Accelerating Success with No-Code Tools: Insights from Hearst's Operations Innovators
HearstLab, a venture arm of Hearst, invests exclusively in women-led technology startups. Alongside a full-time team that reviews prospective startups and provides support to the founders they invest in, HearstLab has built a network of female “Scouts” from across Hearst business units who share their expertise and champion innovation and entrepreneurship. Beyond supporting HearstLab companies, these leaders excel in their day-to-day roles. In this guest feature from HearstLab, we highlight two of these operational innovators, one is a HearstLab team member and the other is a HearstLab Scout, who are making a significant impact at Hearst.
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Author: HearstLab Guest Post | Published: 07/01/24
A Look Inside Hearst
Use Case #1: Streamline Internal Product Communication through Smart Workflows
Accelerating Success with No-Code Tools: Insights from Hearst's Operations Innovators
A Look Inside Hearst
Secret Weapon: “A small tweak to a system can have a large impact on a key business process! By bringing roadmap fields into the weekly updates interface, roadmaps are kept up to date. Roadmaps are the source of truth for leadership and ensuring they’re accurate increases transparency and trust between leadership and product teams.”
Wins: More accurate and timely data, time saved and increased transparency both within the product team and with other partners at Hearst.
User Feedback: “I can now return from vacation and get fully up to speed without asking anyone for updates.” - Freyja Balmer, Vice President of Product Management, Hearst Newspapers
“I've saved around 50% of the time that I was spending on writing updates.” - Jessica Parks, Director of Product, Newsroom Tools, Hearst Newspapers
Wins: “We’re keeping pace with our maintenance tasks and getting down to zero! This translates to more reliable data for the rest of the team, enabling better. data-driven decision making, and smoother operations across HearstLab, both domestically and internationally.”
User Feedback: “Data is the lifeblood at HearstLab. With what Dominique and her team have built, we have high confidence that our thousands of records on startups, contacts, events and more are accurate and up to date, which allows us to make smart decisions quickly.” - Katie Bailey, Co-Lead, HearstLab
Frances Wilson, Head of Product Operations at Hearst Newspapers and HearstLab Advisory Board Member and Scout
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Meet Frances Wilson, head of product operations at Hearst Newspapers and a HearstLab advisory board member and scout, and Dominique Festa, director of data and operations at HearstLab. These leaders are accelerating business outcomes for their respective teams by operationalizing product development, data entry and analysis, end-to-end project management and more through process-improvement initiatives that leverage no-code tools and automation. In this feature, we delve into two recent operations use cases from Owners Frances and Dominique. They share how their teams tackle challenges, implement workflow improvements and achieve results.
Product Managers are prompted via automated messages to fill out their updates using a new Airtable interface. Product leadership reviews updates weekly and flags the ones they’d like to highlight in our weekly product newsletter. Updates are linked to our product roadmap so when you click into projects for more detail, you can see historical updates.
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you click into a project on our roadmap, you can now see all historical weekly updates for a quick summary to bring you up to speed (we hope to enhance our operations with Airtable AI in the future, too). These updates then power other outputs (e.g., roadmap fields, decks, weekly emails, etc.) that increase visibility into project progress and impact. Automations through Airtable, Slack and Make bring this to life.”
How it works:
Hearst Newspapers product managers are prompted via automated messages to fill out updates using an interface built on Airtable for leadership review.
By bringing Hearst Newspapers' roadmap fields into the weekly updates interface, roadmaps are kept up to date.
Use Case #2: Summarize Async Data Maintenance
connects our record maintenance schedule to our task tracking, with automated reminders sent directly to Slack. From within Slack, we can mark a task as ‘Done’ and reset the clock based on task frequency and priority. Record maintenance can sometimes feel like a thankless job. By making the work more visible, we can celebrate our progress and support each other where there’s need.”
Secret Weapon: “Few things feel as good as checking items off your to-do list and hitting zero. That’s what we’re striving for when we reconcile the inevitable duplicate record. Think multiple applications from the same startup or contact information entered into our system twice under different names. We built an apparatus to flag potential duplicates as we encounter them. This allows us to save the cleanup for later or assign it to the appropriate team member. Each team member has a personal dashboard with a ‘Dupes to Clean’ scorecard. This keeps us accountable and motivated to get to zero.”
Owner: Dominique Festa, Director of Data and Operations at HearstLab
Challenge: “Our team has a lot to track: interactions with other investors, prospective startup pitches and applications, pitch event management, event attendance... the list goes on! While we’ve built numerous no-code automations to keep our records up to date, there will always be a need for more thoughtful, manual enrichment to ensure the data remains actionable. With a small team managing a scaling operation, staying on top of the backlog isn't always easy.”
Solution: "Airtable! We built a system that
Dominique Festa, Director of Data and Operations at HearstLab
HearstLab's content management system is built on Airtable and allows contributors to push and publish edits to our website without logging into the backend.
HearstLab's data management schedule is built in Airtable and allows us to assign data clean-up to the appropriate team member, track tasks and have automated reminders sent directly to Slack.
Agile companies, like Hearst, can identify a business problem and pivot quickly with a solution. They’re able to do this in large part due to strong Operations leaders.
“We’re the optimizers,” says Frances. “We’re dedicated to accelerating product development to deliver more meaningful value to our customers and business. We do everything from triaging bugs to creating structure around third-party vendor governance that’s helped us get to a 40% improvement in Core Web Vitals for third-party vendors across our sites. We can oversee this scope of work and do it at scale because Hearst has given our team the ability to experiment, fail fast and achieve continuous improvement by leveraging new software and developing new systems.”
“Operations democratizes access to data and knowledge,” says Dominique. “It allows our entire team to make data-driven decisions with more autonomy and less friction. We’re a venture fund at a 137-year-old company run entirely on a no-code tool that was founded in 2012. That speaks for itself.”
Bottom Line? Operational Efficiency = Agility.
Join one of the many operations teams turning innovation into action at Hearst. Explore career opportunities that align with your passion and expertise, learn more here.
HearstLab, a venture investment arm of Hearst, provides cash investment and support services to early-stage, women-led technology startups. By the numbers:
Learn more about how HearstLab supports women-led startups.
70+ women-led investments to date globally 170+ scouts in our Hearst-wide network
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Owner: Frances Wilson, Head of Product Operations at Hearst Newspapers and HearstLab Advisory Board Member and Scout
Challenge: “Product managers across Hearst Newspapers were spending too much time writing and sending project updates—yet leaders, stakeholders and colleagues were still unclear about the project progress and impact.”
Solution: “The first step was to streamline the update sources from five or more to one. Today, all updates are collected weekly via one source: Airtable. Updates are tied to projects on our roadmap—this means that if
Use Case #1: Streamline Internal Product Communication through Smart Workflows
