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.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the PreVetted podcast, where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today, I am joined by Mike Karoge, his head of product at Patch.com. Mike started his career as a journalist at the Boston Globe before spending over a decade at Patch, where he helped grow the platform from roughly 300
to 30,000 communities nationwide. He now leads product strategy across audience, monetizations, and AI assisted local content infrastructure. Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Carraggi (00:40) Hey, thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.
Federico Ramallo (00:43) I am honored to have you here today. So for people meeting you for the first time, can you tell us a little bit more about what you do?
Mike Carraggi (00:51) Sure, yeah.
how do you tell your aunt what you do if they ask? Because if you can like explain it to your aunt, if I could explain what I do to my aunt, I feel like I’ve got a real clear vision of it. And I don’t know to this day exactly how I would do it. If I answer something different every day from the day, you know, I think, you know, it’s product, right? So what, you know, what I try to do is figure out what we’re building and how and
Federico Ramallo (01:03) You
Mike Carraggi (01:19) not necessarily how as much as kind of what, why, and how can we make things a bit easier and better? Or our users, or our readers, our advertisers, our customers, the people who work at Patch. And there’s a level of…
It’s a bit different, you know, because we’re a local news company. We’re a national local news company. have, as you referenced, we’ve got we’re open and actually over 14,000 communities right now in growing day. And, you know, as you can imagine, a lot of a lot of challenges arise in that a lot of opportunities arise in that. And so what we do on a day to day is like any product person, I guess, really depends on what those are. But I love
trying to identify opportunities and try to figure out how to make it work best for your company, for the people who kind of rely on you as customers. And to me, I think at Patch, we have a really high burden of people who rely on us that we kind of wear pretty proudly because it’s such a, I mean, gosh, it’s such a vital part of.
everyone’s day-to-day lives more so now probably than ever with given the scarcity of options and the challenges that the local news industry faces and publishers face online these days. So yeah, that’s my, I wouldn’t tell my aunt that, but that’s, I guess.
Federico Ramallo (02:39) Right, right. It’s a, mean, if you can articulate it, any concept, right? But if you can articulate it so a four-year-old can understand it, then you understand the concept, right? So, yeah, yeah. And tell us a little bit more about what problem patch is solving. You talk about local news and what do you think, you know, most people don’t realize is still unsolved?
Mike Carraggi (03:04) Boy, I guess it’s the local layer of, you know, the local layer of the internet is like, just really fragmented right now. You know, it’s, if you want to know what’s happening in your town, and you want to know what the important things are in your town, and that’s anything from, you know, what day trash pickup is to what the rates at the local preschool are going to be, the questions I find myself asking more and more as I get older and I…
my kids get older and get more involved in the community when the little league schedule is, whatever it might be, you know, what to do this weekend, who to go to when I get a flat tire, like there are all these questions and the answers are spread everywhere across the internet, everywhere from your local Facebook community page to, you know, what’s left of sort of like the local print industries around town maybe and their digital counterparts, and you know, a number of larger outlets trying to
to kind of come in and plug the gaps to varying degrees of success. I think a patch that we’re just trying to figure out is like, can we really?
Can we be an authoritative and certainly not an exhaustive source of every single thing that’s happening in town, but can we tell you what you want to know? Can we tell you what matters to you and what’s important to you in a way that is also sustainable for a business? I came up, we’ll probably get to it in my story a little bit, but I came up in local news. I started at a weekly newspaper in Everett, Massachusetts, at 14 years old.
The internet was a thing, but we still had the infrastructure of this local newspaper, this local product where you could find out, again, what the Little League score was, who died, who got married, who was born, what’s for sale, who’s looking to get rid of their lawnmower.
what the what the health meeting was about, like all these things that you could find in this in this one kind of artifact that is obviously facing incredible challenges these days to the extent that they still exist. And so at that I think we’re trying to like.
trying to capture some of that, certainly not in a way that says we’re trying to bring back what was old or what was lost. I don’t think that’s a winning strategy. I think we have to move forward and move forward pretty boldly and aggressively. But to do so with the standards that kind of have been established before us and to do that in a way that again is like monetizable such that we’re able to support like living wages for local journalists who are performing this duty that like, again, like
I think if we ever accomplish our goal of telling everyone what they need to know exactly, but we lost our ability to have local journalists be a real part of that in a way that they can be proud of and they can rely on.
then we probably didn’t do the job that we were trying to do. So it’s kind of, we’re trying to struggle a couple of things. But I’d say, again, to get back to your question specifically, what we’re trying to solve that maybe isn’t recognized is, again, the local layer of the internet. Again, I’ll just use the word fragmented.
