An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO, the New York Times)

[00:00] One thing that's really interesting is that our impact and like our business goals are in service of our mission, which is to seek the truth and kind of help people understand the world, not the other way around. And so what it means is that the way that we think about impact is growing a giant subscription business, that business. [00:19] exist to strengthen and inform democracy at a time when people are struggling to understand basic facts and struggling to understand each other and [00:28] That means that impact for us is growing subscribers, but it's also when a deeply reported story triggers an important policy change or a new law. And so when you're a product manager, you're involved again in driving specific metrics like engagement or subscribers, but you're also trying to help stories find their real audience in ways that trigger just this whole different side of mission and purpose-driven impact. And I didn't feel that when I was at [00:59] Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today, my guest is Alex Hardiman. Alex is Chief Product Officer at The New York Times, where she leads teams that build the company's news, cooking, games, audio and advertising products. [01:17] Prior to this role, she was Chief Product Officer at The Atlantic, and before that, she spent two years at Facebook, where she led their news product, amongst other things. As you'll hear in our conversation, Alex has been at the center of the storm so many times, including at Facebook right after the 2016 election, then at The New York Times right as COVID hit.

[01:47] fang tech type company and also how they went about acquiring and integrating wordle i had such a blast doing this interview and i hope that you enjoy it as much as i did with that i bring you alex hardiman today's episode is brought to you by miro creating a product especially one that your users can't live without is damn hard but it's made easier by working closely with your [02:17] quickly. That's where Miro comes in. Miro is an online visual whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours. I actually use Miro to come up with a plan for this very ad. With Miro, you can build out your product strategy by brainstorming with sticky notes, comments, live reactions, voting tools, even a timer to keep your team on track. You can also bring your whole distributed team together around wireframes where anyone can draw their own ideas [02:47] into the Miro board. And with one of Miro's ready-made templates, you can go from discovery and research to product roadmaps to customer journey flows to final mocks. Want to see how I use Miro? Head on over to my Miro board at miro.com slash Lenny to see my most popular podcast episodes, my favorite Miro templates. You can also leave feedback on this podcast episode and more. That's M-I-R-O dot com slash Lenny.

[03:18] This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I've been hearing about AG1 on basically every podcast that I listen to, like Tim Ferriss and Lex Friedman, so I finally gave it a shot earlier this year, and it has quickly become a core part of my morning routine, especially on days that I need to go deep on writing or record a podcast like this. Here's three things that I love about AG1. [03:47] probiotics, and adaptogens. I kind of like to think of it as a little safety net for my nutrition in case I've missed something in my diet. Two, they treat AG1 like a software product. Apparently, they're on their 50-second iteration, and they're constantly evolving it based on the latest science, research studies, and internal testing that they do. And three, it's just one easy thing that I can do every single day to take care of myself. Right now, it's time to reclaim your health and arm your [04:17] nutrition. It's just one scoop and a cup of water every day, and that's it. There's no need for a million different pills and supplements to look out for your health. To make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you a free one-year supply of immune-supporting vitamin B and five free travel packs for your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com slash Lenny. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Lenny. Take ownership over your health and pick up the [04:46] Alex, thank you for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much, Lenny. It's really awesome to be here with you. What's interesting is I think you may be the first product leader on this podcast who doesn't work at a big tech thing sort of startup. And so I'm really excited to just kind of dig in to see what it's like to build product at a company like The New York Times.

[05:09] Thank you. No, no, that sounds awesome. Let's dive right in. Okay. Before we dive in, I'd love to get a little bit of background on just your career. And I'm curious, just like how, what was your career path to becoming the Chief Product Officer at The New York Times? [05:23] Thanks for asking. I mean, I've definitely spent most of my career right at the intersection of journalism and tech. And I think in hindsight, if you were to ask my family, they probably wouldn't be that surprised, even though, you know, for me, I was just kind of kind of rolling with it and sort of following what felt like a really interesting set of problems to solve. [05:53] She actually started one of the first TV stations in the Midwest back in the 50s, when it was still, you know, kind of like pioneering territory. And so for me, one of my first, like the dream for me was to try to find a way to kind of build things in the new space. And that's how I first ended up at the New York Times. And I've had two stints at the New York Times. My first stint was for a decade, from 2006 to 2016. [06:17] And it was during a really interesting time of pretty big transformation. There's so much to talk about within that decade, but I would say there are like two really big things that happened in that moment. The first was. [06:28] really trying to work with the company to shift from being a print first product into a mobile first product. And if you go back to 2006 and you think about it, I mean, the Times had no mobile presence whatsoever. And even like the iPhone 2G and the App Store didn't come out, I think until like 2008. So we just really started investing in small mobile use cases, first on the margins, and then more and more aggressively until we were just leading with mobile and everything that we

