Last week, the Society for News Design teamed up with the Institute for Non-Profit News for its summit on product and technology. The two-day event in Chicago brought together senior leaders from INN member organizations to learn best practices and new skills in analytics, budgeting and hiring, design thinking, impact analysis, technology management, and project planning.
“In a series of sessions, SND introduced managers from small news organizations to design thinking and gave them a new set of skills and tools to take back to their organizations. We’ve received some great feedback that the event was a huge help and that even for small organizations, bringing a human-centered design process to the problems they’re facing will help their organizations be more effective and sustainable,” said Adam Schweigert, INN’s senior director of product and technology.
Kyle Ellis led the design-thinking bootcamp as part of the Society’s SNDConnects program. Participants received an introduction to the problem-solving framework and were challenged to apply it to a series of exercises aimed at re-thinking the article page template.
You don't need to know how to code. You need to understand how technology works and how technology is made – @rsm at #INNproduct
— Julia Smith (@julia67) September 28, 2016
Two members of the SNDMakes community also participated in the summit. Amanda Krauss joined Schweigert for a session on planning and budgeting for technology projects, and Rebekah Monson spoke on product management.
Prior to the larger event, Ellis, Krauss, and Monson joined INN’s 2017 roadmap meeting to help key stakeholders identify focus areas across its 120 member organizations using empathy-building exercises from the design thinking process.