Content Strategy and Product Management (in science education)
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Presentation from Content Strategy Applied 2017 When your product is mostly content, product management looks a lot like content strategy. The Royal Society of Chemistry is an academic publisher, and a major provider of educational resources for schools and teachers. So that's certainly true here. Having worked in content strategy and product management, and now helping the RSC develop its product management function, I'll talk about how the disciplines interact. We'll cover: - What makes a good strategy, and what it means to be a product - Innovation, roadmapping, and thinking about services - Measurement and value when your goals are both charitable and commercial
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Content Strategy and Product Management (in science education)
- 1. Roger Hart Content Strategy & Product Management in science education
- 2. @RMH40 HartR@RSC.org Technical communication Content strategy Product marketing Product management I’ve done bits of:
- 6. Image: BrainTraffic, of course Join in at the chorus
- 7. Making sure your website doesn’t suck, by asking: • What is it for? • Is it any good at that?
- 8. a) Something a bunch of copywriters made up in 2007, to add about £200 to their day rates b) A set of really useful principles that can seem operational, and so old white men don’t think of them as “strategic” What do people think content strategy is?
- 11. “A good product manager is the CEO of the product” “Bullshit” Ben Horrowitz & David Weiden Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager (1997) Every other blog post on product management ever since
- 13. Image: BrainTraffic, of course Usually, this bit is the problem So we look at the other bits instead
- 14. An operational solution to a broken strategy cascade (that you probably can’t affect) “Mr. Carnegie,’ Taylor said, ‘I would advise you to make a list of the ten most important things you can do. and then, start doing number one.” Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy
- 16. So, strategy then? Image: http://gunshowcomic.com/648
- 17. HiPPOs are bad for strategy. (they usually just charge around and break stuff.) Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cumulius/2454289874/
- 18. It’s hard to have content strategy without a business or product strategy Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park)
- 19. Richard Rumelt
- 20. Diagnosis Guiding policy Coherent actions Nature of challenge • What is going on here? • SWOT • Simplify overwhelming complexity • Inductive & subjective Overall approach • What roughly will we do? • What will we not do? • Easy to refer to Coordinated steps • Must build on each other • And on strengths • Proximate objectives A cohesive response to an important challenge” “
- 21. 21 21 Example
- 22. 22 22 Coherent Action Break the cohesion of the enemy fleet Guiding Policy Avoid traditional tactics Exploit rough conditions Nelson’s Diagnosis Outnumbered Better gunners/captains
- 23. "The mission of The Walt Disney Company is to be one of the world's leading producers and providers of entertainment and information. Using our portfolio of brands to differentiate our content, services and consumer products, we seek to develop the most creative, innovative and profitable entertainment experiences and related products in the world."
- 24. Making sure your organization doesn’t suck, by asking: • What is going on here? • What should we practically do about it?
- 25. Geoffrey Moore
- 29. User research Win/loss analysis Competitor research Risk analysis Revenue forecasting Market/opportunity sizing Web & usage stats “Jobs To Be Done” Etc, etc Also
- 31. • to foster and encourage the growth and application of such science by the dissemination of chemical knowledge; • to establish, uphold and advance the standards of qualification, competence and conduct of those who practise chemistry as a profession; • to serve the public interest by acting in an advisory, consultative or representative capacity in matters relating to the science and practice of chemistry; and • to advance the aims and objectives of members of the Society so far as they relate to the advancement of the science or practice of chemistry.
