At the prompting of an ex-colleague from CoinDesk, I joined the News Product Alliance a while back and have found it to be a wonderful community. I was delighted when they released their State of Product Management in Journalism report this week.

I was less delighted, if unsurprised, by some of the findings. While I encourage you to read the full 25-page report, let me summarize some of the key findings for you before I share my take on things.

Progress Made:

• 42% of respondents now hold formal product positions, with another 47% doing product work informally

• 67% report their organization has an official product team; 45% have a dedicated product executive

• Over 60% have direct influence on organizational strategy and budget decisions

• Product management is increasingly seen as central to editorial, audience, and business strategy

Three Major Challenges:

1. Uneven Investment: While adoption is growing, many organizations still treat product as a support function rather than strategic leadership. Investment in capacity, role clarity, and leadership support remains weak.

2. Skills and Training Gaps: Only 23% have received formal product training. Key gaps include business strategy (50% need this), cross-team alignment (44%), and technical fluency (38%).

3. Retention Risk: While 52% want to advance in product/leadership roles, only 30% are committed to staying in news. 50% are open to leaving, and 15% are actively considering it. This risk is higher for professionals from marginalized groups.

So what happens if a company does invest in their product teams?

Did you know this blog post was originally a newsletter? It was sent out last Friday!

If you want to get this type of content a bit sooner and in your mailbox, use the form below to sign up.

The Product Investment Dividend: What Success Looks Like

Organizations with mature product teams consistently outperform those with informal arrangements:

• Business and audience outcomes: 4.5/5 score vs 2.8/5 for informal teams—over 1 full point higher impact on revenue and engagement

• Cross-functional collaboration: 4.4/5 vs 2.9/5—formal product roles break down silos and align editorial, audience, and business teams

• Structured practices: 4.2/5 vs 2.2/5—nearly double the adoption of roadmapping, experimentation, and data-driven processes

• Leadership recognition: 4.3/5 vs 3.1/5—product viewed as central to organizational strategy rather than support function

• Cultural transformation: 3.7/5 vs 2.7/5—faster progress even on persistent challenges like resistance to change

The pattern is clear: strategic investment in product creates compound benefits across operations, culture, and business results—with organizations reporting 22-37% lower severity in operational challenges overall.

It's not a hot take to say that improving your staff leads to better outcomes. But often, we get so caught up in our immediate work that we never take a step back and think about the dividends of pausing, training, and then resuming the work.

When I have run 4-day workshops with teams to help them work better together, I've consistently seen 2-3x improvements in their productivity. That level of improvement happens through compounding: by improving several processes at once, you get compound effects that lead to tremendous change.

You can do this yourself, even if your team is remote. I do recommend bringing everybody together for the week in person for these exercises, though.

4-day Workshop to Help People Work Better Together

I start day 1 with agenda setting as a group. I have a good idea of what all I want to cover, but it's always good to ask the group what else should be addressed. My typical agenda goes:

• Day 1

  • Vision and Mission workshop

  • Introduction to Strategy

• Day 2

  • Wardley Mapping for Strategy

  • Introduction to Objectives and Tactics

  • HOSKRs and HEART frameworks

• Day 3

  • Mapping Strategy -> Tactics -> Tools and Processes

  • Identifying Gaps and Needs

• Day 4

  • Value Stream Mapping

  • Identifying Bottlenecks

  • Define Next Steps

Along the way, we're sharing lunches and dinners together, and by day two, people often start coming up with new ideas and projects.

(By the way, this workshop is effectively the same thing I teach in Leading Product Teams.)

The journalism company participants in this survey aren't unique in facing these challenges. Every industry I've worked in has the same pattern: technical experts promoted without systematic leadership development, leading to team dysfunction and talent drain.

But the News Product Alliance data also proves what I've seen consistently: organizations that invest deliberately in developing their people see measurable, compound improvements. The data shows clear benefits when organizations approach leadership development systematically rather than leaving it to chance.

If you're seeing these patterns in your organization, the answer isn't another generic leadership program. It's systematic development that teaches people how to influence without authority, build psychological safety, and create environments where collaboration naturally thrives.

The research confirms what many of us already suspected: leadership skills are learnable, and the organizations that invest in developing them systematically will retain their best people while seeing compound improvements across everything they do.

I've been thinking about this data for days since the report came out, partly because it mirrors so closely what I see in my coaching work across different industries. The patterns are remarkably consistent—whether someone is leading engineering teams, nursing departments, or newsroom product initiatives, the fundamental challenges remain the same.

What leadership development challenges are you seeing in your organization? Do these patterns from journalism resonate with what you're experiencing in your industry?

Best regards,

Matthew