Upasna Gautam
Upasna Gautam is a product manager at CNN Digital, where she works closely with editorial staff and journalists to build their internal content management system. She is also a longtime meditation coach and a board member of the News Product Alliance. Upasna also shares a story about her team’s product saving the day during the 2020 elections and gives listeners a free mini lesson on meditation.
Communication Skills
A structured cadence of diverse touchpoints helps manage complex stakeholder relationships and product intake.
"I implemented a system to manage that kind of intake with four different touch points or events. So we have weekly demo days, working sessions, breaking news dress rehearsals, and office hours."
Effective alignment requires translating product concepts into the specific 'lingo' and mental models of the stakeholder group.
"When I'm talking to my journalists I'm not using technical terms or like content management technology terms. They have a whole different vocabulary that they use... you have to speak many different l..."
Engineering Skills
Balancing maintenance and new features requires a flexible sprint model that can shift priority based on production stability.
"One sprint might be high-priority feature development, in another sprint maybe we're focused on medium-priority optimizations and bug fixes. But we know that any time there's a critical incident in pr..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
This question helps identify candidates with high agency who can drive impact without explicit direction.
"What's something that would not exist without your initiative?"
Leadership Skills
In chaotic environments, planning must include explicit time buffers and contingency plans to remain effective.
"We always have to have the ability to A, pivot of course, but also have backup and buffers in those types of scenarios. So any time we're planning we build in buffers for all of that chaos that's happ..."
Maintain rigid alignment on the ultimate objective while allowing the execution path to adapt to changing circumstances.
"Stay firm on the goal, but flexible on the process."
Involving engineers early in the discovery process improves technical feasibility and solution design.
"I've made it a point to bring in my tech lead and engineers along for this product discovery ride... When our engineers are able to understand our journalists' needs at the same level as we are, they'..."
Marketing Skills
Building a professional community (like the News Product Alliance) can help standardize a discipline in an industry where it is still in its infancy.
"The goal of it is to increase the awareness and education of product thinking and product management in newsrooms... making the resources more readily available, especially for those smaller newsrooms..."
Product Management Skills
OKRs provide stability in long-term platform migrations by acting as a constant anchor across different time horizons.
"We've used OKRs for a long time, and they've served as an anchor for my team over the last three years... we break those OKRs down of course even further into, we look two to three years out and build..."
User testing in a high-pressure environment like news requires extreme flexibility as users will always prioritize breaking events over research sessions.
"I had a big working session planned with my users to do research with them, or do user testing, and breaking news breaks, and it takes so much time and effort to gather a team of editors across the gl..."
Simulated 'dress rehearsals' are an effective way to test product performance and user workflows under high-stress, time-sensitive conditions.
"We create a script and do a simulation of a breaking news scenario to stress test our platform, because all breaking news scenarios are definitely not the same either. This gives us a lot of great fee..."