And it’s unreliable in a lot of cases because of that fragmentation. And it’s unreliable because of the technological and business and societal changes that are happening so quickly. So we’re trying to not just keep up with it, trying to pace it. We’re trying to lead the way and trying to kind of be a standard bearer for the idea of local journalism.
and also how that’s going to take shape in the future.
Federico Ramallo (06:14) Right, right. I think that having been able to have local news is so important because your community around it, you want to know what’s going on, right? And those local news get covered by nation news, right? So a terrorist attack somewhere becomes more important than, you know,
a water issue locally or originally or things like that. And we’re so overwhelmed the amount of information that is out there. It’s so much that it’s hard to track. So being able to filter out becomes much more important.
Mike Carraggi (06:46) A little.
I’m sorry.
Yeah, exactly. I was gonna interrupt, what I was gonna say was, it’s hard to really comprehend, I think, especially today, if you grow up in the last 20 years or whatever. But the news that’s happening at the Everett Lear Herald, where I started, which is the only department, unfortunately, but at the Everett Lear Herald, or whatever your local newspaper might be, or your local news outlet, Patch, certainly, is probably more impactful to your life, largely.
than what you’re reading on CNN or whatever is coming out, the White House or anything else. Obviously, we live in pretty extraordinary times right now and I welcome, I’m sure people can challenge that statement right there. A lot of things that are happening seem to impact us quite a bit, but I still stand by the things that are happening at town hall in your local elections that you’re voting in are really going to impact your day-to-day life quite a bit.
for most people I think, more than the stuff that Leon gets to headlines and has all the reporters from the New York Times flying in. They’re doing very important, vital work.
democracy and the fabric of the country, but it’s a different job. What we’re trying to do again is tell people like, what do you need to know to get through your day, to get through your week, to make your life a bit better? And that’s like, for me, again, like was at the Harold, I was at the Boston Globe, I’ve covered politics, schools, sports, human interests, like whatever, what have you. And there’s something about like, here’s what happened at the town zoning meeting that just like-
has this way to yeah in fact someone’s kind of day-to-day life in a way that some of this other stuff like yeah the Red Sox lost 7-4 or you know whatever it might be happening you know this person was elected to state house like it’s just there’s stuff that these happen at this low level that’s really granular and really
Federico Ramallo (08:42) Right, right. before the internet, you could get access to all of that through local newspapers. But after the boom of the internet, then the newspapers became, for the people, became obsolete because they could access a lot of information through internet. But they lost that local thing, right?
So going back to product, how do you think about product strategy differently because of your editorial background?
Mike Carraggi (09:17) You know, it’s funny, I think we all have imposter syndrome to an extent in every walk of life and every profession and…
And for me, especially in product management, for what I see on the Reddit boys or the LinkedIn influencers and whatnot, they’re just people I talk to. And for me, it can be quite strong sometimes because I didn’t, again, I grew up as a reporter and I didn’t make the change to product until a couple of years into Patch. And I’m still learning every day and I think we all are.
And for me, it’s like, man, I didn’t grow up reading Marty Kagan. mean, I’ve been influenced by him, I didn’t grow up reading this stuff. didn’t go to school for product management or for business or for finance. Again, I’ve since spent quite a bit of time learning to know. I didn’t go to school for technical expertise on web development or anything like that. But what I kind of realized was
that weak, that what I perceive as kind of a weakness, and in some cases, certainly an argument that maybe it still is, but I think is actually kind of a strength of times. And what I mean by that is coming in as a journalist and someone with a media background or I guess a reporter background in particular, I’ve led editorial teams and whatnot, but you’re kind of an on the ground reporter. Like one of your primary objectives and one of your primary responsibilities, and the best reporters.
can take a pretty complex issue or an issue that you might not know a lot about.