- 32. Supports 54,000 members Policy influence Outreach & campaigning Supporting businesses CPD & careers support Grants & funding Education resources Teacher training bursaries Certification The RSC: and…
- 33. Just so much publishing
- 34. Databases 58 million chemical structures
- 37. Education
- 38. Education in Chemistry News (tailored to teaching) Teaching ideas (and resources) Professional development Blogs Commentary and community Learn Chemistry Teacher-focused resources Student focused resources Online CPD courses (£) Periodic table ~45 microsites Schools engagement Competitions: Olympiad, Top of the Bench Outreach: Spectrometer in a suitcase Careers advice Some events Newsletters Learn Chemistry Partnership - Print copies of Education in Chemistry - Outreach visits & events - One teacher membership of RSC - Discounts on Online and Face-to-face CPD courses, posters, freebies CERP High level journal on chemistry education research and practice (online only) Very small but very engaged community. Not read by teachers. rsc.org - Membership & professional community - Resources and tools - Campaigning & outreach - News and events - Journals, books & databases - Locations & contacts Educationpublishingportfolio:Corporatesite
- 39. So. Much. Content. Seriously. Like, 45 microsites. ~7,000 content “components”
- 42. Mature existing content strategy practice
- 43. Mature existing content strategy practice
- 44. Open access is coming here
- 45. Can we fix it all with content strategy? Or: What do they even pay me for?
- 46. Workshop all the things
- 48. “I think the thing that most strongly drives teachers to our websites/services is the Education Coordinators. Many teachers still find our site incredibly difficult to navigate and find unless they are shown where it is/how to use it (confusion as they give up before they get to Learn Chemistry if they haven’t had guidance).” (This arrived in my inbox during Padma’s talk) WTF?
- 51. Education directorate vision & mission Our vision is that everyone has access to an excellent chemistry education that ensures students have the skills and knowledge to benefit society. The RSC will aim to improve and enrich chemistry education, and ensure that students are inspired to access learning and engage with chemistry.
- 52. Diagnosis: simplified When people find our stuff, they love it. They don’t find it easily enough, and it’s often hard to use. Our outreach activity is awesome, but can be a workaround for findability and usability. So. Much. Technical. Debt. TES, much? Bitesize? Yeah, those. (with the confidential/sensitive bits removed)
- 53. “Gave me what I searched for but not entirely what i was looking for. BUT this site has ben really helpful. Thank you and keep up the good work” “interaction design of site makes it very difficult to navigate. Scrolling through content is too hard.” “I can't find what i want” “These are relevant, clear, accurate, and well researched practical resources” Customer feedback Net Promoter scores Commissioned research (SchoolZone) Organic search Jira tickets UX test feedback
- 54. Roll it all up into a single, coherent, simpler product and fix its discoverability. Integrate this with outreach to help teachers get at value and help us learn. Don’t create (much) more content. Develop a “volume of value” metric. Guiding policy It’s not rocket synergy
- 55. But Roger, what about those coherent actions?
- 56. Periodic Table app Register on site awareness discovery validation purchase Align with our funnel
- 57. http://amzn.to/2l4ian7 One thing to take away? Read the book. It’s awesome.
- 58. More references • Good Strategy, Bad Strategy • Dealing With Darwin • The Product Vision Board • Geoffrey Moore on market maturity (video) • Kathy Sierra at Business of Software (video) • The Jobs To Be Done framework website • HubSpot on Inbound Marketing • The Innovator’s Dilemma • Net Promoter
Editor's Notes
- What I want to talk about is kind of a common misconception Talk a bit about CS & PdM and the intersection More alike than different, a lot of interest in the overlap Execution domains are the main divergence But mostly, having done both I’m interested in a misconception and failure mode But first
- Before we start, I have a little confession to make. This session is in people and processes, and I really shouldn’t speak badly of my stakeholders or team. But they have let me down terribly. My whole idea was going to be around the difficulty of coming in as a product manager to a content product. I did that. But it was easy. Because my team were lovely. Smart, savvy, eager to change, and super on board. So instead, I’m going to talk about some of the things we did together, and some of the reflections on the interaction of the two disciplines I’ve found on the way. My chief weapon is strategy… strategy and frameworks, and… well Let’s start at the conclusion. Content strategy and product management can be problematically interchangeable.
- Move from talking to doing (sadly I’m mostly talking today) you find some huge operational overlaps Not in the core of the disciplines so much, although you do In the misconceptions, failure modes, and in the monsters they’re fighting Content strategy can get lost looking like content management (operational). Product management can get distracted into pure strategy, or seen as non-operational. (to be fair, it can also fail into being a purely execution based product ownership role) I won’t do the whole “what is content strategy” thing. We all know that song.
