An inside look at how CNN builds product

Upasna Gautam is a product manager at CNN, where she leads the team rebuilding and onboarding journalists onto the digital content management system, and she is active in the News Product Alliance. The conversation covers how CNN Digital's product teams work with journalists through demo days, working sessions, breaking-news dress rehearsals and office hours, how planning and OKRs operate in a chaotic news environment, and how mindfulness shapes her leadership and communication.

01Key learnings

• Build buffer time into plans for newsroom work, since breaking news routinely pulls journalists away from scheduled research and testing sessions.
• Use recurring touchpoints such as weekly demo days, multi-session working sessions, and office hours to gather continuous feedback from journalist stakeholders.
• Script breaking-news dress rehearsals to stress-test the platform under realistic time pressure before a real event hits.
• Bring engineers into user research and discovery early so they understand the why behind requests and can judge technical feasibility more precisely.
• Treat the ability to pause before reacting as a core PM skill; listening and speaking the stakeholder's language matter more than having all the answers.
• Start meditation small by bringing full present-moment attention to a daily routine like brushing your teeth, rather than needing long sessions.
• Keep a standing layer of fallback systems and rely on a 24/7 support team to triage incidents so product teams are not always the first line of defense.
• Build trust between product and editorial teams through consistent, direct conversations with users, which makes it easier to say 'not viable' and still be accepted.

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.