[06:58] new revenue opportunities, that type of thing. [07:01] And then the second big thing that kind of marked my journey at The New York Times was the shift to a direct-to-consumer subscription model. This was back in 2011, and there was just a lot of skepticism, including from people at The New York Times, about whether or not people would pay for quality journalism. And we brought in consultants, and they said, you know, maybe... [07:21] over the course of history, you'll get to 1 million subscribers if you're lucky. And so it felt like a really big nervous bet at the time. But thank goodness, it kind of helped make a market for paid journalism that has really helped a lot of news organizations find new ways to support quality coverage. But after a decade, I did what I think a lot of people did, was you sort of look around and you say, like, [07:42] I love what I do, but I would love to go learn how to do product in the context of a product-led, digital-first company. And so that's when I went to Facebook and I left in 2016. And the timing is actually pretty important in terms of my experience at Facebook. Because when I first joined Facebook, I totally left the media space. [08:01] And I was focused on building out a team that was really trying to help micro-sellers in markets like India and other parts of APAC who were coming online for the first time in really low bandwidth areas. [08:12] and just wanted to sell their goods through social commerce, really looking at what WhatsApp and Line and sort of other other regional competitors were doing. And we were focused on business messaging and the interoperability of the Facebook apps from more of a small business perspective. And it was really awesome work. And then the 2016 presidential election happened. I'd only been there for a couple of months. And as has been discussed very widely and reported widely, I mean, it was a wild time where there was just so much reckoning around.

[08:42] misinformation, disinformation, election integrity, platform responsibility. So I went over very quickly to help out on the news front where I led the product and engineering teams. And it was really hard, really interesting work. Did that for a couple of years, decided- Before we move on, I'm curious. You were leading the news product at Facebook during the election during- [09:05] Right after the election. Right after the election, after everyone is coming after Facebook, trying to tear it down. Wow. What year was that? [09:12] So, I joined in early 2017 on that effort. And the election was November 2016. Oh my God. Before you move on, just like what was that like? I don't know how one can describe that experience, but what do you think about when you think back to that time? I think about wartime product management, right? I mean, you're kind of coming in. And I think there was, what I appreciated about the time inside of Facebook was that there was just this [09:38] incredible humility, right, that was needed to really understand and first diagnose what was actually happening on the platform. [09:46] And the approach to content on Facebook historically was very binary. You basically had [09:52] content from friends and family and then you had public content and public content could come from anywhere it could come from a you know reputable news organization or it could come from you know my younger brother posting something and declaring it to be to be true and what we really tried to do kind of very quickly was try to unpack the categories of public content to say that there actually is something that is factually accurate

[10:18] information. And that requires a certain craft from the journalistic trade. And there are ways to kind of really look at what is trusted information, how you kind of make that a little bit more essential and visible to people on the platform, while then reducing things that are at best dubious or at worst, like truly misleading propaganda. It was really fascinating and really hard just because the platform hadn't been built to think about classification of [10:48] And so there was just a ton of work to figure out how to make the platform far safer. [10:53] and far more informative after I would say a pretty intense election cycle. [10:58] Yeah, I feel like you're, I was going to ask you about this later, but I feel like you're drawn towards just crazy things. [11:04] wild and crazy center of the storm roles. And I guess that one you didn't expect necessarily to become that. I imagine the New York Times has a lot of that, but maybe a quick question there. What have you learned about just living in a world of just constant chaos and stress and urgency, endless urgency? I would say if you did ask my family and my husband, he would say that I'm always attracted to kind of the more chaotic problems. I just actually think that that's where [11:34] able to take all of these crazy inputs, trying to create a very structured model to figure out, okay, what is true? Where do we have conviction? Where do we have those questions? What are the most important problems to solve? How do you prioritize? How do you get a team rallied around shared context in one single goal? These are actually the conditions where product managers thrive. And for me, just having been in the journalism space for about