And that you as a reporter might not know a lot about it. And you have to kind of become an expert in that overnight. And learn enough about it to then translate it in a way that the lay person who may be reading your story who again isn’t an expert in zoning laws or whatever the school committee was debating or whatever example you want. And it has to be understandable in a way that they can digest it and learn it. And then you kind of have to move on and go to the next thing. And you still worry about pick up some stuff. But you kind of have to pick up and drop a lot of…
lot of things, and certainly the drug a lot of things, I’m sure every product person is familiar with, but the ability to understand something and pick it up kind of quickly.
to learn enough about it and then to such that you can connect and communicate it in a way that again is like easily understandable. That’s what reporting is and that’s really like that’s what product is. mean that is you know that’s a lot of a product is and obviously there are things like stakeholder management and communications and like I’ve always thought myself to be someone who can interact with people because you have to as a reporter again the best of us I still say us as ever in a story
years but you know can get someone to open up and get someone to you can build trust with these people and win trust with these people and again stop me if what I’m saying is like hey wait that’s what we do in product management right like we we build trust with people we build bridges we’re trying to open up lines of communication we’re trying to bring people along get them aligned and a of that is just you know strategy of kind of communication and and
Heck, I you know, we’re also used to working late and skipping meals because you’re whatnot. And I guess there’s some overlap there between reporting and doing product. But I really think that ability to learn.
to spit back out, to translate, to communicate are things that are pretty helpful for me in my product journey. I wouldn’t have had those if I maybe had, I don’t know, if I had skipped some of, if I wasn’t a reporter and I went and I did take some more traditional path. And also I would argue, and this isn’t any kind of, I’m not coping here, but I always say that at the rate at which things are changing, there certainly is a standard and still a
certain philosophy and skills that I think are important to have and to grow on its foundation. But things are changing so quickly and I for one am happy that I don’t feel burdened and weighed down and handcuffed by what I might have read in a book growing up, what I might have learned at a class, what I might have had a boss 15 years ago tell me for the moment 15 years ago, which is…
largely useless now. And again, that’s not to dump on anything that’s more foundational, but we’re doing things now with, of course, with AI. And I say we as an industry and as a society that have really probably flushed a lot of that down the toilet. And I think people who might be trying to hold on to the way things were and the way they were supposed to be, that’s just, it’s never a good strategy in general. But particularly now, you really have to come up with things with open arms and
and be willing to say, know, this is a new tool and this is a new way of doing things and it’s gonna cut out this traditional way, but that’s fine. Like we’re not here to do, know, being as a customer product manager is not, or product executive or product leader or thought influencer or whatever you wanna call Like it’s not doing, you know, what was laid out as some kind of abstract rule book, or it’s not doing what we’re 10 or 15 years ago. It’s what’s working today is like delivering value
the people users that people use your product, no matter who they might be. And there’s new ways to do that today, I think, than there were before. And of course, again, I can only hear people saying, well, values value that doesn’t change. And there are, course, like things that are so foundational that you can’t shake them. And I hear that I’m not trying to speak over that. But I am I do think it’s important to have a real
flexible outlook with where things are going, with where things are today and saying, you know what, you know, whatever Marty K. Ging might have written, whatever, you know, in whatever era, like it’s just different now. So, you know, sometimes I get pushed back on that when I talk to people who are a bit more experienced in the field and that’s their right and who knows, they’re probably correct. But I’ll tell you that I’ve found success for myself, but you know, for Patch, in not having, you know, I certainly have strongly…
felt beliefs, but I held them quite loosely because I wasn’t ingrained with a traditional product upbringing, I guess. So that mix is what I did bring in from editorial, I think kind of helped.
Federico Ramallo (15:11) Right, that’s very interesting idea. the concept of, I think that a lot of the overlap is that we’re talking about people. So it’s reading people, understanding people, becoming a domain expert of a specific problem niche. So those three things is what allows you to become a great product manager because it’s…
understanding what people tell you and what people don’t tell you in order to understand what we need to build in order to provide value for those same people, right? And sometimes users don’t know, cannot articulate what they actually want, right?
Mike Carraggi (15:44) Okay.
