When I joined the Wall Street Journal as its first Chief Product and Technology Officer last year, one of the first things I did was implement OKRs across the product, design, and engineering (PDE) organization. The team had not used them before. OKRs have become the operating system for how we set priorities, measure progress, and hold ourselves accountable. The approach has been successful enough that other parts of Dow Jones are now adopting OKRs after seeing the results at the WSJ.
The process required thoughtful adaptation. OKRs as described in most books and blog posts are designed for technology companies where the entire organization can rally around a small set of product metrics. Media companies are different, as I have written about in the context of IT culture vs. product culture. The newsroom has its own mission, its own metrics, and its own culture. Advertising has different incentives than subscriptions. The editorial product and the business product are intertwined but not identical. Applying OKRs without accounting for these differences produces frustration, not focus.
What Worked
Start with PDE, not the whole company. I did not try to implement OKRs across the entire organization at once. I started with the product, design, and engineering team. This was the team I led, the team I could hold accountable, and the team that needed a shared prioritization framework most urgently. Once PDE demonstrated that OKRs produced clarity and results, other parts of the organization became interested. That organic adoption is more durable than a top-down mandate.
Objectives should describe the outcome, not the work. This is the standard OKR advice, but it is particularly important in media because the default is to describe objectives in terms of projects.
“Launch the new homepage” is a project. “Increase homepage engagement by 20%” is an outcome. The first tells the team what to build. The second tells the team what to achieve and lets them figure out the best way to get there.
Key results must be measurable and time-bound. “Improve the reader experience” is not a key result. “Increase average session duration from 4.2 minutes to 5.5 minutes by end of Q2” is a key result. The specificity matters because it forces the team to commit to a target and creates an unambiguous way to evaluate whether they succeeded.
Quarterly cadence with mid-quarter check-ins. We set OKRs at the beginning of each quarter and reviewed progress at the midpoint. The mid-quarter check-in was not a grading session. It was a conversation about whether the approach was working and whether adjustments were needed. Sometimes we realized at the midpoint that a key result was not the right measure, or that priorities had shifted. We adjusted rather than blindly pursuing a target that had become irrelevant. This flexibility was essential in a news environment where circumstances change fast.
Grade honestly. At the end of each quarter, we graded every OKR on a 0-to-1 scale. A 0.7 was a good score, meaning we achieved roughly 70% of an ambitious target. A 1.0 meant we set the bar too low. A 0.3 meant something went wrong, and we needed to understand what. The grading was not punitive. It was a feedback mechanism that helped us calibrate our ambition and our execution over time.
Keep OKRs focused. Each team had two or three objectives with two to three key results each. That meant six to nine targets per team per quarter. More than that dilutes focus. Fewer than that may not capture the full scope of what the team needs to achieve. The discipline of choosing a small number of objectives forces the leadership team to make hard prioritization decisions, which is exactly the point.
Adapting OKRs for a News Environment
The newsroom at a major media company operates by different principles than a product team. Journalism has its own quality standards, its own mission, and its own rhythms. Asking a reporter to set quarterly key results for their investigative work would misunderstand what journalism is. The newsroom should have goals and should be accountable for them, but the OKR framework is not the right tool for editorial work.
That said, the product and technology team working on newsroom tools absolutely benefits from OKRs. “Reduce the time to publish a breaking news story from 12 minutes to 3 minutes” is a valid product OKR that directly serves the newsroom’s mission without imposing a business framework on editorial judgment. The key is to respect the boundary: OKRs belong where measurable outcomes can be defined and where the team has the autonomy to pursue different approaches to achieve them.
The Media-Specific Challenges
Balancing editorial and business objectives. In a media company, the product and technology team has dual responsibilities: to the reader experience and to the business. A feature that increases subscription conversion might affect the reading experience. A feature that improves the reading experience might reduce advertising inventory. OKRs need to reflect both dimensions, and the PDE leadership team needs to navigate the tension explicitly rather than pretending it does not exist.
My dual reporting structure helps here. I report to the editor-in-chief and am a member of the newsroom leadership team, while also reporting to the business side at Dow Jones corporate. I attend the editor-in-chief’s daily news meetings, where the senior editorial leaders discuss the day’s coverage priorities, breaking stories, and newsroom operations. I have staff on both sides of the house. This means I understand editorial priorities from the inside, not through secondhand translation. When setting OKRs, I can ensure that the editorial perspective is genuinely represented, not just acknowledged.
We handle this by having some OKRs focused on reader experience (engagement, satisfaction, time on site) and others focused on business impact (conversion, retention, revenue per subscriber). The portfolio of OKRs has to include both, and the leadership team is explicit about which takes priority when they conflict.
The speed of news. News organizations respond to unpredictable events. A major news story can redirect the entire product team’s attention for days or weeks. OKRs need to account for this. We built slack into our quarterly plans, assuming that some percentage of the team’s capacity would be consumed by reactive work. Teams that plan at 100% capacity in a news environment will miss their OKRs every quarter, and the OKR system will lose credibility.
Cross-functional dependencies. Media products depend on editorial, advertising operations, marketing, and subscriber services. PDE cannot achieve many of its OKRs without cooperation from these teams. We addressed this by making dependencies explicit during OKR planning. If a PDE objective required editorial to change a workflow, we named that dependency and confirmed alignment before committing to the OKR.
The Results
After the first two quarters, the OKR system is producing real benefits. Teams have clarity about what matters most. Cross-team conflicts about priorities have decreased because the framework provides a shared basis for decision-making. Leaders can see at a glance where the organization is making progress and where it is stuck. And the quarterly grading rhythm is creating a culture of honest self-assessment that did not exist before.
The transformation is extending beyond process. The PDE organization at the Wall Street Journal is becoming one of the strongest product and technology teams in media, and the team is delivering measurable results for both the journalism and the business.
OKRs are one part of that transformation, but they are the part that makes everything else possible. They provide the structure that allows good judgment, strong leadership, and clear communication to operate at scale. For a CTO, CPO, or CPTO leading a PDE organization of 200 people working on dozens of products, that structure is not optional. It is essential.