Overview
Two Sides
The battle for digital attention is simpler than it seems. The most successful apps follow a straightforward pattern: they attract users with compelling content – and then encourage users to build habits around the consumption of that content.
Think about your favorite digital experiences – the ones you visit each day. Chances are, what keeps you coming back isn’t a slick UI, snappy performance or that one killer feature. First and foremost, it's compelling content that entertains, informs, or inspires. Paired with the habits you’ve formed around consuming that content.
Scrolling New York Times headlines over morning coffee; playing Wordle in between meetings; listening to Spotify on your commute; queuing up Netflix on your couch; watching Instagram reels in spare moments; checking for updates from your favorite newsletter or podcast creators – these are the rituals that animate our days.
And behind each of these habits is a powerful pairing: content that draws you in, and a product experience that feels effortless, intuitive, even addictive.
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Before we go any further, let’s take a second to define what we’re actually talking about when we say “content” and “product.”
Content is the substance users come to engage with: articles, videos, podcasts, tweets, games, playlists, posts. Sometimes it’s made by professionals; other times, by a community of users. Either way, it’s the starting point for engagement. It’s what sparks users’ interest and captures attention.
As a result, your product can only be as engaging as your content. That is: the maximum potential of your app to engage users is proportional to the quality of your content.
For example, you could have the most beautifully designed podcast app in the world — if it doesn’t have anything people want to listen to, it won’t matter! If you don’t have compelling content to offer – and on a regular basis, no less – it’s unlikely anyone’s going to come knocking on your door. And you’re not going to have much hope fighting for regular visits.
Product, meanwhile, encourages users to build habits around content – creating digital experiences that maximize content’s potential.
To accomplish this, product seeks answers for all the major questions about how an app looks and functions – all the ways an app aims to meet user needs with exactly the right execution.
For example:
How does content look? How is it organized? How do users discover it?
How often is content updated, refreshed or replenished? How often – and based on what triggers – are users encouraged to return again and again?
What features might enhance a user's experience along the way?
Answers to all of these questions must be tuned precisely, to match user needs. Doing so – guiding an organization and its various functions through the pursuit of these right answers – is the responsibility of ‘product.’
It's often said good products teach users how to use them. I’d adjust that: great products anticipate user needs so completely that there isn’t any ‘teaching’ required. Users see the app as an extension of their own needs and desires, and build habits seamlessly and intuitively as a result.
All in all, great apps bridge content strategy and product strategy so that the latter maximizes the potential of the former. With the right content, and the right answers to the questions above, great apps can fit into user’s routines like a glove.
One Coin
Okay. So far, we’ve separated product and content into clean, independent, collaborative categories – Right?
Not quite. Try to make sharp decisions around digital strategy – try to build the kind of ‘great’ products I alluded to above – and you’ll find product and content are not independent concerns at all. Rather, each informs, shapes and is interdependent on the other.
In fact, many of the most successful digital organizations don’t draw a bright line between product and content strategy at all. They operate from a place where the two are so tightly integrated, they function more like a single system.
A Times 'A1' meeting in 1983.
The final A1 meeting, May 2015.
The times (wink-wink) have changed. The famed A1 meeting fell off the daily agenda in 2015. Nowadays, check the Times’ ‘front page’ on your phone and you’ll find something that looks nothing like the old ‘A1.’
Yes, you’ll still find the day’s big headlines. But today, they sit alongside games, recipes, personal essays, explainers, podcasts, life advice, and a lot more. These are types of content The Times didn’t even used to produce, but now sees as essential to meeting the needs of their on-the-go audience.
Just as importantly, all this content is structured in a way purpose-built for mobile browsing. In a single scroll, readers can catch up on the day’s top news (a habit-forming mechanism if there ever were one), while discovering a few worthy distractions along the way.
In the end, The Times’ shift toward this more fluid, mobile-first model of content and product wasn’t the result of product or editorial changes in isolation. It emerged from both sides coming together, listening closely to their users and each other, and adapting accordingly. Through this natural integration, clear lines that might otherwise separate content from product became less rigid – resulting in a more user-centered experience overall.
And where most news organizations faltered in the transition to digital, the Times is now more powerful than ever.
Netflix offers another useful example. You might not love every show or movie Netflix produces, and that’s understandable. Because to understand Netflix, you have to understand that content quality isn’t always their goal. Why is that? Well, increasingly, users aren’t all that focused on quality, either.
Netflix knows today’s viewers don’t often give shows their full attention. Instead, we’re watching while scrolling, working and texting. So rather than fight this reality – competing with messaging and social apps in a zero-sum war they're not likely to win – Netflix designs for it. More and more, the company scripts and produces its content so viewers can follow along while only paying partial attention to their TV screens. (Yes, really).
