Earlier this year I did a talk at NMP 22 in Oslo about the challenges of digital innovation in a traditional media company. Later I was asked to publish my talk as an article here at NMP but since two hours talk and 50 slides translates poorly to 500 words I decided to write a series of articles instead. This is the first one, it’s called

”Why we suck and why that’s okay”Anders_haeren_CTO_MittMedia

I work as the CTO at MittMedia –  Sweden’s largest publisher of local news with a total of 28 daily newspapers and 20 free newspapers. Back in 2012 when I was Director of digital development, our CEO asked me to formulate a suggestion for a new development process. He also presented three requirements:

  1.  It has to simple enough for anyone to understand
  2.  Yet it needs to ask all the right questions so we don’t bet on the wrong horses
  3. Finally, it has to be an inclusive process because we’re a big company with lots of stakeholders and ideas

Happy for the opportunity and a tad naive I accepted the mission and embarked on a journey that still isn’t finished, nor will it ever be.

I began by documenting all my experiences from past digital projects. Then I interviewed a bunch of key personnel about their experiences. Finally I looked at our current development process and at other companies. My conclusion was painful but clear: We were great at making newspapers but we sucked at digital product development and innovation. We had taken all our knowledge about the offline world and applied it to online and there were tons of reasons why this was a recipe for disaster. The main problems with our current process were:

  1. There was no process
  2. Since there was no process there were no clear phases and so we continuously changed requirements all the way up to release resulting in delays, cost creep, scope creep, bugs and confusing products
  3. Anyone could title themselves project manager and start a project
  4. There was no list of ongoing projects (and from my count it looked like we had about a hundred, give or take 20)
  5. Since there was no list of all the projects there was also no prioritization of projects and so every project was the most important one (at least to someone)
  6. Even if we would have had a list we had no common criteria for prioritizing projects or products against each other
  7. There was no common definition of role or mandate for project managers and project groups
  8. Project managers tended to be more like executors of their own ideas than coordinators to utilize the individual strengths of the project group and make the group succeed
  9. Projects were spawned and run in organizational silos
  10. As a consequence we were terrible at involving all the right personnel from the start
  11. Project groups never talked to end-users to validate ideas
  12. Being fast was always more important than doing things right
  13. We were terrible at looking at available data and analytics
  14. We rarely looked at other available products for potential competitors or partnerships
  15. We seldom did prototyping and never applied the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) thus making product development time-consuming and expensive
  16. We sucked at specifying purpose and goals for our projects
  17. As a consequence we didn’t follow up projects
  18. Everyone thought a project was finished at product release so the product was left to its own fate
  19. Since we never followed up projects or products we never killed any unsuccessful products or gave extra love to products with unrealized potential
  20. We never learned from our mistakes

Problem number 20 was perhaps the most troublesome of all. Eric Schmidt once said that Google celebrate their failures, and in the world of digital startups they have the mantra “Fail cheap, fail fast”. Then there’s always Thomas Edison:

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
– Thomas Edison

But since we never evaluated our efforts we did not learn from our mistakes. Instead we did the same mistakes or variations of the same mistakes, over and over again. This in turn made me write a blog post in sheer frustration, coining a quote of my own:

”The single greatest failure of the media industry in the 21st century is not learning from its failures!”
– Anders Härén

How the heck would we ever become better? Where should we start? Luckily I’m a bookworm so meanwhile I was also researching a lot of books about innovation and digital development and I stumbled upon the classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen. That’s when I realized that we were not alone, and in a strange way our crappiness was a testament to our greatness. As it turns out, the more successful a company becomes at their core business, the less adaptable they become at trying new things. When a big disruption occurs in society, like the Internet, smartphones, or social media, traditional companies tend to try to adapt these new phenomena to their old mental models. It’s like that saying: If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Apparently there was a silver lining to my despair and so I set out to find a new process. The following articles are about that journey beginning with the world of Agile, UX and Lean Startup.

Written by: Anders Härén – CTO at MittMedia