What we talked about
Mike Carraggi started at 14 writing for a weekly paper in Everett, Massachusetts, went on to The Boston Globe, and eventually made an unlikely pivot into product management at Patch.com without a business degree, without a technical background, and without a traditional product upbringing. What he brought instead: the ability to learn fast, communicate complexity, and read what people mean, not just what they say.
Show notes
Mike Carraggi started at 14 writing for a weekly paper in Everett, Massachusetts, and by the time he landed at Patch he had covered politics, schools, sports, and human interest stories at the Boston Globe, none of which is the conventional path into product leadership. What he discovered is that the best reporters and the best product managers are doing nearly the same job: becoming fast experts in problems they didn’t know yesterday, then translating that understanding into something a non-expert can act on.
What we covered
- The journalist-to-product transfer runs deeper than most people expect. A great reporter has to quickly become an expert in zoning law, school committee procedure, or infrastructure finance, distill what matters, and communicate it to readers who know nothing about it. Mike argues that is exactly what product management requires, and that not having been trained in a traditional product framework has been an advantage rather than a deficit, because it means he isn’t holding onto methodologies that no longer apply.
- Patch has grown from roughly 300 to over 14,000 communities and is continuing to expand. The core problem it is trying to solve is what Mike calls the fragmented local layer of the internet: if you want to know when trash pickup is, what the Little League schedule looks like, or who to call for a flat tire, the answers are scattered across Facebook community pages, fading local print outlets, and a dozen other places. Patch is trying to be the authoritative, if not exhaustive, answer to what matters in your specific community.
- On AI and local journalism, Mike draws a clear line between acceptable and unacceptable uses. Generating a brief game recap from a box score, summarizing a press release for a reporter, or moderating user-generated content at scale, all reasonable. Using AI to replace the investigative and accountability work that requires sources, judgment, and community knowledge, not the business Patch wants to be in. He says local news that loses the ability to pay living wages to local journalists has probably failed at its actual goal.
- AI has made Patch’s comment moderation more robust than it has ever been. The platform can now quickly assess whether user-generated content, endorsements of local businesses, comments on stories, is appropriate, local, and valuable before it goes live, at a scale that would have required a much larger team to manage manually.
- The discipline problem is underappreciated. Now that product people can prototype and test ideas in hours rather than weeks, the temptation is to chase every new opportunity that surfaces. Mike argues the product cycle has not accelerated nearly as much as the development cycle, and the discipline to stay focused on what will actually deliver results, not just what can be shipped fast, is the underrated skill of this moment.
- Patch’s future direction is around being the source local residents can trust for accurate, verified information, especially as AI-generated content and deepfakes make authenticity harder to establish. Mike described Patch’s goal as letting local businesses, events, and community members know they matter, not just listing that they exist, but actively telling the community why they are part of its fabric.
About Mike
Mike Carraggi is Head of Product at Patch.com, a national local news network covering more than 14,000 communities across the United States. He started his journalism career at 14 at a weekly newspaper in Everett, Massachusetts, went on to the Boston Globe, and transitioned into product leadership at Patch where he oversees audience, monetization, and AI-assisted local content infrastructure.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-carraggi-60110726
- Website: https://patch.com
Episode 147 of the PreVetted Podcast.