This isn’t the only way Netflix has transformed its content strategy over the years to become increasingly user-first. Additionally, Netflix uses extensive viewer data – preferences, viewing habits, completion rates – to inform decisions about what genres to greenlight, what tone to use, and even what actors to cast.
Are these content decisions? Sure. Would they have been made without a product-like mindset that situates Netflix’s target users at the center, rather than artists and creators? Certainly not...
This influence of ‘user-first’ product strategy on content strategy also happens in reverse. To wit: If we look at Netflix’s app, we find an experience equally fine-tuned to match user needs – but just as dependent on alignment with content strategy to get there.
Here’s a fun experiment. Load up your Netflix app. Have a friend sitting next to you do the same. It’s likely what you each see will be entirely different. Maybe this isn’t a great surprise – as Netflix has long fed users personalized recommendations on what to watch. Today, though, personalization happens at nearly every level of the experience: content categories are hyperspecific to user watch history; metadata shifts to highlight qualities users find most important; and artwork changes to feature different actors, moods and scenes. Starting this year, Netflix even generates rows of recommended content based on a user's real-time browsing history(see video below: spend a few moments contemplating one title, and the app will generate a whole bunch just like it!). Altogether, the same trove of user data Netflix uses to inform content production helps individual users find what to watch in increasingly individualized ways.
Moreover, all of these elements that Netflix personalizes – category titles, movie artwork, descriptive metadata – are owned by ‘content’ teams. And as a result, all of this product-based personalization requires a massive collaboration with editorial teams to produce, update and optimize literally tens of thousands of editorial records with countless variations of these elements – all in a single structured framework Netflix's algorithms (designed by its product teams) can use to pick and choose what to show to each user.
Are Netflix’s decisions around what to show users content-based? Product-based? You be the judge.
Wherever you land, you’ll find a digital strategy that, like the Times’, is exceptionally user first: Netflix understands its fundamental job is to help users want to find something to watch they’re likely to enjoy – and do so fast.
And so everything it does – from the content it greenlights, to the product it’s built, to the data pipeline that makes it all come together – is pointed at reducing the friction users experience between “I want to watch something” and “Here, loyal subscriber, is something to watch.”
Case Studies
Adventures in product and content
Despite these success stories, many organizations still isolate product and content in silos. Product teams are tasked with building platforms and creating experiences, while content creators (be they writers, marketing teams or – in the case of social media platforms – users) fill those layouts based on the constraints given.
At legacy editorial organizations – newspapers, magazines, entertainment studios – this dynamic is sometimes flipped. Content carries such institutional weight that product’s role becomes more reactive. Insofar as there’s a product strategy, it is: “Take what we’ve always done and make it look nice on the web.” (Or, on mobile. Or, on TV. You get the idea.)
Having worked as both a editorial contributor and a product leader in many kinds of organizations, I’ve seen how these dynamics can quietly limit outcomes.
Conversely, I’ve also seen how much potential gets unlocked – how much friction falls away, and visionary execution opens up – when organizations bring the functions of product and content into deeper alignment, approaching digital strategy from first principles.
Here are two such examples.
And yet when the games were over, we didn’t just have glowing reports from users, trade publications, and award associations – we had a suite of tools that we could use for any number of strategic purposes in the time to come. As we designed and spec’d all these ‘Olympics-specific’ features, we ensured they were flexible enough to be useful in various ways outside of the Olympics – solving the other needs around premiere marketing editorial teams had identified.
Meanwhile, in addition to overhauling all the ways users discovered Olympics content, we worked closely with content teams to design new content types built to take advantage of the opportunities a digital platform can provide. This included feeds of almost every live event (even if they weren’t broadcast on television); a ‘Gold Zone’ broadcast similar to NFL Redzone that whipped users around to the biggest moments; and an AI-powered recap feature that fed users personalized highlights from the prior day’s action.
Overall, we hadn’t built a whole suite of features we’d need to shove in a drawer for the next cycle of Olympics games, and we hadn’t burnt our entire roadmap up on a single need. We’d actually satisfied stakeholders and users alike.
And we’d done it by harmonizing content strategy and product strategy.
Best practices
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
So how does great digital strategy succeed? Maybe it’s worth first discussing how it fails.
Maybe you've heard that famous line: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In digital product work, I’ve found this to be particularly true.
Across my career, I’ve worked closely with both product and content teams — sometimes embedded within either, sometimes acting as connective tissue between them. In my experience, these partnerships can unfold in a few different ways.
At worst, the two sides operate in silos, and maybe even see one another as competitors in a zero-sum game for strategic control of the user experience.
At best, they collaborate fluidly through a shared, user-first mindset — building something neither side could have shaped alone.
Getting to this second kind of partnership isn’t easy. There’s no universal playbook for realizing positive collaborative. But when I look back at the highest-functioning orgs I’ve worked with, a few patterns emerge — and the role of leadership in setting the collaboration up for success is almost always at the center.
