Two sides of the same coin:
Harmonizing product and content strategy
Introduction:
Two Sides
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One Coin
Best Practices:
Culture
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Balancing Art and Science
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Process
Introduction
My career began in newsrooms. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was preparing for a career in digital product and innovation strategy.
Working at Vice, Newsday and ESPN, I’d sit in front of some ancient, bespoke content management system for hours each day, engaging in a game of tug-of-war. The tools were incredibly inflexible and cumbersome. Adjusting styles, modifying page structure, organizing content – getting a single story live could take half the day.
It was across these frustrating days, without realizing it, that I got my initial education in a principle that would later animate my career: product strategy and content strategy shouldn’t be distinct disciplines. Rather, they're two sides of a single coin.
Two Sides
Product and Content Strategy
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.
Behind each of these habits is a powerful pairing: content that draws you in, and product design that makes the experience feel effortless, intuitive, even addictive.
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. 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 something compelling to offer – and on a regular basis, no less – it’s unlikely anyone’s going to come knocking. And you’re not going to have much hope fighting for regular visits.
Product, meanwhile, is what builds habits around content. It is the pursuit of the most engaging possible digital experience – an experience that maximizes the potential of its content.
To maximize engagement, product is responsible 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. 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 their experience along the way?
Answers to all of these questions must be tuned precisely, with user needs in mind. Doing so – guiding an organization and its various functions through the pursuit of these right answers – is the responsibility of ‘product.’ Great apps unite content strategy and product strategy so that the latter maximizes the potential of the former.
With the right content, and the right answers to these questions above, great apps fit into user’s routines like a glove. Because of this, 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.
One Coin
Harmonizing product and content strategy
Okay. So far, we’ve separated product and content into clean, independent categories. Right?
Not so fast. 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.
The New York Times
Take The New York Times for example. For decades, everything the Times did revolved around ‘A1’ – the front page of the print edition. This was the paper’s crown jewel: it caught eyes on newsstands, dictated what stories got prioritized, and defined the way The Times presented itself to the world. Accordingly, for decades, there was a high-stakes meeting every day at 4 pm that focused on the A1 layout. Everything in the organization was pointed at this meeting. Coverage, staffing, even tone – all of it funneled through this A1 center of gravity.
The times (wink-wink) have changed. 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 specifically 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) and discover a few worthy distractions along the way.
In the end, The Times’ shift toward this more fluid, integrated model of content and product wasn’t driven by product or editorial teams in isolation. It emerged from both sides coming together, listening closely to their users and each other, and adapting accordingly. Through this natural integration, the clear lines that previously separated 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 more powerful than ever.
Netflix
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, texting. So rather than fight this reality – competing with the messaging and social apps users have a hard time putting down – Netflix designs for it: more and more, the company scripts and produces its content so viewers can follow along while only paying partial attention. Yes, really.
This isn’t the only way Netflix has shifted its content strategy over the years to become increasingly user-first. Additionally, Netflix uses extensive viewer data – preferences, viewing habits, completion rates – to inform their 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... (Is any of this a positive trend? Maybe not, if you believe in the arts! But it’s hard to argue with the results).
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, and have a friend sitting next to you do the same. It’s likely what you each see will be totally different. Perhaps this isn’t a great surprise – 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. The same trove of data Netflix uses to inform content production helps individual users what to watch in increasingly individualized ways.
Meanwhile, 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 – in a single structured framework the product team can use to pick and choose what to show to each user.
Are Netflix’s decisions content-based? Product? 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 between “I want to watch something” and “Here is something to watch.”
Into the slot
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 journalist and a product leader in many kinds of organizations, I’ve seen how these dynamics can quietly limit outcomes.
But I’ve also seen how much potential gets unlocked – how much friction falls away – when organizations approach digital strategy from first principles and bring the functions of product and content into deeper alignment.
The New Yorker
Take The New Yorker, for example. When I joined, TNY had long had a mobile app. But the experience wasn’t exactly mobile-native. It largely followed the logic: “What if we took everything we’ve been doing in print for 100 years and on the web for 15 years and made it available on your phone?”
Working with editorial leadership, we began asking a different question: “What does a truly mobile New Yorker experience look like?” That mindset shift opened up a ton of possibilities, and directed us to three targeted, mobile-specific strategies that transformed the depth of our engagement – all in a little over a year.
