Spaces
Transforming newsroom planning at
The Washington Post.
Spaces became the Post’s much-needed central planning hub within months of release, and it was my vision from the start. Adoption has surpassed targets even faster than expected, with every goal met within months. Over 200 Spaces have been created by the newsroom, and every editor uses Spaces on a daily basis.
Spaces solves many problems for The Washington Post newsroom, including: far too many tools across teams and projects, a missing shared source of truth, countless missed opportunities for collaboration and promotion, and the drag of constant redundant communications.
A three pillar vision.
The product development of Spaces was unprecented at The Washington Post: a designer (that's me) laid out a comprehensive vision for how planning could work at the Post, earned buy-in from stakeholders across the organization, and led the product's direction from inception to its successful release.
The three pillars that form the foundation of that vision are Ideas, Spaces, and People. Each pillar is both an organizing concept and a modular component to build the Post's new planning tool around.
A complex prototype used to build buy-in with the newsroom while validating the product direction.
Flexible. Scalable. Powerful.
Spaces is truly what those in the news media business call a “universal budget,” and also so much more. It's a shared calendar for the whole organization, a freeform planning space for every new initiative, and a daily source of truth for each team and project.
Having the Spaces product vision from its inception in a quick Google doc to its full release to the newsroom, I continue to guide Spaces feature development with a healthy backlog of concepts that fit seamlessly together, and a capacity to rapidly pivot in reaction to live user needs.
Spaces is just getting started as a living product, illuminating a brighter future for newsroom planning at the Post.