[11:59] two decades now, it's just then or the tech space around news, [12:03] it's just been a constant set of like upheaval and transformation some things within our control some things entirely outside of our control and so i love it i mean there's no better for me like there's nothing else i'd rather be doing than trying to solve these problems in the world at scale but it does you know it does take a certain amount of just like grit and resilience and the [12:25] You know, the ability to really focus on the most important problems in a given moment and also the ability to kind of let other things slide when you have to. But again, I feel like these are core product skills that we look for in terms of leadership and grit and the ability to drive through really, really tough problems that there's no playbook for. Nobody's ever really done before. Yeah, you said you said PMs thrive in this. I think some do. Some are like, no, leave me. I guess that's true. [12:55] which is there's like the eye of Sauron, which is the number one most important thing to the CEO at that time. And my advice is often don't avoid that thing usually, but work maybe to the side of that, because you don't want to work on something that doesn't matter. That's like over in the Shireland. You want to be something that matters, but not maybe the most important thing. I feel like you're the opposite. You're like, where's the eye of Sauron focused? I'm going to go there and build stuff. That's pretty awesome. Awesome. Sometimes I'm sure there are moments too where it'd be nice to chill. [13:25] But I am drawn to those types of problems for sure. This feels like therapy, Lenny. I'm kind of into it. Tell me about your mother. She's wonderful. Okay, great. That's the end of that one. I'll let you finish your career overview. Well, I feel like we're almost at present, which is I found that there was so much incredible experience that I was able to kind of soak up and lean at a place like Facebook.

[13:55] And for me, I really wanted to figure out how to apply that back into organizations that just had more of a kind of classic journalistic mission and purpose. So I went to the Atlantic for a year. They had just been purchased by the Emerson Collective. So it was a really kind of fun moment of just investment and expansion and ambition. We launched their consumer business. And then I came back to The New York Times in late 2019, right before the pandemic. And I've been there since. Your timing is impeccable every time. It really is. [14:25] some research on you before this chat. And when you came back to the New York Times, there's all these stories about how [14:30] how big of a deal it was. Returns to the New York Times. That must have been something coming back because you were there for 10 years, right, initially, and then you came back. What was that experience like just coming back to something like that after being away? [14:43] I felt really lucky. I mean, when I left on the New York Times, when I left the New York Times back in 2016, it was on really, really good terms. Like it almost felt I was like, I'm going on an externship. And I really hope that one day I'll be able to I'll be able to come back and just do my job better. Because I do I do think there's real value in being able to do product in a bunch of different contexts. You're just so much better at pattern recognition, like learning how to solve a diversity of problems, learning to work through things. [15:13] great support when I left, which was really important. And I don't think everyone necessarily has the privilege of that support when they exit a company. So when I came back, it was just a real moment of excitement. And my interview process, I kind of joke with my boss at the time, it did actually feel more like therapy where when you've worked with people for a decade before and you go in, the conversation isn't the normal list of interview questions. It's like, okay, here's what

[15:43] here are the conditions on the ground now. How do you feel about X? How do you feel about Y? You know, do you, are you still passionate about solving this? What else have you learned that's going to make you better? Like it was, it was wonderful. It was like one of the best interview processes because you're talking to a bunch of people who knew what you were like when you were leading as a person at a different point in your career and are kind of pushing you to be better. And so I felt like I got kind of the best chance of a lifetime to come back and try to do my job [16:13] And you've been there three years at this point? Yeah, three years on Halloween. So coming up very soon. Oh, wow. That's three days from now when we're recording. Yeah. When this comes out. I'm curious at a company like New York Times, which is I imagine people think when they think product, they think it's the newspaper. And at Airbnb, we have this challenge where like when we talk to hosts, here's the product, you know, like what what is what is your product? Is it in our homes? [16:43] times and then is it a challenge to help people understand here's what the product team does? It's a really good question. I mean, at the most basic level, I would say that our product is our journalism, which we then marry with a really compelling and useful user experience in a way that helps people [16:58] really act on our journalism so that they can understand and engage with the world around them. And for about 150 years, our product was pretty simple. It was a printed newspaper, which is still very beloved today, but the UX of the newspaper was a predictable structure. It was a very finite amount of news. It was time bound, which I think is kind of a really kind of lovely thing in terms of setting expectation. It also has the packaging of the newspaper, just such serendipity where you

