An inside look at how CNN builds product | Upasna Gautam

It happens all the time, right? That is the nature of breaking news. I mean, you have to be ready to pivot at, you know, the drop of a hat. 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 globe to do a user testing session and when breaking news happens, they have to prioritize that over everything, right? So, like, what do you do in that situation? You can be frustrated. Absolutely, it's frustrating. But you always have to have the ability to, A, pivot, of course, but also have backup and, you know, buffers in those types of scenarios. (upbeat music)

Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Upasana Gautham. Upasana is a product manager at CNN, where she leads the team responsible for the content management system that journalists use to write and publish their stories. She's also on the front lines of elevating the discipline of product management within newsrooms through her work at the News Product Alliance. She's also a long-time meditation and mindfulness teacher, which, as we discuss, ends up being pretty damn handy working at a place like CNN. We dig into how the product team operates within CNN, how they collaborate with journalists, the breaking news dress rehearsals, and also some simple tricks to build your own mindfulness in your day-to-day work as a PM. Enjoy this episode with Upasana Gautham after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Amplitude. If you're setting up your analytics stack but not using Amplitude, what are you doing? Anyone can sell you analytics. While Amplitude unlocks the power of your product and guides you every step of the way. Get the right data, ask the right questions, get the right answers, and make growth happen. To get started with Amplitude for free, visit amplitude.com. Amplitude, power to your products. Today's episode is brought to you by OneSchema, the embeddable CSV importer for SaaS. Customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file, and building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never-ending sink for your engineering and support resources. You keep adding features to your spreadsheet importer, but customers keep running into issues. Six months later, you're fixing yet another date conversion edge case bug. Most tools aren't built for handling messy data, but OneSchema is. Companies like Scale AI and Pave are using OneSchema to make it fast and easy to launch delightful spreadsheet import experiences, from embeddable CSV import to importing CSVs from an SFTP folder on a recurring basis. Spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products. Customers get frustrated by useless messages like, "Error on line 53," and never end up getting started with your product. OneSchema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product. For listeners of this podcast, OneSchema's offering a $1,000 discount. Learn more at oneschema.co/lenny. (upbeat music) Upasana, welcome to the podcast.