In those settings, executives tend to cultivate great digital culture (and pave the way for great digital strategy) in three pivotal ways.
First: They set the tone for cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Collaboration can’t happen if everyone’s walking on eggshells, afraid to challenge assumptions or cross into the other’s domain. The most effective teams I’ve seen don’t just tolerate overlap between functions — their leaders invite it.
The result is a multidisciplinary culture where product and content teams aren’t just encouraged to share progress, but rather expected to engage each other early and often.
Second: They create shared fluency and shared expertise.
If we accept that digital strategy is multidisciplinary, then naturally, teams need to speak the same language. Organizations that thrive tend to invest in building this connective tissue by ensuring their digital leaders are fluent in each other's work.
For example, product leaders must understand how their choices shape the creation, organization, and substance of content. (They also need to understand what good content looks like, and why). Editorial leaders, meanwhile, must grasp how digital experiences shape discovery, guide interaction and build habit. Neither side needs to be expert in the other's work. Still, something more than a basic familiarity is necessary; only then can true collaboration emerge.
Sometimes getting there means pairing editorial and product leads together into steering committees. Sometimes it means embedding folks from one side into the workflows of the other. Sometimes it means bringing in an outside consultant to help orient, educate or execute.
The goal isn’t to turn product folks into editors or vice versa. But a level of mutual understanding — about how content is created, and how digital experiences shape behavior — makes true collaboration possible.
Third: they know when to lead and when to delegate.
When it comes to long-term product transformation, some of the best outcomes I’ve seen start with direct authorship from senior leaders. Other times, the most effective path is to find a trusted point person and give them real space to lead — with the autonomy and clarity to shape something meaningful.
Where things often go sideways is when this leadership is only partial. Teams are nominally empowered but regularly overruled. Product owners get the title, but not the trust. Responsibility for setting vision is supposedly delegated, but never truly handed off.
It’s totally natural for execs to want a hand in major strategic bets — especially if they’ve got strong product instincts. But if a leader’s thumb is constantly on the scale, it becomes nearly impossible to build products that are truly user-first. And over time, that lack of trust tends to drive away the very talent present to help chart a better path.
Process: Inputs and Outputs
If culture is the first key ingredient to success, process is second. Good process is the only sustainable path to good outcomes. Without purposeful structure, good results are simply accidents.
Understandably, many people worry that process will hamstring their creativity. This can certainly be true: when process is too rigid, it smothers progress and frustrates participants.
But with good process, the opposite happens. Exploration becomes safe, permissible and purposeful. Creativity becomes structured, scalable and repeatable. And the art of product strategy – more on that in a minute! – can emerge.
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At its core, strong product strategy is built around two things: clear inputs and rigorous outputs. In practical terms, this means gathering user research, analytics, and insights; then translating those inputs into thoughtful hypotheses; and finally, measuring results. And iterating if necessary.
Put another way: building great product strategy means letting humility guide the first step, and conviction the next. And then allowing humility guide the following. And so on, in an endless cycle.
This kind of combination of confidence and flexibility requires the right personalities, sure – but also the right process. Without process, strategy is at the mercy of shifting tides of opinion – including the influence of the loudest, most senior, most convicted voices. Typically, these are variables that have nothing to do with whether or not your product is actually serving users.
Different teams and different products require different processes. Still, I’ve found a certain baseline recipe is a good starting point. This process – blending my experiences as an early-stage startup leader, product consultant, and in-house product principal – melds ingredients from an array of best practices.
Most simply, it has four main phases.
Discovery and alignment: Product leadership constructs a comprehensive view of the status quo and orients stakeholders on the rough shape of the opportunity.
The goal is to develop a clear and aligned view of where we are; where, broadly, we think we can go; and why it's important. And then articulate this in a clear fashion so everyone is on the same page as we set out to explore further.
Most critical is ensuring the team deeply understands user and business needs, and is able to evaluate how current efforts to satisfy each are measuring up.
To do this, the team immerses itself into the strategic landscape, conducting user research; diving deep on analytics and business considerations; interviewing key team members, stakeholders and partners; surveying the competitive playing field; and uncovering key technical considerations.
The output of this stage is typically a ‘brief’ – in written or deck form – that outlines findings and orients the team towards next steps.
Vision and journey mapping: With a shared understanding in place, we can set out together to explore a vision for what our product might become. What do we believe we can build? Why will it matter to users? What might a better experience look and feel like?
The output is usually a Vision Presentation – a narrative that helps stakeholders envision what’s possible, and helps the team get excited to build it. To make things concrete, this presentation typically includes our first, early stab at sketching the experience.
We also create a short-to-medium term roadmap to validate, iterate, refine and actualize this vision.
