My First Product Launch: BuzzFeed Product Manager Edition
BuzzFeed Tech product managers talk about their experiences of their first product launches and their work now.
It was mid-spring when I got the call that every millennial dreams of — I got extended an offer to intern at BuzzFeed! A few weeks after receiving the call, I found out that I’d be working as a product management intern at BuzzFeed Tech on the Tasty team. I was so excited about the opportunity and a little nervous, too — after all, BuzzFeed was going to be my second role in product ever and I wasn’t quite sure what it looked like to launch products at BuzzFeed and do it well. To my excitement, halfway through my internship, I successfully shipped my first feature (you’ll read more about that below).
What is product management, anyway? The truth is that it’s completely different everywhere you go! BuzzFeed has a deeply people-driven culture. To that end, I saw product managers encourage and inspire their teams just as much as I saw them lay down product goals and spearhead company objectives. In textbooks, product management is typically defined as “the practice of strategically driving the development, market launch, and continual support and improvement of a company’s products.” but as someone pretty new to the role, I’d probably define it a little something like this:
But the question remains: what’s it like to launch your first product at a company like BuzzFeed? To get a good answer, I asked five BuzzFeed Product Managers about the wins, challenges, and experiences that come with a first product launch! Keep reading to hear what they had to say.
Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Sami Simon 👩🍳
Then: Product Manager for BuzzFeed App (October 2017)
Now: Senior Product Manager for Tasty Tech Team
What was BuzzFeed like when you first started as a product manager?
BuzzFeed was definitely an established company by the time I got here, and one I had been excited about for many years before! I came at a time when we were trying to figure out how to diversify the company’s revenue — so there was definitely this energy of new beginnings and excitement.
What was the first product you launched? What was your role in the project?
The most significant was the Tasty Action on Google, which was a voice experience where users could use their Google Assistant to help them find and cook Tasty recipes. I was the product manager, but I did a ton of work in partner management and anything else that needed to be done. I wrote a blog post about it for Google if you want to read more!
How has your approach to product changed since your early PM days?
I think early on, I felt like I needed permission to make many of my product decisions. What I’ve come to realize is that my instincts are solid and that I know when to ask for guidance when I need it. Those two things combined make me very capable of making great product decisions. I think it’s also important to always remember things can be iterated on in production — nothing has to be perfect at launch!
Dilip Rajan 🤓
Then: Associate Product Manager for Post Experience Team (July 2016)
Now: Staff Product Manager for Community Team
Was BuzzFeed pretty different back in 2016?
Yeah, back in 2016, BuzzFeed was transitioning from being a startup to a mid-stage company. The business model was a lot simpler then: the sole revenue stream was native advertising (a.k.a., creating and distributing branded content for advertisers). BuzzFeed’s culture of curious, creative, down-to-earth, and incredibly friendly people hasn’t changed one bit though!
What was the first product you launched? What was your role in the project?
My first large project was re-platforming the post page. The post page had different versions for desktop and mobile, was served by legacy code, and had accumulated years of tech debt. The goal was to help build a single, responsive page that could serve all of our different post formats (articles, lists, quizzes, etc).
What obstacles did you face while launching your first BF product? What did you learn?
Keeping the re-platforming project within a reasonable scope was challenging. On top of deprecating legacy code, we also wanted to make design improvements to our post pages. But due to our rollout plan, we couldn’t test each improvement individually (which was risky because even the smallest of changes could have knocked our user metrics — and been disastrous for BF). We ended up only making the improvements that we had high conviction around and saved everything else for future iterations. Overall, I learned a ton about how to prioritize and sequence complex projects and I developed a ton of relationships with people across the organization!
Swara Kantaria 😜
Then: Technical Project Manager for Growth (September 2015)
Now: Staff Product Manager for BuzzFeed Shopping
What was BuzzFeed’s big goal back in 2015?
Back when I joined BuzzFeed as a technical project manager in 2015, the big focus was to launch BuzzFeed in new international markets. My first project was to launch our site and app in Japan. My team was also responsible for working on new workflow tools to support our international growth. For example, we launched a new translation tool (called Bento) that allows editors to easily request posts for translation, localize translated posts, and then publish them on our site. It was a fun time filled with lots of growth and learnings about international expansion!
What was the first product you launched? What was your role in the project?
After a little bit of time working on project management at BuzzFeed, I started taking on more product responsibilities. My first official product launch (as a product manager) was for a new consumer product called BFMPDB (which stands for Buzzfeed Motion Pictures Database, basically BuzzFeed’s version of IMDB for our original videos). I was responsible for creating two new pages: the contributor pages and the video pages. We use these pages on buzzfeed.com to give credit to all the talented people who contribute to making our videos.
What advice would you give to someone jumping into their first PM role?
As a Product Manager, you play an important role in building a competitive advantage for your company by adding real value for your product’s users. Early in your career, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the various inbound stakeholder feature requests thrown your way. Try to stay focused on the problem you’re trying to solve for your users. Staying rooted in real user problems will give you clarity on what to prioritize and will ensure you’re building products that serve your users in the most meaningful ways!
Chris Johanesen 🆗
Then: Lead Designer (August 2006)
Now: Principal Product Manager on the Site Team
Imagine we took a time machine back to the early beginnings of BuzzFeed — how would you describe it?
The Internet of 2006 would barely be recognizable today. This was before the iPhone, before Facebook’s newsfeed, Twitter was still where you shared a funny status about what you ate for lunch, and YouTube was mostly just a place you went to watch clips ripped from TV shows.