[17:28] opinion, culture, games. And so it's a really kind of great bounded product in and of itself. But about 25 years ago, you know, when we started shifting over to digital, the web, and mobile, the world just fully opened up in a way. And we just saw this really tremendous disaggregation and kind of distribution of our journalism. And so we really tried to meet the moment by building a wide array of products in the news space to extend our reach. So our products then, [17:58] We dabbled with a lot in the VR/AR space early on. And so that was kind of, I would say, the first big extension of our products. When we then pivoted, though, to a subscription model, [18:11] It was a really interesting moment where we actually had to take more of a destination-first approach. And it was almost like the beginning of us rebundling all of what we did, but on our own destination again, and digital destination. Because in order to build a really thriving subscription business, you really need a direct relationship with your customer, as opposed to just relying on platforms to really kind of distribute your coverage. And so that's where we, again, we really started rebundling the breadth and depth of value that people once kind of found in the Sunday newspaper. [18:41] Thank you. [18:41] at digital scale. And now today, our product bundle includes even so much more than news, which I hope we'll talk about a little bit more later. We've really kind of scaled our products in a bunch of different categories where we feel like we can really help people understand and engage with the world. So we have cooking, we have games, we have sports, we have Wirecutter, right, which is a great recreation surface. We're playing with a new audio app all around,

[19:11] And so those are actually like we have now like six fully fledged different product destinations. And the next thing for us to do is to really figure out how to put those together into a bundle that really becomes the essential subscription for any curious English speaking person around the world who really wants to know what's happening and wants to be able to again act and engage and make great decisions based on the products that we build. Got it. So it sounds like the strategy is. [19:39] a subscription bundle where you just keep bundling awesome stuff into this bundle so it's an obvious thing everyone has whether you want cooking or games or the new york times online i think that's right we did this pretty great exercise and and kind of strategy strategy projects over the last year we we kind of took a look and we said you know what is the largest addressable market where the new york times can be truly valuable every single day to a group of people and what we found [20:09] the world, we believe are willing to pay for the type of high quality journalism based products that the New York Times produces. [20:16] in the categories of news, [20:19] gameplay, cooking and recipes, sports, which is why we acquired the athletic, shopping recommendations, and audio. And so in order for us to really capture as much of that audience and really serve them well, there are really three things that we need to do to make that essential subscription work. The first is we absolutely need to have the best news destination in the world.

[20:42] And when you think about the New York Times, we actually have the solar system metaphor where for us, news is the sun in the sense that it's why we exist. It is what gives us kind of our brand heritage and reputation. It's what instills trust. It's also where we just have the largest audience when you think about a funnel kind of for our portfolio. And it's also where we just have the most amount of high quality coverage. [21:12] trusted journalism, great journalists who just have like real expertise, a great product experience that allows you to really like unlock that value, distribution, reach, sort of the other ingredients that you would need for successful products to work. And so we're really focused on, you know, building out beyond news products that really help people engage with their passions and kind of life needs that go beyond news. And then the third thing is what you're describing as the bundle. How do we create a connected family of products that puts all of those things together so that [21:42] you come into the New York Times to news or maybe through Wordle, you know that you're having the best experience within that category, but then you also can quickly experience and discover everything else that we offer. And that's the strategy and the vision. And it's a really... [21:58] I mean, it's a huge ambition. We want to get to 15 million subscribers by 2027, right, just over 9 million today. And I really think we can do it. Awesome. I actually wanted to chat about goals and how you think about [22:10] success as a product team. I imagine the North Star metric is what you just said, which is subscribers. And if that's true, what other goals do you have across teams? And

