Andrew Phelps

Background

About Andrew Phelps

My career has always braided technology and storytelling: I was the journalist who knew how to code, the product manager who invented new kinds of storytelling, the digital agitator who found himself in transformational moments. In eleventh grade I dropped out of high school to focus on my growing business: building PC’s and designing websites for my mom’s friends. My parents eventually convinced me to go to community college. That’s where I discovered the student paper and my love of journalism. As I moved through my career, I was doing more and more "digital strategy" and "product management" before anyone called it that. At The New York Times, I co-authored the “Innovation Report,” an internal account of the newsroom’s digital shortcomings that shook the industry after it was leaked to BuzzFeed. My team went on to lead the reinvention of The Times’s core mobile news experience and built our strategy for push notifications. The analyst Ken Doctor said we “redefined Page One for the digital era.” We built “one-sentence stories” for Apple Watch and conversational chat bots (way before it was cool). At Apple, I was head of product for Apple News, with 100 million monthly users. We partnered with more than 60 publishers to launch Apple News+. At The Atlantic, I worked with newsroom leaders to align editorial and product strategy. We conceived of the beloved mobile app, directed the digital redesign, and led the product team through extraordinary growth (400k new digital subscribers in about one year). In 2022, I launched my business (again). I’ve worked with CNN, NPR, The Washington Post, Recurrent Media, The Trevor Project, The Aspen Institute, and individual coaching clients, among others. One of my superpowers is the ability to drop into a complex organization and absorb the place quickly: the bottlenecks, the politics, the broken parts. I speak newsroom, technology, design, and “business side.” I can help turn a blank whiteboard into a strategy, a strategy into a story, a story into a movement. Transformation is hard. If you are charting these waters, let me help you navigate. Feel free to DM me to book time on my calendar.