About the product

Have you ever had to fill out a powerpoint to share your product updates? Or get bombarded with emails or SharePoint links to access information about you product line? This is where Newsie comes in.

Newsie was started in June 2020 when the Autonomous Vehicle Lead at Ford tasked FordLabs with creating a product to reduce the cognitive load on consumers of status updates, increase the value of status updates that product teams share with leadership team members, and increase the transparency and collaboration across product teams. This tool did not stay siloed within the AV team, and has since expanded across all of Ford Enterprise Technology, including teams from Ford Pro, Electrification, Ford Credit, and Global Data Insights & Analytics. The goals to simplify the writing of status reports and make it more fun for the Producers and export FordLabs values and support cultural change have been added with the increase of users.

Approach

FordLabs follows the Double Diamond approach to building products. We first scope with the Product Owners to understand the space and opportunity in its current state, as well as identifying goals and deliverables. After kickoff, the team enters the Discovery Phase, validating that the problem exists and deep diving into the experience of the users. We then identify and prioritize pain points and areas of opportunity. This moves the team into framing: ideating and experimenting possible solutions and bringing them back to customers for feedback. We continue to iterate to continually bring and expand on the best experience to all users. For my time on this product, we were in the iteration phases, which did include diving into the discovery mindset again.

With personas developed and adopted by team the next step was to identify the primary, secondary, and tertiary persona. With five, that is not an easy task. One of the best parts of Newsie is how involved the entire team is in every step. Our goal was during a workshop to take the TaaS Software bullseye, and have the team individually rank the personas. Then while in the workshop, small groups would share their opinions and come together for a singular target. After, as a group, we’d have two bullseyes to compromise. While seemingly straightforward, I quickly learned that the team had very different opinions on who our primary user was- and all with very solid reasoning.

Rethinking the approach, a smaller subsect (our two PMs and myself) took the full team’s feedback and questioned our methodology. Are we even using the right framework? Does having a singular primary persona make sense for the product? Newsie is a product that has two very distinct purposes - to record and report out product progress. So we flipped our thinking, focusing on what has to be true in order for Newsie to work as a product. There has to be content created in order for others to consume it. After a attempting a few different frameworks, including the inverse pyramid, we landed on a venn diagram framework. It captured the complexity we were seeing with implementing Newsie in new organizations - Newsie spread due to a desire to easily read updates from Leadership, which could only be accomplished due to the efforts of passionate Product Managers and Product Owners.

With this new frame of mind we are able to refocus our roadmap and how we move forward with new features and further research. When looking at functionality of Newsie, we look at our Alexis’s and David’s for how to best add information. This is balanced with keeping in touch with Prapti’s and Kim’s needs, because they are the audience. Based on the team's inputs and research, we reframed and reprioritized our near term business goals to focus on the personas creating the content in Newsie, where we had previously been focused on the personas of those consuming the Newsie content. We felt this helped us balance the needs of our personas and align on next steps in our business goals

Research

With personas and their prioritization identified and engineers busy updating Newsie’s data model, the focus of Summer 2021 moved into creating a sustainable research and feedback loop. Working leanly since conception, Newsie had no framework or plan for continual research. I developed an easily adaptable plan that looped through different personas and organizations with a broad interview script that could be utilized by any future team members. In addition, I was able set regular observations of presentations using Newsie to further expand the scope of findings. This research plan remained in affect until the product was handed off in June 2024.

It was through this research sprint that adapting the design for mobile as well as updating the look and feel of the product update page was the next priority.

Responsive Design

In keeping lean and agile, Newsie was developed as a desktop only tool. However, as the customer base grew, especially with higher level leadership (the Alans), a desire to access Newsie easily on the go became a vocal desire. Reviewing our amplitude data, we were able to identify all the screen sizes that had currently accessed Newsie- which included more than just a standard 14” desktop screen or phone. We jumped at the opportunity to design and implement responsive design for the entire site.

In fall 2021, we had a new designer join Newsie. This new perspective as well as user feedback allowed us to reimagine how the site was laid out. Using A/B testing we updated the product pages- from a product landing page with a button for product updates, to a tabbed view with edit functionality on old updates.

Other functionality added: redesigning how to update product information like taxonomy or team members, ability to create update drafts, switching between products without exiting, breadcrumbs for easy navigation in the product header, calendar functionality for choosing updates, bucketing product lines on the organization page, designs for error pages or new products with no content, updating the footer, creating a banner to promote other FordLabs products,

Newsie’s Effectiveness

Newsie spans over 17 different organization across Ford Motor Company and has an average 8,495 unique users per month. The adaptation of responsive and mobile designs resulted in a 6% increase in “ease of use” metric. Newsie has continued to grow and evolve, even as it is being shopped to new internal product owners. Below are charts documenting the effectiveness of the additional fuctionality of the above design changes.

Key Learnings

• I learned to not be afraid to throw out work, to try new frameworks, or build a new one altogether. The process might be longer in the moment, but you will move faster in the long run.

• The site was able to build off of a solid design system to adjust for the growing consumer base.

• While ideally responsive/mobile designs would be included from the beginning, it is never too late to build out that functionality.

• There is an immense amount of difference you can make to a product with solid research, even later in the product cycle.