NPR+ Podcast Operations

SERVICE DESIGN • PRODUCT STRATEGY • WORKFORCE EXPERIENCE
Background

I led efforts to put an end to unnecessary operational headaches in order to better serve NPR+ subscribers.

Back in 2020, a team called PodOps was created to support NPR’s first paid podcast subscription program, which offered sponsorship-free episodes for a handful of participating NPR podcasts.

I defined and guided the overall service design strategy for new PodOps workflows, facilitated co-creation workshops, and oversaw all research & design work.

The team

Adela Bateman, product lead
Hazel Leung, senior product designer
Frank Gómez, engineering lead
The PodOps team

THE CHALLENGE

The PodOps team’s workflows were prone to human error, highly time-bound, and central to the listening experience for subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

Every day, this tiny team would prepare and publish both free and paid versions of each episode — a wholly manual and tedious process, often with very little lead time. It was prone to human error and extremely stressful for not only the PodOps team, but for podcast producers, audience relations specialists, and core product team as well.

We needed to reduce the burden on PodOps to ensure a consistent experience for all listeners, regardless of subscription status.

Discovery

Before we could make any meaningful improvements, we had to understand the lay of the land.

Hazel had just completed a contextual inquiry study to uncover the podcast production end of the workflow, which gave us a great foundation to build on.

We got to work and conducted a follow-up contextual inquiry with the PodOps team. Frank, the engineering lead, was involved in this process as well — I always recruit engineers to observe and take notes, ensuring we’re on the same page from day one.

Here’s what we discovered:

  • What we heard:

    • 9 tools were needed to complete 1 workflow

    • The most tedious parts of the process were largely out of the team’s control

    • The workflow was highly manual

    • Human error was almost unavoidable

    This meant that the workflow was not sustainable or scalable.

  • What we heard:

    • No operational norms had been set or communicated to podcast producers

    • PodOps rarely knew exactly when they were going to receive episodes from producers

    • Episode submissions routinely contained incorrect and missing information

    • All comms between PodOps, producers, and audience relations were via email, rather than a ticketing system

    This meant the workflow was largely at the mercy of other teams, making it prone to disruption.

  • What we heard:

    • PodOps was tasked with establishing their own processes while the product was live

    • All issues were dealt with on an ad-hoc basis

    • The only person on the team who was an ops specialist at NPR before PodOps was established became the de facto point of contact

    This meant there was limited capacity for knowledge sharing, let alone process optimization. PodOps specialists felt they couldn’t take vacation, because there was simply no one else who could do this work or troubleshoot when needed.

[A coworker] had to take his dog to the vet. I'm always happy to cover, but I hated that I was annoyed. It's just that the workflow takes so f***ing long, and I'm doing this on top of other things.

— Pod ops specialist
Collaborative Service blueprinting

It became clear that we needed a way to identify specific areas of improvement in the workflow.

To do this, I led a series of highly interactive blueprinting workshops with the core product team and the PodOps team. We started by documenting the current state.

As a result, we revealed over 20 distinct steps that were needed to publish a single podcast episode.

forging the path forward

The current state blueprint allowed us to clearly see distinct areas of opportunity that we could prioritize with intention.

Of course, we didn’t want to rip the rug out from under the PodOps team by designing a new workflow in a vacuum.

Instead, I ran additional, future-focused blueprinting workshops to co-design solutions and plan a phased implementation approach:

  • Low-effort fixes with little immediate impact to set us up for high-impact improvements.

    Goal: Remove the need to copy & paste episode metadata across systems.

    Solution: Use existing CMS capabilities to automatically push episode titles, descriptions, images, and WAV files to centralized asset management system used by existing APIs.

  • Low-effort, high-impact improvements to reduce the reliance on manual processes.

    Goal: Simplify the creation, encoding, and archiving of episode derivatives (with vs. without sponsorship messages).

    Solution: Fetch episode metadata via exiting APIs & automate publication of episode derivatives to appropriate platforms.

  • High-effort, high-impact improvements that represent the culmination of all prior work.

    Goal: Significantly reduce the amount of time spent preparing episodes for publication

    Solution: Deprecate legacy podcast upload tool, implement existing ticketing system, and automate removal of baked-in sponsorship messages

Pictured above: The final set of blueprints documenting the current state and each of the 3 implementation phases. These artifacts were detailed enough for the core product team to use and, when zoomed out, a useful way to illustrate the impacts of each phase for our stakeholders.

Impact

This work allowed us to simplify the PodOps workflow, which saved time, reduced anxiety, and established a reliable NPR+ listening experience.

While we did not make it to phase 3, we did accomplish the following:

  • Cut the number of steps in the PodOps workflow by roughly 20%

  • Reduce the time spent publishing a single episode from 1–1.5 hours to roughly 30 minutes

  • Reduce the volume of NPR+ complaints*, saving audience relations specialists time and energy

*Unfortunately, I no longer have access to these specific metrics. Write your case studies as the project is happening, folks!!