Design intensives: Fundamental to this initial roadmap: focused design intensives. Each intensive tackles one specific feature or component of the new product experience.
These intensives combine strategy, design, and iterative user testing – aiming to first crystallize our approach at roughly 80 percent fidelity. Rather than finalized designs, the initial goal of this stage is validating major strategic decisions on the shape of the new experience.
For example, one intensive might focus on designing a new feature. At the end of the intensive, we put the feature in front of users and get feedback, achieving internal alignment on both the value of this feature and the major strategic decisions that shaped its execution.
We also ensure all major assumptions core to the approach are molded alongside proper teams. This includes content strategy and production, technical planning, and more.
Once we’ve validated the feature at the 80 percent-fidelity threshold, we then dial it in with final designs.
Production and Operationalization: Once a design intensive is validated, it moves into production. This stage encompasses final engineering, content production, data structuring, taxonomy development, and QA. During production, product leadership sets up ongoing testing and measurement frameworks to ensure quality and refine long-term roadmaps.
In this phase, the focus shifts to practical details: How will we launch successfully? How do we measure success? What comes next?
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None of this is one-size-fits-all. The shape of each phase shifts depending on the product, the team, and the challenge at hand. But in almost every case, structure – when applied thoughtfully – doesn’t restrict creativity. It supports it.
Balancing the Art and Science
Speaking of creativity, I’ve gone all this way without telling you about my favorite way in which product and content intertwine: Creating a vision for your product feels a lot like writing a story.
You start with a blank page (or deck, more likely). And pretty soon, you need to create a story that sweeps your audience away – about how your app is going to be so engaging, it will sweep your users away.
Meanwhile, this story needs to be so clear – so compelling and powerful – that your whole organization will rally behind it to make it real.
It also needs to be so true – so grounded in insight, research and user-first principles – that, once it becomes real, your audience recognizes its power immediately.
While process is fundamental to enabling this kind of vision to emerge, process alone can't lead you to your vision. Rather, great teams remember digital strategy is equal parts art and science – and do their best to balance the two.
Indeed, great strategy, like great storytelling, requires just as much clarity, creativity and imagination as it does specificity, authenticity and rigor.
Balancing all these sometimes competing qualities isn't easy. And so, as it turns out – just like telling a great story – building a great product requires authorship.
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It's sometimes said you can judge the quality of a movie script by how many screenwriters have a credit on the end product. Of course, a script with a single screenwriter on its cover page is by no means a guaranteed hit. But scripts that have credits from three, four or five different writers? That's generally a sign of a troubled project.
Any of us who have worked on projects with too many cooks in the kitchen can attest things aren't too different in the workplace. Projects where ownership isn't clear result in muddied, watered-down results.
This is particularly true of strategy. While strategy is a deeply collaborative process – including inputs from users, stakeholders and various partner disciplines – strategy built by ‘committee’ is generally likely to stray from user-first principles and fail as a result.
Accordingly, your strategy should have a primary author: Someone who leads the inquiry and shapes the vision; who molds and iterates and interrogates the narrative, ensuring it’s user-first – until they have it just right.
This person of course is not on an island. They should be constantly collaborating with others to shape and uncover the best possible expression of the team's work. At the same time, this person is the 'author' of the team's story, responsible for suffusing your strategy with art and making it more than the sum of your parts.
At the same time, there’s no escaping the science required. Strong strategy requires structure and rigor: user research, data analysis, iterative testing, validation loops. A well-functioning team has a product owner who ensures its hypotheses are grounded in evidence, measured in clear outcomes, and iterated based on lessons learned. The resulting pursuit looks a lot like the scientific method.
The trick is not to lose either the art or the science in pursuit of the other.
As Steve Jobs once said:
| “Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!”’ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
That idea – that users often can’t articulate their deepest needs until they see them solved – underscores the value of product leadership that has its feet on the ground and its mind in the stars.
Product leaders must ground their inquiry in quantitative and qualitative insight – a deep, rigorous and empathetic understanding of users – but then be bold enough to chart new territory.
Conclusion
In the end, great digital strategy is about more than either product or content on its own. It’s about bringing the two together through an open culture and rigorous process that enable art and science in equal measure.
When such work can emerge, the results speak for themselves:
Experiences that inspire not just habit, but delight.
Experiences that meet users where they are, fitting glove-like into their routines.
And experiences that become something far more to their users than mere utilities:
Through the habits users build around the content they consume, they learn about the world around them, connect with new perspectives, and see their lives, work and relationships in deeper ways.
Finally, something else happens that goes beyond mere prose. When product and content strategy move beyond their silos and work hand-in-hand – with vision, imagination, and rigor – the result isn’t just a better, more delightful digital experience, or one users effortlessly weave into their lives.
It’s the foundation of a digital business, built to last.