Making The Telegraph a digital first organisation

A talk by Jane Austin

The Telegraph of London is the world’s leading centre-right newspaper.

It is undergoing seismic change right now - the editor has been replaced, there is a new Chief Digital Officer, a new Chief Content Officer (Jason Seiken, who revitalised the fortunes of PBS), a new CIO - all of whom are world class leaders and who have a strong vision for The Telegraph.

I was the third hire for the Chief Digital officer, which shows the importance the organisation places on UX

The aim is to make us a digital first, product led, user centred organisation. We are changing our technology, changing our working process, reworking all our different websites and experimenting with new audiences, new products and new ways of delivering content.

We are working in blended Agile teams, we are releasing small MVPs, testing and learning as we go, we are doing lots of user research and we are putting the user at the heart of everything we do.

I have been at The Telegraph for one month. I haven’t got a great story to tell right now, but I know I will have a wonderful story to tell in September.

I will talk about what worked and what didn’t, what we have learned and how we have innovated, and how I built and led a UX team that will be at the forefront of all this change. This will be a compelling story. The eyes of the UK press are on us right now, and I will tell the inside story of the cultural change we are going through.