, you’re a manager. Let’s assume you do well and move up to manage more and more people. Now you’re no longer paid for the amount of work you do; you’re paid for the quality of decisions you make.

However, measuring wrong things, taking decisions without context and overloading yourself in numbers can be equally damaging. Hence my last entry in this collection -  Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z Muller. He rightfully states that ‘anything that can be measured and rewarded will be gamed’ and uses many examples of one-sided failed strategies, warns against the threats of quantitative-only approach to decision making. This book was once called ‘a timely manifesto against measured accountability’ and in some ways this description is correct, although it must not not be taken as an antidote to the arguments from the previous OKRs book. On the contrary, they should work in unison, helping you to build an effective yet fair and transparent system of goal setting. 

Quotes: Accountability ought to mean being held responsible for one’s actions. But by a sort of linguistic sleight of hand, accountability has come to mean demonstrating success through standardized measurement, as if only that which can be counted really counts. The most characteristic feature of metric fixation is the aspiration to replace judgment based on experience with standardized measurement. Metric fixation leads to a diversion of resources away from frontline producers toward managers, administrators, and those who gather and manipulate data. Trying to force people to conform their work to preestablished numerical goals tends to stifle innovation and creativity—valuable qualities in most settings. And it almost inevitably leads to a valuation of short-term goals over long-term purposes.

Thank you for making it to the end, hopefully, you’ve found it useful - next week in the third collection I’ll be recommending the best books I have read on all things to do with a complex subject of 'innovation'. Meanwhile, I am inviting you to send me your recommendations on the best content/product alignment books in the comments. Thank you and happy reading!