Yep, exactly. it’s really like, well, thank you for picking up one piece that I left off there. Being a reporter, you’re sifting through. There’s what people say, there’s what people mean. And those are very often two distinct things. I think it’s a coming on a great reporter to have that scope.
and have that to go. I’d say that’s another serious overlap. So I’ve actually, like I said, I went from thinking it’s, having some imposter syndrome about it to, you know, I still do sometimes, I think we all do sometimes, but on balance I probably feel more confident, given my background, as opposed to the other way around. I’ll also say, you know, as I’m sure that we will center a lot of conversation around AI and whatnot, but to just start it or whatever, like…
You know, as someone who’s spent his life writing and writing well enough to have been paid for it in my life, you know, yeah, you see that something comes out and it lets people write now. of a sudden people who couldn’t write can now write. And I would argue it’s not very good, but it’s getting better and I’m sure it will continue to improve. But it kind of takes away this like edge you’ve got. Like I always had an edge, you whether it was in product or in writing or just whatever, where I was able to do that.
You see it taken away from you a bit or dulled a bit because now everyone has this floor. But that goes for everything. It goes for someone like me who comes into product with a limited technical understanding when I started. That’s certainly improved. But my technical floor, just by the basis of using AI…
In my floor on a lot of skills and otherwise I might not be as sharp is has raised you know for all of us because um So, know, I might have dulled an edge in writing Although I still hope to maintain some of it but you know, I I’ve also lost a I don’t know what if we want to call it a deficit or you know reduce my deficit in other areas thanks to AI so like it’s a good time for someone to like
It’s a good time. I got lucky and I fell into a journey that was well timed given what AI does allow for and that’s and I don’t think that anyone can just wake up and do product and they have an AI system and it’s like hey I’m using JetGBT to do this that and the other thing. I don’t mean it like that at all. You still need your distinct edges and strengths and judgment obviously and it’s probably
Cliche already at this point given how fast the conversations have evolved, but obviously, know, what AI is not very great at reading out judgment. And that’s probably going to stay the case, but, you know, being able to leverage it as a tool to raise our floors, I certainly have benefited from that.
Federico Ramallo (18:33) Right, right. I think that AI, it averaged everything out, so it’s a mustard of none. So it is our judgment as humans that guide it. So we can use it to build so many interesting things, but it requires our judgment, our ideas as input, and then they can, it can expand it into, know, if you’re by coding as a non-technical product owner, then…
You can build a prototype and show it to users, Or show, you know, can make your idea into something more tangible, right? Whereas you couldn’t do that before, right?
Mike Carraggi (19:09) You can articulate
what you want out of a product so much more easily, so much more quickly, and so much more richly. mean, you can really show what you wanted to do. one other thing I’d say on top of judgment, which I think is, again, is cliche at this point, although it’s very, very true.
One thing I hear less about is discipline. Maybe that goes hand in hand with judgment, but now that you have the world at your fingertips technologically, to be able to build whatever you want at any given time, and this goes for anyone, certainly those people who maybe are less in the day-to-day grind of developing, I don’t think developers fall into this trap as much, but the product side, because of what you can do is so…
is so expanded, you find yourself like, could just go do this tomorrow, then do this tomorrow, and I can solve this problem tomorrow. And it’s still, well, the developmental cycle has been reduced 100-fold, accelerated 100-fold.
The product cycle is, you know, it’s accelerated because we can crunch data and we can get some, maybe generate some ideas or brainstorm or get some copy generation. But by and large, the product cycle is still not nearly as accelerated as the developmental cycle. so the development cycle. so, the discipline it takes to still understand this still needs, we can get stuff out there, we can test it quick and dirty and we have to do that. have to move fast. But if we want something that’s probably going to work and not just say, Hey, we
did work, but we did good work and here are the results to back it up. I think that you need to maintain not just the judgment of the discipline to fight that urge off sometimes.
Federico Ramallo (20:44) Right, right. I think that this happens with all automation, that the more automation you have, the more productivity power you have, the more responsibility you have towards providing the direction. Because if you have the wrong direction, whatever it’s going to build, it’s not going to be useful or impactful. So…
To your point, on the software side, with HNT coding, we can build things faster, but we have a higher responsibility on the product side to provide those requirements with more clarity.
Mike Carraggi (21:22) Well said. Yeah, I agree with that.
Federico Ramallo (21:25) So what do you think is changing local news and community publishing with AI right now?
Mike Carraggi (21:35) That’s such a, it’s like a challenging question sometimes because I think people on the outside might think, great, like you’re using AI to write stories. Like that’s what the future is, or that’s what the future journalism is, AI stories. And I see, you know, some…
box scores of games being rewritten as game stories for a sports league or something like that.
