Upasna Gautam
Upasna Gautam is a product manager at CNN Digital, where she works closely with editorial staff and journalists to build their internal content management system. She is also a longtime meditation coach and a board member of the News Product Alliance. Upasna also shares a story about her team’s product saving the day during the 2020 elections and gives listeners a free mini lesson on meditation.
Career (separate track) Skills
The ability to pause before reacting is a critical skill for product managers to break negative mental patterns and lead effectively through high-pressure situations.
"Equanimity is one of my favorite words, it means mental calmness, composure, evenness of temper, especially in crazy, stressful situations. It's the ability to remain un-rattled in like the highest of..."
Discovery & Research Skills
A structured system of diverse touchpoints ensures continuous user feedback even when stakeholders have unpredictable and chaotic schedules.
"I implemented a system to manage that kind of intake with four different touch points or events. So we have weekly demo days, working sessions, breaking news dress rehearsals, and office hours."
Simulating high-stakes scenarios through 'dress rehearsals' allows product teams to identify and resolve critical friction points before they impact real-world operations.
"In addition to that, we also do I mentioned breaking news dress rehearsals. And you can imagine this is exactly what it sounds like. We recreate their workflows in the new platform. This allows us to..."
Involving tech leads in discovery-oriented sessions helps bridge the gap between technical feasibility and user needs early in the process.
"With weekly demo days, I facilitate those with my product design lead and my tech lead. And we use that as an open form of communication to deep dive into features that exist on our platform, also to..."
Growth & Retention Skills
Onboarding users from legacy systems requires a long, buffer-heavy cycle that prioritizes repetitive dialogue and workflow testing to account for daily disruptions.
"So when we're thinking about onboarding especially the teams, our onboarding cycle's very long. It involves training, testing, lots of dialogue and feedback. And then only do we actually test, and the..."
Operating Cadence & Communication Skills
Mindful communication allows product managers to remain un-rattled by negative feedback and build stronger trust with diverse stakeholders.
"You can cut through that chaos with equanimity because it also really gives you this outsized advantage in everything from stakeholder management, team morale, to the way you're able to translate user..."