First, we prioritized visual dynamism. The New Yorker is known for its world-class, award-winning photography and evocative illustrations. Our research showed the audience felt the sense of immersion, surprise and whimsy they associated with TNY was missing from mobile. As a result, Job one became building tools for art directors, designers and editors to enliven content and make it feel just as eye-grabbing as it did on every other surface readers experienced TNY. There were bigger fish to fry, but this was low-hanging fruit. And it ended up making a big difference in making the experience something users actually wanted to spend time with.
2022-2023
2022-2023
Lastly, we leaned into content types that are mobile-native. Audio and puzzles stood out as obvious opportunities – already beloved by users, but underutilized on mobile. Working across teams, we improved the experience around both, while also increasing production volume.
Peacock
At Peacock, the challenges we faced were a little different. Like many large organizations, Peacock’s product roadmap was often shaped by high-stakes, high-urgency asks from executives. A premiere here or major tentpole event there would result in a high-priority feature request. From there, a ‘scramble drill’ would set off – a race to build features tailor-made for this next big content moment. Sometimes, in the haste to launch, corners were cut, opportunities were missed, and tech debt was taken on. Even worse, these features built for a single use case were sometimes abandoned shortly after launch.
When I joined in early 2024, a new chapter in this story was at risk of opening. Editorial teams were clamoring for a specific set of presentation tools that would allow them to better showcase some big premieres of new TV shows and movies that were due in a few months. In tandem, NBC leadership was keen to build a highly tailored, best-in-class experience for the upcoming 2024 Paris Olympics. In short, we had two high-priority, high-pressure asks coming from high places – and results were expected on the immovable deadlines of content release schedules.
Were these efforts the wrong ones just because they were urgent? Of course not. Each were strategic imperatives, critical to Peacock’s ability to effectively merchandise its best content and engage users as a result. Still, as a collaborator reminded me, effective product leadership often requires – as it is often said in the entertainment world – taking the ‘note behind the note.’ While stakeholders were identifying valid, worthwhile strategic opportunities, it was the job of product leaders to identify the right solution – to determine what ‘best-in-class’ or a ‘better showcase’ looked like from a user perspective; to build tools both powerful enough to drive engagement, and sturdy enough to last.
The experience we ended up launching for the 2024 Paris Olympics is a great example of this. Many of the ‘showcase’ elements we designed and created to showcase Olympics content were indeed highly specific to the needs of the games – and were incredibly effective at driving engagement as a result. For example, one such feature was used by 81% of all Olympics watchers, and was alone responsible for more than 46 million watch hours alone. Peacock’s Olympics experience has also since been recognized by The Webbys and the Sports Emmys, including a Best Interactive Experience award from the latter. That wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t take the specific needs of Olympics audiences seriously.
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 molded to user needs and built to take advantage of the opportunities a digital platform can provide. While the typical NBC broadcast was available on Peacock, so, too were any number of watch experiences that allowed users to choose their own adventure. This included feeds of almost every live event (even if they weren’t broadcast on television); a ‘Gold Zone’ feature 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 threading the needle between content strategy and product strategy.
Best practices
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
So how does great strategy succeed? Maybe it’s worth first outlining how it fails.
There’s that famous line: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In digital product work, I’ve found that to be especially true.
Across my career, I’ve worked closely with both product and content teams — sometimes embedded within each, sometimes acting as the connective tissue between them. These partnerships can unfold in a few different ways: At worst, the two sides operate in silos, seeing one another as competitors in a zero-sum game for strategic control. At best, they collaborate fluidly through a shared, user-first mindset — building something neither side could have shaped alone.
Getting to that second kind of partnership isn’t easy, and there’s no universal playbook. 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 in three pivotal ways.
First: They set the tone for cross-disciplinary collaboration.
They cultivate a multidisciplinary culture where product and content teams aren’t just encouraged, but expected to engage each other early and often. 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 — they invite it.
Second: They create shared fluency and invite shared expertise.
It’s easy to forget how young the modern internet really is. Our mobile-first reality has only been with us for about 15 years. As a result, within many companies, digital expertise – especially among senior leadership – is often inherited from other domains. This is true of both product and content leaders. And it means they don’t always share the same vocabulary, mental models, or expectations around what “good” looks like.
The organizations that thrive tend to invest in building this connective tissue. 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 work of the other. 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 and underlining key principles. 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 — is what makes true collaboration possible.
And third: they know when to lead and when to delegate.
When it comes to long-term product evolution, 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 quickly overruled. Product owners get the title, but not the trust. Vision is nominally 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 anything user-first. And over time, that lack of trust tends to drive away the very talent present to help chart a better path.
