Upasna Gautam on Equanimity, Editorial Touchpoints, and Product Management in News
Source: Lenny’s Podcast Speaker: Upasna Gautam Link: Episode
Upasna Gautam is a product manager at CNN, leading the team that rebuilds the content management system journalists use to write and publish stories. She is also a board member of the News Product Alliance and a longtime mindfulness and meditation teacher. This episode covers product development inside a breaking-news organisation, the four editorial touchpoints Upasna uses to stay close to journalists as customers, and how equanimity — the ability to pause before reacting — transfers directly to stakeholder management and team morale.
Key ideas
- Equanimity as PM superpower. Working in news requires thriving in chaos, not just ambiguity. Equanimity — mental composure in the highest of highs and the lowest of lows — gives an outsized advantage in stakeholder management and team morale precisely because news moves faster than any process can accommodate.
- Four editorial touchpoints. Upasna structures journalist relationships through four recurring events: weekly demo days (open-forum product previews), working sessions (breakout workflow recreations with editors), breaking news dress rehearsals (scripted simulations to stress-test the platform at the speed of breaking news), and office hours (open blocks for questions and friction triage). Together these replace ad-hoc communication with systematic, trust-building access.
- Engineers embedded in discovery. Bringing the tech lead and engineers into user testing sessions and design jams — not just sprint planning — let them understand the why with the same depth as product and design. The result: sharper technical feasibility calls and fewer late-stage surprises.
- Journalists are customers, not colleagues. Editorial staff cannot serve the product team’s research schedule; the product team must serve theirs. Every planning cycle builds buffers for breaking news, and every onboarding cycle is longer than it needs to be because that time is routinely consumed.
- Listening before speaking. Upasna attributes CNN’s transition from fragmented to unified product–editorial collaboration to one discipline: conversing in the language of the listener. Mindful communication means being fully present in a conversation, extracting the root cause from a complaint, and never assuming your own experience as user mirrors theirs.
- PM in news is still in its infancy. Most newsrooms outside large outlets have no embedded PM function; journalists have absorbed product, engineering, and data work by necessity. The News Product Alliance — founded during the pandemic — exists to raise awareness, share frameworks, and mentor journalists-turned-PMs at the newsrooms that cannot afford dedicated tech talent.