- We look at these models and talk about governance We audit and build inventories Editorial calendars Try and sell the value Do the things around the outside that we practically can do Or, as I used to put it
- TCUK 2010, CS Forum. Paris. We recognise those as inherently strategic questions, and I hope you’ll recognise the model later. It can help you interrogate a strategy, because if it doesn’t derive from a strategy there’s a problem. But there’s a perception problem. What do the cynics say…
- Why is it seen as operational? CS lives at the execution side? I’ve had this fight. I’m sure many of you have. I really thought I’d have to sell content strategy into my organization. I did at Redgate. For ages nobody wanted to know. Can’t we just do stuff… I hear this, and I also hear some other views of product management (Think about the archetype of who does strategy work vs who does content strategy. Old white male execs vs younger more junior, less likely to be white or male folks, often from a marketing or tech comms background. Hmm…)
- People see the content management, not the strategy. Not even that, they see the bogeyman version. The bit with spreadsheets and keyword fiddling, and deleting/rewriting, and talking about “topics” and wanking on about bloody DITA. They also see the product strategy bogeyman for product management.
- No, really though I don’t even own a moleskine, but hey, two out of three ain’t bad There are a lot of misconceptions about product management too. Lots of them live at the strategy side. That we just tell dev teams what to do, or over-promise, or say no, or pose in front of slide decks (ahem) In fact, there’s a real tension. It’s similar – strategy and operations Tell the lion story? Zebra loves butterfly, Strategy Lion says become a butterfly. How? “That’s an operational problem”. It’s not helped by silicon bloody valley and investor storytime, but that’s one for another day.
- Fuck, in 1997 I was being bullied at boarding school… No hiring & firing No P&L No legal No accountability A network to call on No authority Running team? Product owner? BAU? What actually is it. Well, based on no authority… Panders to the desire to look strategic. Rather like cs… Taking strategic, or at least influential action from an operational world Here’s a better view
- Mind the product. They’re good guys, valleywank notwithstanding. Explain what we do Understanding. What to build. How to address a market. You are not the CEO of the product You are the operationalisation of the need for strategic thinking. You are strategy’s quarterly rolling average. Seem familiar?
- Fighting a rearguard action against poor strategy. That’s not totally been my experience, but it’s been part of it.
- Where strategy doesn’t cascade properly from clear steering at the top of the business, you can’t execute properly. CS & PdM have a history of working around this by taking the initiative in their own domains and asking hard questions on a micro level. Asking them again and again and often. Andrew Carnegie 1890, Frederick Taylor, upcoming consultant. $10k bet. Early piece of strategy consulting. Where business strategy is clear and obvious, content strategy is easy Any strategy is easy Where it isn’t, content strategy looks like magic, simple advice looks like magic (we’ll come back to that with market maturity, and the need for types of strategy) It lets people work out which things to do and not do, gives you a place to start Frederic Taylor got his ten thousand dollars Now, the world is a bit more complex than in 1890, and telling a plutocrat to make a list.
- What I really want to talk about is how to operationalize strategy work Its’ what lives at the intersection of our disciplines. Execution? We got this. Flippantly, I can drive a dev team, you can run an editorial process. I’ll talk about that more in the examples later – the relationship stuff isn’t easy. But we got this. Strategy though? Every business has a strategy, right? SLIDE
- Strategy work is hard It’s inductive, it’s subjective, and it’s suffered huge, ego-driven inflation It doesn’t help that strategy thinking has roots in humanity’s oldest practice of fruitless willy-waving: killing people so you can steal their sheep and feel big about it. The business version is just about stealing the opportunity to acquire fungible sheep futures. Money’s a series of deferred promises, and sure, fewer people get a flint knife through the eye, but too often it’s sheep and hegemonic masculinity all the way down That’s a real problem. A lot of people think things are strategy that are really just expensive, big, scary, or masculine.
