Milan Bargiel

Comment sections are an essential feature of online news media www.zeit.de. They allow people to exchange ideas, engage in discussions and express their thoughts about what is going on in the world.

To keep comment sections a safe space, the professional team of moderators at ZEIT ONLINE needed a new tool that reduced the complexity of former workflows and provides a seamless moderation experience.

In this project, I took the role of a product owner together with the former head of product at ZEIT ONLINE Michael Schultheiss. By conducting workshops with moderators, prototyping and continuous user testing, we were able to give shape to the tool while actually building it.

In 2019, news media ZEIT ONLINE replaced its legacy comments database with a lightweight, flexible, and scalable system that is orchestrated in the cloud.

As a technical product owner my role was to represent the perspective of users, moderators, and the newsroom in the development of the database. Together with my colleague Thomas Strothjohann, I set up an agile practice and defined the qualities of the database in user stories.

Reconnecting a service deeply intertwined with the basic functioning of the news web page was an inspiring challenge.