Q&A with Emily Ryan, Director of Product at Harvard Business Review
By: Tesnim Zekeria
Tags: Subscriber Spotlight, Journalism, Media, Product, Harvard Business Review

Q&A with Emily Ryan, Director of Product at Harvard Business Review

This week, The Idea caught up with Emily to learn about her role, why HBR is experiencing the best subscription numbers it has ever seen, and how the publisher plans to build niche audiences. Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.

Tell me about your role at Harvard Business Review.

I am the director of product. I manage three product managers and one scrum master. We’re responsible for feature enhancements, maintenance, bug fixes, changes to the website, and off-platform products as well. We oversee products including our iOS and Android apps, a partnership with a company called News Over Audio to create audio versions of our article, and a significant number of newsletters.

How has HBR’s product teams evolved over the years?

We used to work in Kanban, which is a method of working that focuses on having a set number of “work in progress” items and “on deck” items. We realized, however, that this wasn’t working for us. We were working in a very waterfall way and had no idea when work would be done or when we could get help with design, analytics, or testing.

So, we transitioned to working in co-located, cross-functional scrum teams. Each one of my product managers is on a team with a scrum master, three to four developers, and a designer. We found that these small teams are much better at solving problems and coming up with solutions together.

We also have more insight into when things will be done through the structure that scrum provides us.

When reorganizing the structure of our product teams, we also made sure to align the teams around certain aspects of our business.

One of the teams, “The Core Team,” is focused on site architecture and maintenance. They are mostly innovating along architectural and structural lines. For instance, they recently built HBR’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The other two teams are aligned along our business goals: encouraging people to consume our content, and eventually getting them to purchase our content. We built the “Consume” and “Buy” Teams to support these goals individually. The Consume team works closely with editorial stakeholders and goals, while The Buy team focuses on revenue opportunities with subscription marketing, e-commerce, and advertising.

This arrangement has been great because it allows product managers to 1) become in-depth subject matter experts in certain areas of the business and 2) narrow down the scope of the stakeholders that they’re working with. This set-up also allows our product teams to more easily prioritize editorial and business goals as they are not competing with each other.

HBR launched its good-better-best pricing model a year ago. Can you tell me about how this product was built?

Last January, we launched our first three-tier subscription product. Before that we only offered one subscription that included all access to the site, the print magazine, and access to our app. When we launched the three-tier subscription product, we introduced a digital-only subscription that was unlimited access to the site and the apps, a digital plus print subscription, and a premium subscription, which included some additional benefits like free eBooks every quarter, case studies and events. That project was enormous and required collaboration amongst all three teams.

The Consume team focused on editorial innovations that would strengthen the subscription offer, such as editor curated reading lists and case study bundles.

The Buy team focused on the mechanics of the conversion page, supporting account management, and all of the underlying structures that help us identify subscribers and manage paywalls. We used what is called “Scrum of Scrums” to ensure that all three product teams were aware of what the others were doing.

We also worked closely with our UX team. They took charge when it came to thinking about the paywall language: the call to action needed to differ based on what type of subscriber you were, anonymous, or registered.

The running joke for awhile was this one scene from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” where one of the characters is trying to figure out a mailroom conspiracy theory. The character has a bunch of papers up on the wall connected by strings and it was a mess. It kind of felt like that. We spent a really long time with the UX team parsing out all of the potential scenarios and pain points that users might encounter when coming across a paywall.

How has Covid-19 impacted HBR?

Recently, we’ve been publishing a lot of content on working from home, supporting employees, and answering all kinds of nebulous questions that come with the unprecedented situation we are in. Our editorial team has always focused on creating content that’s helpful and relevant to our audience. Now more than ever, I think they’re doing an amazing job of it. And, even though the content is free, it communicates to potential subscribers the value of our brand.

While we decided as a company that all of that coronavirus-related content should be free and in front of the wall, we are a business and, just like any other business, are really concerned about what this means for us and our ability to make money.

So, we also made the decision to reduce our wall. Previously, non-registered users could access three free articles and registered users could access six articles. When they ran out of articles, the user would be asked to subscribe. When we made our coronavirus coverage free, we reduced the wall from three to two articles for non-registered users and from six to four articles for registered users.

This combination of publishing relevant and timely content along with reducing the wall has led to the best subscription numbers we’ve ever seen.

We’ve also seen an unprecedented number of site visits: In March, we had 17.9 million unique visits, an all time high, bolstered by one of our coronavirus-related articles titled “The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief.”

This story actually came about when our editors were on a Slack call and asking each other how they’re doing. One person responded that this moment felt like grief and this inspired one of the editors to do some research and bring that piece together alongside grief expert David Kessler.

Was HBR considering to reduce its meter limit prior to the pandemic?

The reduction of the wall was always something that was out there. I think we weren’t ready to pull the lever to do it until we realized that this was a good opportunity for us and that we had to be a bit proactive and defensive in this moment.

What’s an interesting project that you’re currently working on?

We’ve been thinking a lot more about how to a lot build rabid, excited audiences around certain topics or issues. One project I’m working on now is thinking about how HBR can create memberships for different segments of our audience, specifically young professionals.

These are people who might be a little bit younger than who we would consider our typical audience. We currently have a student subscription, but we want to identify a voice, style and platforms that would be best suited for an audience of young professionals.

We have been able to successfully build some niche cohorts of audiences before. The example we keep going back to is our Women at Work podcast which started as an experiment and went really well. We were able to quickly build an engaged and excited audience. And, we ended up following up the success of the podcast with a focused newsletter and events.

What is the most interesting thing that you’ve seen from a media outlet other than your own?

With the young professionals project, I’ve been looking a lot at verticals like The Cut, The Lily, The Skimm, Smarter Living from The New York Times, among many others. I think the common thread between all these sub-brands is that they’re really daring to go deep in a certain area and they’ve given themselves space to create a new voice that caters to a specific audience. These verticals have such a distinct style and they’re unapologetic about it.

I’m also really interested in user generated content and how we might make more of that. The Wall Street Journal is revamping its newsletters and encouraging people to contribute more. And, now, with Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, the line between content consumer and content creator is so thin.

Rapid Fire

What is your first read in the morning?

Definitely my email, then usually The Boston Globe online.

What are you currently reading?

I’m part of a monthly book club and last month’s book was The Holdout by Graham Moore — I highly recommend it, especially for crime heads like me!

What job would you be doing if you weren’t in your current role?

I started out as an editor and would probably be doing that if I didn’t get into product management.