[22:20] And maybe even further, I'm packing a lot of questions into one question, but I'm curious just like how your product team looks like how many PMs do you have? Roughly, how do you structure the teams? And then roughly, what kind of goals do they all have to try and imagine the product team at the New York Times? Let's start with structure. So. [22:37] First, I love this question talking about my team because I love hyping them. They're amazing. And our success is truly like only as good as our people. [22:46] And it is so true. And so for us, when we think about our org structure, the way to set that up so that our people can really do their best work is that we have two axes. We have functions and then we have missions. And so I oversee two functions, which is the functions of product and design. [23:07] So it's pretty, it's kind of normal of what you would find in terms of functional responsibilities. We focus on standards of craft and excellence, career growth, like career frameworks, equitable promotion processes, community of practices, skill development, all of that. But missions is kind of where a lot of the work happens. So these are cross-functional teams, very similar to what we had at a place like Facebook. And these cross-functional teams are led by usually a general manager, a product leader, or an engineering leader. [23:36] and they're all pursuing the same high-level goals and objectives. [23:40] And cross-functional missions at the Times, again, include a lot of the same skill sets that you would find at a tech company. PMs, engineers, designers, data scientists, researchers, product marketers. But the big difference is we also have editors if it's a product space that directly shapes our journalism. And I can talk more about that because it's a pretty interesting differentiating factor. Yeah, that's super interesting. So those are journalists within cross-functional product teams. Exactly. But we have three different types of missions.

[24:10] We have consumer missions, we have monetization missions, and we have platform missions. So editors are embedded within consumer missions. And those are the missions that I oversee, where we're focused on creating really great products, again, in categories like news, cooking, games, audio, et cetera. And so that is where having editors involved, particularly editors who are very product-minded, it kind of brings in the best of their expertise and marries it with a lot of the normal signal [24:40] insights when you're trying to make sure that you understand a consumer problem and that you're really finding the best creative solution for it. [24:47] Hmm. [24:48] It is really cool. It's one of the, I think, most gratifying parts of working at a news organization like The Times. But if you work on a different mission, like a monetization mission, we have two really big ones. One is subscriber growth. The other one that's also really important is digital advertising. And so they really, they build centralized commercial products that we can then scale across all of the products in our bundle. So the subscriber growth team, for instance, they look at making sure that we have, you know, really great account. [25:18] and ID management for subscribers. If you're buying a subscription through games or through news, or if you're on the digital advertising team, you know, you're trying to make sure that we have a first party data program that's really privacy safe, that works as well in cooking as it does, you know, in the new space. And then there's a totally, totally different third bucket of mission that we have, which is all of our platform teams. And so this is everything from, you know,

[25:43] monetization platforms like our commerce engine, which is so important, right? Because we're a subscription business to data platforms where you might have like our ML platform or experimentation tooling to just basic kind of infrastructure. And those are shared across the bundle, which just really helps make it so much easier, more efficient for really engineers to shoot code and do their best work. So a lot of this actually, I think probably is pretty familiar to how you [26:13] Minus the editors. Awesome. On that infra piece, that reminds me of something I definitely wanted to talk about, which is [26:20] Something New York Times is really known for is the visualizations and these kind of immersive stories that you all put out. [26:26] And I'm so curious just how that gets done. I feel like if I was at a... [26:31] on a product team at a regular, like a big tech fan company, you'd be like, "Shit, all these ad hoc things they got to do for all these stories, such a pain in the butt." That's so important to the New York Times and the online experience. So I'm curious, just like, what is it like to build these things, say the election, [26:46] widgets and all that stuff. And then I was just reading a story about climate change and it's this [26:52] really beautiful immersive story of just what is happening with the world so there's like a bunch of questions there but i guess roughly just how does that how does that get done [27:01] something like that well first thanks for saying that i really appreciate it i do think there's something really special about some of the ways that we marry kind of the journalism and the presentation i want to start just by giving credit where credits do which is i think some of the most interesting and inventive and compelling formats they actually do start off as one-off experiments that are spun up in the newsroom by embedded teams that we have within graphics visual journalism

[27:31] data scientists, designers, literally all hunkered down together, focusing on how to make one story come to life in the best possible way. Who has the idea usually? Is it like the journalists working on that? They're like, hey, I think we should make some really great. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's I mean, we have a newsroom of over 2000 people. And so. [27:49] You basically have people who have been, you know, experts on certain beats like climate, for instance, for decades. And so they're the ones who they have kind of the nugget of the idea. They start to do reporting and then they really pull in others like from visuals, from interactives to say, like, how can I really make sure that I can tell this story with as much impact and weight as possible? And that's where the magic starts to happen when you kind of pull in all of those other skill sets together to help dream up how that story might be told. [28:19] So they're like, Alex, we need one of these for our story. [28:22] Can you get us on the list? How does that process work? No, no. So these are teams that are really autonomous in the newsroom. So for one-off, truly special features, I'll give you an example of one that I found to be particularly powerful. I don't know if you read Jodi Kantor, who is one of our really incredible investigative reporter. You might know for some of her work that she did around Me Too and Harvey Weinstein in that investigation. Yeah. [28:48] She recently did a piece on how employers are tracking [28:51] and monitoring remote workers with tools like productivity scores. [28:55] And the story itself was designed to show a person's own productivity score in the moment as they read the article. Oh, shit. And it was super visceral, really creepy in the most effective way. And that's like in my mind, like that's the type of magical experience that only happens when you actually have dedicated designers, engineers and others who can like really sit down with a reporter and say, like, let's let's figure out how to shape that story in the most magical way.

