Assessing news product thinking skills

Much of the daily work of news product management is translating critical thinking into business answers. That means challenging unsupported assumptions while drawing both inferences and conclusions from incomplete data.

We often assume these skills develop with experience within a news organization. And while critical thinking is a learnable skill, it also comes more naturally to some people earlier in their careers. So how do we measure that capacity, or prove its utility in a given role?

As it turns out, other industries (notably law) also value this talent and have already developed diagnostic assessments to do that. The tests are proprietary but ask a battery of questions to specifically test your facility with assumptions, inference, deduction and interpretation.

A key to those assessments is that, when given to hundreds or thousands of job candidates and staffers, useful industry benchmarks are developed. News Product Management has never employed these evaluations at scale, but below is a sample of what that might look like in our context.

This example quiz is 12 questions long, split into four group questions with three responses each. It is just a quick JavaScript app so bear in mind if you refresh or leave the page your results will probably be lost.