- Highest Paid Person’s Opinion – toxic for good strategy. Likely to mess things up with drive-by planning and bullshit hobby projects. (Give RG example of capricious leadership and DLM double-down?) What is and isn’t strategy Expensive Senior Would a small business call a photocopier a strategic purchase? Then what about your ERP system? Are you walmart? Or is it a well intentioned fail?
- Magic thinking. I’ll come to the market maturity model Also “build it and they will come” Failure to face the question and well intentioned hope. CS can have a get out – just serve the target user. But to really pay off it has to connect. What do we do about it? I’m afraid it’s an old white man.
- This is Richard Rumelt, and he is not here to steal your underpants. UCLA, INSEAD. Worked for JPL in 60s. Aerospace. Havard. Also actually very smart. Years of consulting. Down to Earth. Strategy starts with the challenge. No formula Really, really hard. “Unlike a stand-alone decision or a goal, a strategy is a coherent set of analyses, concepts, policies, arguments, and actions that respond to a high-stakes challenge.” It’s interesting to note what’s not listed in here: Vision Goals/objectives Timescales Scope These are also needed, but they’re supporting players.
- This framework is one of the most useful things I’ve discovered. The org’s coherent actions could feed your content strategy, of course, in which case we pull them into our diagnosis. Ask hard questions. Where is your company in the market. What challenges do you face. Internal and external factors. Where do you just suck?
- Trafalgar. Britain doing an empire again. Jingoism, last night of the proms, and the high-profile queering of naval history But it’s a really simple strategy example
- Here’s another example: Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. The British were outnumbered, but they had better trained gunners and more experienced captains. If they followed the tradition tactic of lining up and blasting broadsides at each other, this wasn’t going to work out well for the British. But Nelson realised that his gunners were better trained than the Franco-Spanish gunners, and he judged that they wouldn’t be able to compensate for the heavy swell as well as his gunners. This lack of accuracy isn’t so important in traditional navy battles, but could be exploited when the ship’s coherent formation was broken up. So he risked his lead ships in order to break up the coherence of the enemy. And as he anticipated, his captains came out on top in the ensuing melee. Result: the French & Spanish lost 22 ships (2/3rds of fleet), the British lost none. This strategy came with risks, but BAU was a higher-risk approach (almost certainly doomed to failure), and “Nelson judged that the less-trained Franco-Spanish gunners would not be able to compensate for the heavy swell on the day”. So this was a judgement, not some algorithmically derived fact. Like to think of this simply like CS What about bad strategy.
- This is Disney's mission statement. Not quite a strategy, but publically available and may indicate thinking. Unfair to pick on mission statements, but… Fluff Multi purpose Non invertible Doesn’t face the problem Be a big entertainment company that does lots of stuff well. Profitably. To usefully specifically address a challenge, a strategy should probably be invertible. That is, could you imagine a sane person wanting to do the reverse. Maybe not exactly, but if it’s just stupid… Again, mission statements Elon Musk (not a great dude) but secret tesla plan blog post is a better example.
- But diagnosis is hard and requires a lot of data. Plus there are other frameworks. So complete the picture of what to do with a product, I look for another old white man. Here’s where I start to throw frameworks around. I promise, no ZMOT
- Wrote Crossing The Chasm. Speaker, academic, lecturer. Esp tech business. Who’s heard of? Keep this quick. It’s about types of product and innovation. About what you need to do when.
- This is his key model, snapped from my copy yesterday Gartner hype cycle overlays neatly… Partly explains so much bad strategy Explain If you’re in growth or mature, your strategy can be anything. If the money’s rolling Our strategy has the here key pillars of knowledge, mustard, and underpants Sure. Fill yer boots! Project signoff, exec seniority, free for alls, and post hoc attribution Of course, then disruption or decline can arrive.
