How does editorial fit into the product process? Well, what is editorial these days in the light of technology churning out valuable content and users now fitting into the fray? It varies with your product line, but there are common lessons to be learned. Gina Piarulli of J.J. Keller manages Prospera, an online resource that helps human resources professionals understand complex regulatory and compliance issues. This means working with very talented and specialized people focuses on these key requirements. Editorial staff participates in calls with clients in the early ideation phase and sometimes come up with products themselves. On a tactical level editorial moderates online client discussion boards to understand what they're saying, acting as a conduit for new ideas to the development team. Getting personalities to work together can be tricky, especially when working with extroverted sales and marketing personalities and more reserved editorial and development teams. But editorial fills important gaps in being able to support sales and marketing staffs when they can speak the "shop" language in detail with clients that may make up for personality differences. With an entire staff co-located, the communications between various times is high, keeping ideas flowing into the product effectively. Webcasts to clients are driven by their editorial staffs, which helps them to communicate to customers in a relatively low-key environment that lets them communicate their expertise effectively to clients.

Elizabeth Osder of Yahoo! News heads product development for search and local products, enabling tools that shape content from contributors into appealing online products. Editorial is involved from the very beginning of the product development process, testing ideas that may have merit and developing those that will be of most service (yes, good ideas for editorial do come from marketing, and vice versa). Brainstorming sessions are key, but offsites are a luxury that's not often undertaken in very tight development cycles. Whatever the process, the key thing is to have a process and to apply to it wherever possible. "You take seriously the development process, then see who comes up with ideas and has the passion to run with them." At some point, though, editorial needs to get out of the loop and let things happen. Focus groups for new products help to fill the knowledge gap with their mass audiences to help create compelling and engaging products, as does going through usage data from their interactive product. With development teams in Norway and Bangalore communications can be challenging, but engineers do come to California on a regular rotating basis to get them more familiar with how products are deployed in editorial and to address problems more effectively - and sometimes as small fixes with big payback that are apparent from hands-on experience. Keeping development from creating products that are too feature-rich can be a challenge, requiring them to challenge people to keep the low hanging fruit close and keep value high from the simplest solutions possible.

Dave Callaway, Editor in Chief of MarketWatch, spoke for the other side of the editorial equation. Dave runs and directs the coverage of 100 journalists globally publishing constantly throughout the day and working with technology, marketing and sales to develop products meaningful to users. If products don't sync with editorial's sometimes obscure rules of the road his job is to raise the flag, but more often he's in the role of selling good ideas to journalists that must adopt them. Editorial from his perspective should also be in the "pre-conception" phase, invested in a new product and process as soon as possible. Having development in another state tends to limit the opportunities for direct involvement, placing a focus on efficient interchanges. Driving development down to several people on the editorial team allows the process to be shared fairly and efficiently during the development lifecycle and drives buy-in into the team more effectively. Editorial is always on the watch for products that may threaten their credibility but also equally concerned that they help to develop products that help the company as a whole. Editorial communicates with their out-of-state development team regularly, including face time on at least annual visits to the development site. It can be an immersive program, but it doesn't take a huge investment - "two days and a few beers" can do it. One of the best product ideas that they had came from a developer exposed to this environment, providing stock quotes that updated within the body of the story page as people are reading stories relating to that stock. A few hours, huge payback.

Participation is the key to success with editorial, and these stories offer a number of effective routes to success. Whatever the process, getting the process collaborative requires a certain level of unified culture buy-in that's overhead that must be born - overhead that may be foreign to some companies, but it's part of the process of creating today's most valuable content.