Yeah, so I think a lot of people think it’s, we’re creating just mountains of content and stories and going to replace editors or reporters or something like that with AI. Not the case. Like I will say that there is space in the current ecosystem and in the future, of course, for some more low touch content that…
I say is probably not a waste, but like an unnecessary burden of a human person’s time. know, sometimes you’ll see like a little game story of a sports league written via a box score. It’s kind of written, generated by AI. And sometimes it’ll be like a light, I don’t know, like a summary of an event or a business or something like that. And like, I think that that’s probably where you want to…
to this stuff, to scale out local information, but to respect and save the time for reporters and editors to do real point stories. And editors and reporters, that’s a separate issue of them having their own AI-assisted tools to make their lives a bit easier. Maybe put a press release into something that summarizes it, or maybe use a copy-editing check or something like that. These are, I think, good uses
AI. Not just good, but ethical. And I’ll say upfront, like, I’m not an AI denier by any means, but I don’t intend on losing the soul of what we do in local journalism.
but just to serve AI’s efficiency. That’s not the business that we want to be in, that Patch is in. And so I would just say, so there’s that, but there’s also, we’re able to scale a bit more. We’re able to moderate comments a lot more efficiently. I think our comment system at Patch right now is more robust than it’s ever been. user-generated content, we’re able to take a look at that pretty quickly and say, does this belong on the site? Does it provide value?
appropriate, is it local? And so we’re able to provide a lot more content and value or like at least vet and moderate it. And there are, you know, you know, human reviews to a lot of these things. But, you know, we’re pretty comfortable helping, having it help expand and scale our kind of our user generated content, may it be like, you know, comments or endorsements where people come on to patch and they’ll tell someone they’ll endorse a local business and they’ll
tell the community why this local business means so much to them. We don’t want someone to come in and just flame that local business or anything like that. And at scale, it’s hard to keep track of that stuff. stuff like that. It’s really helpful in a local news scaling way. I assume your question is more toward the actual local reporters maybe or the local.
ecosystem on that front and yeah I don’t know like it’s yeah it’s a complicated question I mean you know a lot of man if I was a reporter right now I would
I’d be really skeptical because first of all, you have to be skeptical because you’re a reporter and that’s your nature. And I, you know, and I would say that society does not have a great track record of like, you know, not embracing technology to its absolute fullest capacity, consequences be damned. Like, but I would say a patch, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be doing it if I thought that we were ever using it to have any kind of like negative impact on the industry.
And that’s not to say that we don’t use it and it will maybe make a judgment call that we wouldn’t have made or that is straight up just wrong. And we would go and fix that or correct it and do our best to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So there’s obviously bets you have to make and bets you have to place to be as efficient as you need to be and as valuable as you need to be to your users. But.
Like I said, think I’m pretty, I think I can stand by like the way we use it. I know your question isn’t exactly the ethics or whatever, but I think we can stand by the way we’ve been using AI and experimenting with it, which I think is really like with an eye toward just making life easier for the reporters and their job easier and making life in one’s community a bit more robust and rich on Patch.
Federico Ramallo (26:05) Right, right. Yeah, I I think AI opens a lot of possibilities. We can use it for nefarious purposes or positive purposes for the society, right? And I agree with you. mean, if you can use it to monitor comments and be able to weed out those, you know, comments that are not providing value to the conversations or just are insults, right, then you’re proving a lot of value to…
to the users, right? Then I’ve seen people, you know, not talking about patch, you know, but I’ve seen people using AI to, you know, do cyber attacks because they can now simulate users better, right? Or they can use it to generate fake content that it’s not providing a lot of value for society, right? And that those are, you know, less positive, you know, uses, but it’s a double-edged sword, right?
once you have more powerful AI tools, you can use it for one way or another. My question was more on the philosophical side of the impact of AI on the local news.