- Moore also looked at buying preferences Performance to relationship to value Commoditization. Content’s going to help as inbound and support in the first half. Dictates relationship with customers and shape of opportunity Dictates innovation needed
- Sorry about this slide. Geoffrey Moore is a very smart man, even if he does like to slag off unions without explaining But he is not a graphic designer Quickly then, innovation of best fit You can probably see some content opportunities, too Neutralizing innovation Sadly, as I’ll explain, my organization is in the indefinitely elastic middle, with maybe some hints of category growth in some places. Now, product management is both more than throwing frameworks around, and may involve more frameworks These are just the ones I find most useful
- There’s buckets of other stuff. There’s a lot in common with product management. Here’s another framework James this morning – journeys, JTBD. User needs analysis. Fantastic techniques.
- Founded 175 years ago. London, Thomas Graham, 77 scientists. Royal charter by Queen Victoria Updated in 1980
- Don’t actually read this Gives us a top down purpose Is almost a mission statement, feels like a strategy But what do we do?
- So much. We do so much cool stuff. Massive educational funder.
- 40 odd journals Thousands and thousands of articles, high profile. Disseminating knowledge, advancing progress of science.
- 20-ish databases 3k links from wikipedia
- it’s basically New Scientist for chemistry
- 1.2M hits per month WTF?
- Alongside membership & pubs Working with publishers and a strong team. Relationships What I found
- Talk about web traffic. Levels of usage. ToP, engagement. Despite not much marketing. SEO & keywords – very curriculum specific.
- ~7000 content objects. Mostly XHTML bits Rendered on the fly or previewed. Some raw PDfs or word docs. “Duncan: it's like a series of Russian dolls, drawn by a cubist” When teachers find it, they love it.
- How cool is this. Makes it real. We will actually send you a spectrometer. ~70,000 students visited in 2016. 32 university centres and regional tours IR, UV, Mass, Mini NMR (how the fuck?) 40 page hand-out, with exercises. The kind of thing the RSC can do, that schools/unis could never afford to.
- I didn’t know what was going on Content machine
- Stories quite high level. There was some really fantastic work, but a few smells Too many personae? Validation? No testing? Old testing? Elaborate ontologies No JTBD, or quite general. But the team have a great understanding. This was for CPD – did it join up with everything else?
- Real willingness to tackle these problems Some agile knowledge Lots of modelling Lots of domain knowledge KPIs? Ad-hoc Oh, and an elephant…
- A couple of purposes. Get team on side Walk through diagnostic procedure Surface existing deep knowledge Find easy wins
- Clustering exercise I love a 2x2 matrix Importance vs certainty Surfaced anxiety about metrics, usage, value delivery
- Massive value, but fighting UX Teachers are time poor.
- Product clustering. Take existing offering, try multiple architectures Surface fit and importance from team Explain value propositions, share knowledge Crowd-source the materials of a diagnosis Existing strategy was a solid list of actions, but bitty
- Useful framework for clarifying. Mention Roman’s other stuff.
- Not a bad mission statement, but we could be more specific.
- Also, our competitors have huge traction. We arguably shouldn’t fight them. Charity.
- Learn to love Netpromoter -100 to +100 Verizon 7, Virgin Media -6 Apple & tesla regularly >85 Some teachers Qualaroo Mention organic search Synethsised, formed matrix of actions, prioritized
- It needs to evolve, and I’m skipping some specifics that are in the works. Pulling the concerns of CS & publishing together with PdM VoV But…
- This is still very much a journey, and some of them have a massive change management impact. Plus some of this is devolved to the team. It’s a process. But a lot of it is about cross-linking and driving people down the funnel. Be able to measure, technical debt, boring stuff. It’s not like winning a naval battle
- We can add metrics at most stages and look at co9nversion optimisation. Doesn’t matter that it’s not a commercial product – pick proxy metrics We’ve not solved it – it’s a process. Overlap between me & edu publishing. Do nervous about stepping on people’s toes. But fundamentally, they’re very similar roles, which makes the perspective much appreciated. Amd people wanted what product management was selling.