When I started at BuzzFeed we were a tiny team: myself, Mark Wilkie as the engineering lead, Peggy Wang as editorial lead, and BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti. There were also a few advisors like Jason Kottke, Duncan Watts, and early investors.
Jonah was BuzzFeed’s first “product manager.” It was a very experimental time — we were more of a tech R&D lab and not yet anything resembling a media company. As a team, we were very collaborative and would just talk through ideas together until they made sense — our process was very fluid and organic. Jonah has a million ideas, and the early days were mostly about experimenting and trying things out. But it always felt like Jonah had a vision we were working towards, rather than just experimenting randomly.
What was the first product you launched? What was your role in the project?
The first project I helped launch was BuzzFeed.com. I created BuzzFeed’s branding, the visual design of the site, as well as all the HTML and CSS markup. We also built a custom content management system for the site. Part of BuzzFeed’s success is that we started as a tech company so our key tech has always been built in-house for our needs. This has helped us evolve our publishing in new innovative ways and also stay ahead of trends like social, mobile, and video, rather than do what everyone else was doing at the time.
What’s a product management motto you live by?
“Be the glue.” As product managers, we have to be leaders, but we also need to be the glue that fills in the holes on our team. I like to work very collaboratively, and I try to adapt myself to be whatever the team needs to do the best work. This also means that everyone on the team should be a part of idea generation and decision making.
Ivor Tossell 😬
Then: Technology and Political Columnist (February 2015)
Now: Senior Product Manager, Content Systems
February 2015 was over four years ago! What was BuzzFeed like at that time?
When I joined, BuzzFeed had just finished a major hiring spree and was like a small company walking around in a big company’s body. Tech had just grown by something like 1000% and was trying to adjust its process and tech stack to match. Having a design process and product KPIs were new concepts at the time. Code deploys happened once a day, and they were an enormous production that involved the bundling-together of many disparate branches from around the organization. As often and not, the deploy would then get frantically rolled back after something in the bundle caught fire and took the whole system down.
In 2015, distributed platforms were on the horizon: Facebook Instant Articles was rolling in, and Apple News was a top-secret project. BuzzFeed was swinging towards a distributed strategy where our platforms came first and our owned and operated (our own mobile platforms) came second. It paid off in many senses, but I’m glad that our O&O platform is front and center again because it allows us to do so many fun things we can’t do on the platforms.
What was the first product you launched? What was your role in the project?
In my very first days, I got very bound up trying to create a working auto-complete drop-down (with keyboard shortcuts!) for bylines in the CMS, which was finicky but stood the test of time. My first giant product was an overhaul of the CMS interface: make it easy for editors to edit BuzzFeed lists by clicking in and out of fields instead of opening up and saving data in modals.
What led you to product management? What made you stay?
My career has alternated between political journalism and content management systems, which, in hindsight, is weird. After a stint as the editor of a couple of student newspapers, I wrote my own CMS and sold it to other college papers (this was before WordPress was such a thing). I switched to journalism for a decade, but when the opportunity to join BuzzFeed Tech came up, I jumped. I’ve stayed because, honestly, it’s a great place with great people, and a mission I believe in: to spread news and cats, for the betterment of all.
Carey Flack ✨
Last Spring: Strategy, Tech, & Design Student @ University of Oklahoma MBA
Now: Product Management Intern for Tasty Tech Team (June 2019)
What was it like to intern at BuzzFeed?
It was so amazing! For context, BuzzFeed is broken up into agile teams and squads(like Tasty, BuzzFeed.com, Internal Tools) that are working on some exciting projects. Walking through the BuzzFeed office you can often find interns coding, designing, and launching all sorts of projects with their teams — which I think totally speaks to BuzzFeed’s culture of having all hands in. During my time, I also had a blast attending Shrek-themed happy hours, seeing Lil Nas X perform live, and soaking up five seconds of fame by starring in a BuzzFeed News video! Most of all, I got to build great products with an incredible team that I learned so much from along the way (shoutout to Tasty Tech!).
What was the first product you launched? What was your role in the project?
My first official™ product launch was Tasty’s recipe linking feature, which allows food editors to easily link newly posted recipes (like pumpkin cupcakes) with previously posted recipes (like vanilla frosting). This new linking feature means that our food editors no longer have to copy and paste the same vanilla frosting recipe 500x and it also gives our users easier access all of the homemade frostings, sauces, and crumbles that are necessary to complete their recipes — bringing them much closer to the Tasty brand. As the product management intern, I kicked off the recipe linking project by setting goals and KPIs, leading a competitive audit, walking through user-flows with our designer, and nurturing our conversation with the Food Team — a major stakeholder in the project. You can catch the feature in action here!
How can I prepare for a role in product management if I’m new to product management?
There are honestly so many ways to jump into product! Even though I pursued a product internship, my personal roadmap into the field actually began with entrepreneurship. In college, I spent a lot of time launching tech projects with friends (like Roomswap and BLOOM), which gave me foundational knowledge in strategy, UI/UX design, and team-building. These experiences also taught me how to launch projects fearlessly, which I think is a super important muscle for newer product managers to strengthen anytime we can. In terms of applying for positions, I recommend publishing online case studies of your work — it not only is a huge application boost, but it’s a great conversation starter that has personally helped me connect with all sorts of amazing new friends and teammates!
Have a story on your first product launch? We’d love to hear it! Send us a comment below.
BuzzFeed Tech is hiring! If you’re interested in browsing openings, check out buzzfeed.com/jobs. We have roles in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, London, and New York!
To keep in touch with us here and find out what’s going on at BuzzFeed Tech, be sure to follow us on Twitter @BuzzFeedExp!
