Product Journey

This is the product journey of Mosaic News to date, spanning the project’s first six months. Across 8 chapters, I’ve documented what inspired the idea, the discovery research behind it, phases of experimentation and prototyping, continued implementation and iteration, and ultimately its deployment and what comes next.

Each chapter offers a window into my thought process, supported by artifacts from along the product journey. I hope to continue updating this page and adding new chapters as Mosaic News’s story evolves.

— Josh

Chapter 01

Foreword

Mosaic News started its life out as the “Media Bias Analyzer”, a prototype I built while pursuing my Master of Technology Management at UCSB.

Chapter 02

The Prototype

The “Media Bias Analyzer” was a simple experiment, if generative AI technology was being used to spread misinformation (and ultimately capture attention), how could that same technology be used to make us more aware of how that content worked on us?

Chapter 03

Market & Competitive Research

With a fresh mind and renewed motivation, I understood this would be an ambitious project. The first step was to conduct a more concrete market analysis of the opportunity to assess product-market fit, along with a competitive analysis of existing news aggregation platforms to see how current solutions served this problem and where they differed.

Chapter 04

Distilling Product Requirements

The philosophical framing provided by Brin and Masoud helped me articulate the problem, while the market research provided evidence that it extended beyond my personal experience. Together, they gave me enough confidence to translate the opportunity into a set of initial product requirements organized around three tenets: transparency, agency, and privacy.

Chapter 05

Three Experiments

The next step and first area of experimentation presented the most existential uncertainty: whether I could create an independent news-aggregation backend at all. If that foundation proved too expensive, unreliable, or inflexible, none of the remaining product requirements could be realized.

Chapter 06

Compounding the System

Together, the three experiments established the foundation of the product. I could independently gather and enrich reporting, organize it into meaningful context, and distribute it through a ranking system readers could inspect and control. The remaining work would now be about extending those capabilities, connecting them into a coherent experience, and making the entire system reliable enough to place in the hands of readers.