Mike Carraggi (27:02) Right, yeah, yeah. And I, yeah, again, I agree with you. And again, it’s a fine line because like local news is an industry that’s like self governed by this like unwritten code of ethics. mean, news in general, has been for a long time and it always hasn’t been a great code of ethics. I mean, you look back to like the turn of the century or the 20th century and like the kind of the realization of
different news outlets and whatnot back then, or even at the founding of the country, and how news outlets would use it. I it hasn’t always been this beacon of virtue like I think we have and it is now. I think it’s incumbent on us now, or to the extent where anyone thinks it is a beacon of virtue now, but it’s incumbent on us now, given the…
how we live, where we live, the things that are ongoing to be a place. And I say this to Patch, I would say this to Washington Post, to anyone, know, to New York Times or Boston Globe, where like, you have to be able to be somewhere where someone can go and know if they’re taking trustworthy, accurate information. You just have to, for needle stakes. And I think that once AI casts a doubt upon that, then you probably lost the plot to the extent where it can help you do that more efficiently and better.
and I think that you’re a responsible steward of the technology.
Federico Ramallo (28:17) Right, right. mean, I think I’ve seen the importance of local news with what happened a few months ago here in Guadalajara, where the whole city got seized by the cartel because of the situation where they pursued the leader of the cartel.
and they did this coordinate attack. So three days later, everything was normal in the city, but global news, everybody was talking about it. And it was taking so much out of proportion of what was really happening on the ground. And the only way that you can learn that is by, when you’re living there, you can learn that by looking at local news.
Mike Carraggi (28:58) Yeah, yeah,
it’s fine.
or you would never, when there’s a big national story, I implore people, I implore people, like go to the local news source and have that down because they have people there, they have sources, they know the community, they know the people who are impacted. Sometimes we’ll see this big thing like what’s happening with the ICE stuff in Minnesota. you know, I got my news from the New York Times, like a lot of people did, but I’ll tell you, I went to the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the local reporters there and, you know, made sure that
A, we have to support them, especially when we’re leaning on them for this kind of really important coverage. And also just like, if you want to be educated on it, if you want like a full picture, a trustworthy picture, like go to a place where someone has connections and someone knows the area. And it’s one of things about local news and that patch to…
It’s just important to be able to rely on someone who knows the lay of the land.
Federico Ramallo (30:00) Right, right. And we are so used, numb, I think the word is numb, to see so many news that are over exaggerated, right? That the global news are looking more for the headline, right? And they keep over exaggerating. And we have so, I mean, we as a society, right?
such as short attention span, that they keep trying to find these hooks to cut our attention. So in that process, we also lose the nuances of the problem. It’s easy to say, these are the bad guys, and these are the good guys, and they simplify the story. Whereas if you read about it in more detail, there are so many nuances that probably there is not one bad guy
It’s more complex than that,
Mike Carraggi (30:53) Yeah, yeah, well, like to bring it back, like to even to bring it back to patching us, like I said, like news is probably always relying on viewers since the very, very beginning because the person writing it needs to get paid in some aspect and advertising and all that stuff. it probably isn’t a new phenomenon to paint an overly broad picture in the news that is as far from a new phenomenon. But I think what.
And to bring it back to Patch a little bit, and I don’t mean to promote Patch with this, not necessarily, but like, I think we’re really focused on, news is better when you do not require people to read it for you to be successful. And I mean by that is like, you know, if you can go out there and write a story that you think needs to be told, regardless of like how sensational a headline.
even if it’s a very quote unquote, I wouldn’t say bland, but even if it’s a quote unquote, you know, just a headline that wouldn’t like generate all this fear and wouldn’t generate all this national news and clicks and all that. But the quality of the story, the importance of the story, and it’s such that like people need to read it. Like then you’re doing a better service to the community. So Apache really tried to like, I have one thing that I’m always trying to do, we’re always trying to do like.
we’re actually really focused on now, how can we monetize our product, our company in a way that is less and less reliant on someone just coming in and viewing a story that they saw because they have like, wow, I got to click that headline. Like we want these people and we were very good at getting them. So it’s not that we’re not good at it. We’re very good at it, but we would like to rely on.
something that’s maybe a bit different that we can’t be accused of and our reporters don’t have the pressure of, you gotta get eyeballs on this story because this is how we’re gonna pay our bills this month. That’s business I think we wanna be in,
Federico Ramallo (32:41) because you’re not the user, you cannot put your assumptions into what is being built, right? Yeah.