Balancing the Art and Science
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 is much like writing a story.
You start with a blank page (or deck, more likely). And pretty soon, you create a story that seeks to sweep your audience away – about how your app is going to be so engaging, it will sweep your users away. This story needs to be so clear, 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.
This kind of ‘Vision’ works when done artfully. Not because it’s fanciful or ungrounded, but because the act of shaping that story – of anticipating user needs, imagining new ways to serve them, and articulating a clear and motivating path forward – demands creativity, clarity, and authorship.
This last element – authorship – is key. Great strategy, like great storytelling, requires imagination. And great strategy – like great storytelling – requires authorship.
This means that while strategy is a collaborative process – including inputs from users, stakeholders and various partner disciplines – strategy built by ‘committee’ is generally likely to fail. Your strategy should have a point person: 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.
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 grounds its hypotheses in evidence, measures its outcomes, and evolves its thinking based on what it learns. 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.
Process: Inputs and Output
Good process is fundamental to achieving this blend of art and science. That’s because good process is the only sustainable path to good outcomes. Without purposeful structure, good results are accidents.
I often hear skepticism about process. Some people worry process hamstrings creativity. This can certainly be true. When process is too rigid, it smothers progress and frustrates participants. But with good process, the opposite can be true. When process is strong, exploration becomes safe, permissible and pointed. Creativity becomes structured, scalable and repeatable. The art can emerge.
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 into thoughtful hypotheses, roadmaps, and measurable outcomes.
Put another way: balancing the art and science of product strategy means starting with a hypothesis that feels clear and motivating. Testing it with real users. Learning and refining. Holding strong opinions, but lightly. Letting conviction guide the first step and humility guide the next.
It also means having the right scaffolding underneath: not process for process’s sake, but structure that drives meaning, purpose, and alignment.
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Every product starts with a vision – some sense of what you’re building, why it matters, and who it’s for. That vision doesn’t need to be perfect at the start. But it should be clear enough, and compelling enough, that the team feels energized to chase it – and has confidence users will respond in kind. If you don’t have a strong, compelling hypothesis that you really believe as a product leader, it’s pretty unlikely users will find one for you.
At the same time, history is filled with products that took the scenic route, finding their magic through iteration and an open mind.
Does this mean feeling around in the dark until you find the right answers? Maybe for some, but I’ve found the best teams account in advance for the fact both imagination and humility are needed in equal measure.
To put a spin on a popular phrase, product teams should have strong opinions, lightly held. They should start with conviction – with a vision rooted in equal parts evidence and imagination. And they should test that vision with humility, letting real-world feedback refine the shape of what they build.
This kind of combination of rigor and flexibility requires the right personalities, sure – but also the right process. Without process, strategy is at the mercy of shifting tides of opinion – the loudest, most senior, most convicted voices will dictate which way you go. Often, these are variables that have nothing to do with whether or not you are actually on the right track.
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 three dimensional view of the status quo. Most critical is ensuring the team understands user and business needs deeply, and is able to evaluate how current efforts to satisfy each are measuring up.
To do this, the team goes far-and-wide, conducting user research; diving deep on analytics and business considerations; interviewing key team members, stakeholders and partners; surveying the competitive landscape; and mapping key technical considerations.
The output of this stage is typically a ‘brief’ – in written or deck form – that outlines findings and orients the team on the scale and scope of the opportunity. The goal is to develop a clear and aligned view of where we are, and where, broadly, we think we can go – and then articulate this in a clear fashion so everyone is on the same page as to the goals and assumptions of the initiative.
Initial Vision and Journey Mapping: With a shared understanding in place, we begin to shape the story. What do we believe we can build? Why will it matter to users? What would a better experience look and feel like?
This part is more artful by nature, but still grounded in signal. We look for validation through early user feedback and initial mockups, all with the goal of building a high-level strategy and roadmap the team can rally behind.
The output is usually a Vision Presentation – something that helps stakeholders envision what’s possible, and helps the team get excited to build it.
We also create a short-to-medium term roadmap to validate, iterate, refine and actualize this vision.
Design intensives: Next, the team segments the roadmap into 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 crystallize our approach at roughly 80 percent fidelity. Rather than finalized designs, the goal 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 research, etc.
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.
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 enables 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 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.
Lastly, something else happens that’s not all 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 digital experience users effortlessly weave into their daily lives:
It’s the foundation of a digital business, built to last.