Mike Carraggi (32:48) Exactly. And it’s
just important to, yeah, it’s just important to have a real open mind and not stick to anything too clearly. like in the name, again, back to AI, like one of the tools that’s available to us now is just learning quicker because of really data capabilities and stuff and interacting quicker because of like just tools like I’m, you know, I am now, I would categorize myself even as, you know, someone with a product in here, if had a product, a badge, would consider myself.
a part-time, very unskilled, very poor, but nonetheless, developer in the sense where I am putting a lot of work into creating things. Now, they’re not very good, and I need the actual team, the actual development team to apply their expertise. Thank God for them. And I think we have one of the most incredible teams.
personally and professionally, that I could ever hope for a patch, actually. But before it gets to that, sometimes it’s prototyping or something a little bit deeper. You’re tweaking something, you’re learning how to, you know, building emails where in the past it wouldn’t have designed an email. And I would say like, you’re a product person, yeah, but today you’re a product person and that’s probably your specialty or mine.
But I’m also a very poor developer, a very poor designer, but I’m still doing these things. I’m still developing designing because that’s what we’re expected to do now. I think the developers on our team, to a better extent than I am a developer, they’re doing product work. They’re doing design work because that’s the tools that are available to us have made it possible for competent people who want to learn to be able to wear two, three hats at once. And not in way of me, I work myself to the bone. I’m doing two or three people’s jobs. That’s not it.
merging these jobs together and they’re really becoming one more. And I’d be shocked if in two years or three years, you know, we don’t just have a product or a dev or just like, it’s just one, not just we, I don’t mean we at Patch, mean globally, the job is just gonna be one job and you’re gonna have a specialty, but I don’t see like an excuse in the future of very super distinct walled off.
here within the product and development design world.
Federico Ramallo (35:04) Right, it used to be more of a wall, right? You’re on one side or the other side, right? And then it was a clear edge on responsibilities. And now that line is blurred, right? So people are expecting more from the product side to do more design work, and from the design work to do more product. And the same for development, right?
I don’t know you’re familiar with this concept of spec-driven development, where basically you have an agent coding based on your specs, right? So how do you come up with those specs? Well, you have to start thinking as a software engineer more as a product than as a software engineer, right? Because you’re delegating the responsibility of implementation to the agent, right?
Mike Carraggi (35:47) Yeah, think the writing,
I think, and I’m going to step on that water here by accident, but like the writing code as far as development team, I think they would say has been replaced by some product thinking, you know, and, and, uh, you know, they’re still responsible for the code that goes out. It’s, it’s, you know, there’s, there’s rigorous review and whatnot and they’re still guiding it, but there’s certainly product thinking that they’re applying to it absent me, like, you know, like sometimes completely absent.
Think it’s great. I think it’s great. I think it’s a feature. I think it’s great because it helps us move quicker I think it’s great because man like we have who’s smarter Who do you know that smarter than the developer like no one that I know is smarter than a developer now You’re able to allow these people to flex this other part of their very powerful brain To make something better and who knows the product better than a developer, know, very rarely like find someone at the company That’s a real better understanding. So it’s just been like a great a great boost for
I know that there’s fears and they’re probably fair and they’re probably more existential than what’s my product career going to be or what’s my development career going to be. There’s probably bigger ones on a bigger level surrounding the technology and who’s in control of it and what people do with it. But on this level, I got to say the benefits of it have outweighed the negatives, I think. And I aim to keep it that way for a reason.
the way we’re leveraging it and benefiting from it.
Federico Ramallo (37:14) Right, right. Yeah, I think that the benefits are outweighed the cons. mean, there’s a lot of people that I’ve seen kind of either providing too much hype for what AI could do or seeing AI as an enemy, right, or trying to fight it back, right. And I think those two approaches are
in my opinion. I think it’s more about how can we leverage to be more productive, to focus more on the core of our roles, right? And to be able to integrate better, change the dynamic, how we work together, to, you know, for benefit for the company, for the users, and society, right?
So going back to asking you more about advice, what advice would you give to product managers that are either starting their career or they are thinking on getting into the role? What advice would you give them?
Mike Carraggi (38:14) Yeah, I guess just to be kind of good to trust in yourself because they think that it’s such a goofy piece of advice.
You know, you need to be able to make decisions with firmness and clarity. And that does not mean making the right decision every time. fact, it probably means the opposite quite often. But having some confidence in yourself and your skills and in your talents and even those which you haven’t quite developed yet, your ability to learn, you know, it helps you move forward. there are, you we always say there’s like the three ways in which you can go. can make the right decision, the wrong decision, or no decision.
You’d rather make, of course, the right one, but…
If not, then make the wrong one because the no decision is that’s a real bummer. Like that’s going to kill you. That’s going to, you know, that’s not going to learn from that. You’re not going to, you’re not going to move forward if you zoom out and zooming out and having the perspective of, you know, trying to build something that is like trying to build something that’s a system and not having this day to day, like I’m guilty of this very much so. And because of that, would be part of my advice to product folks like.
especially as we go a leader, but even I think on a very granular level, like your day-to-day work is important and it’s really hard and it’s really pressure-filled and it’s constant and it’s very time-intensive and thought-intensive. But you…
a real great product person and I think a great product leader especially is able to have a system and systemize their excellence and systemize and automate their excellence to an extent where they don’t have to be in it every single day doing things that are time intensive and doing things that are really not going to have the ROI
like for it to have. And I would just say like step back, see like how you can, maybe you don’t have to impact things as hands on as you think, which is something I struggle with. You don’t have to execute every single thing, operationalize it, create a system that sustains excellence, it sustains reaching your outcomes. So I’d say like those, probably those two things are, you know.
It’d probably be a lot more advice than that. Read the newsletters. Stay up on what’s happening. Remember that, I guess one big thing I’d say is just remember that the people you’re working with are all probably with you to be working toward a goal.
Federico Ramallo (40:51) So Mike, tell us a little bit about what the future for patch you envision. Where do you think you can take patch next?
Mike Carraggi (41:01) I would say Batch is going to be a place where you’re able to come as a reader, and I want to focus on the readers here, you’ll be able to come as a reader and figure out what you need to know locally that’s important to you.
wherever you are, whether it’s via your email or on site or whatever the emerging technology of the day is, I think that…
We want you be able to be confident that what you’re getting a patch is pretty quick, accurate, local information, kind of stamped with the patch, know, stamp of approval here because as the world gets, again, as local news gets quite fragmented and as local verification of just verification and authenticity of anything gets kind of dissolved in the age of AI and memeification.
You know people making videos and photos and AI written content and all that stuff like we just want you know when you come to patch You’re getting the local authenticity of whatever it is that you’re looking for reading learning about You know events businesses Local news school news sports scores, whatever it is your commute your conversations with your fellow community members
a site, whatever it might be. if you’re accustomed, if you’re someone who wants to spread the word on Patch and let people know about the fact that you matter on Patch, that you matter in your community, if you’re like a local bakery, if you’re someone who’s hosting a whatever it might be, a theater production or something like that. If you’re on Patch, we’re going to let people know that you are important to your community, that you matter to your community. We don’t want to just stick a sticker up there and say, hey,
like this thing is happening, this place exists. Like that’s great, there’s a space for that, it’s called the Bolton or the local coffee shop probably, but like we want to be able to deliver on a promise of you’re gonna matter in your community and being a patch is like part of that. We’re gonna tell people that you matter to your community, we’re gonna tell people that you’re an important part of the fabric of the community.
And hopefully that drives a great turn of view. Hopefully that gets people to your event, hopefully it gets people to your business. But what we’re really focused on is like, we want people to see you on-patch and increasingly off-patch thanks to, you know, emergence of obviously traditional search, but also AI search. And we also want people to know like, once they see you, then you matter to the community, which is really important to us. I don’t think we’re doing the job for our customers that we want to do if someone doesn’t see them and say like, well, this
It’s not just existing, it’s actually a of the community.
Federico Ramallo (43:23) Mike, I think that having in this world where we have so much synthetic content, synthetic everything, having a curated company that is providing a curated content and local news is becoming much more important in this current age. So I think that what you’re doing at Patch has a
big impact on society.
Mike Carraggi (43:45) Thanks, yeah, I would encourage everyone listening if you made it this far, thank you. But I’d encourage you to find your local patch wherever you are. There’s something for you. And then let us know what you need more of, what we can do better, how we can help make life in your community a bit more informed. And we would love to have you and see you on the patch.
Federico Ramallo (44:08) Awesome. Mike, thank you very much for joining us today.
Mike Carraggi (44:12) Yeah, thanks for having me.