[29:25] Thank you. [29:25] you don't have time to mess with roadmaps. And so we really have teams who are kind of freed up from some of the normal processes around that. So they can really just focus on on storytelling for really big stories and pieces. But [29:39] On top of that, what we do have is a storytelling product team. [29:43] And what they do is they really kind of take notice of things that are starting to work in more of the experimental phase, some of these one offs. And then they work closely with editors to test and find product market fit for new formats that can actually scale across many parts of the report. So that over time, you know, when you open the app, the app is more accessible, more engaging because we still have the traditional story based article. [30:13] into visuals, into live. I mean, if you can look at live, we've kind of broken out of the tyranny of the article in many ways, where you have live reporter updates that are the size of length of tweets, right? People filing from the ground, you know, in Ukraine, trying to [30:27] give you a sense of what's happening in a very immediate and real way. And that's where we do have teams, product teams, who have to think in two modes. First, they have to be able to think in the moment with editors, where you might not always have all the right data at your fingertips, and you just have to make a call. Like, what is the best experience to tell this story in a really truthful, accurate, accessible way? And then the other mode is when they're not shipping at the speed of news. They're trying to build end-to-end systems so that we're building the tooling to

[30:57] stories at the same time as the consumer experience, which is a totally different mode of system-level thinking. And it's a very cool space. And that product team is, they're pulling off some pretty incredible work because they can't operate in those two modes. It's like in the moment, in the moment of the story, but also trying to build the systems that allow you to kind of reshape the composition of storytelling formats that we have across our products over time. That is super cool. What [31:27] are using the platform and building on something that already exists versus like a one-off experiment, would you say roughly? The majority are on our platforms, hands down. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. And then just to understand, so you said Jody was the journalist that you mentioned. So does she has like a product team dedicated to her work? No. What we have is we have a centralized interactive news team, graphics team, data journalism team. And so they, those [31:57] really big stories to kind of help bring their story to life. I see. So do they have to come to this team and be like, hey, I'd love your time? Like, how does that prioritization? Because I imagine a lot of journalists are coming to them like, hey, my story is going to be awesome. We need you. [32:12] You know what, to be totally honest, I'm not involved. So somehow it works. It just ends. That's a great leadership sign. Like it just works. You set it up and it's working. So that's great. And the newsroom has set it up. And something that is just again very interesting about the way that

[32:31] we are set up is that we have our newsroom and then we have our business side and the business side is where you have all of the product teams and there is intense collaboration between the two but they do have different leadership structures because that's how we maintain the independence of of our coverage i mean we have our product teams sit within the newsroom if they're focused on storytelling live anything related to the coverage the only distinction really that i'm i think i'm trying to make is that [32:59] Product teams really help stories [33:02] find their widest audience and be as engaging and as impactful as can be. But product teams don't have any influence over the selection of the stories. That is what the newsroom kind of retains as editorial. Okay. So you mentioned Wordle and you all acquired Wordle recently. And I'm just curious what that was all like. I imagine it's still being integrated. Were you involved in the exploration and purchase process? And what went on there? [33:32] I'll first just kind of bring you behind the scenes on how the deal came to be, and then we can talk a little bit more about what the integration process is like. Yeah, that sounds great. So I first heard about Wordle in early January because a New York Times reporter, Daniel Victor, actually wrote a piece about Josh Wordle. [33:48] who's a software engineer in Brooklyn and how he had created the game really is like this gesture of love for his partner. And I certainly wasn't the only person to read that column, like everyone inside The New York Times perked up. And I remember reaching out to Jonathan Knight, who's the general manager of games, who's on my team. He'd already taken notice well before the piece was published, and he had already reached out to Josh to see if he would be interested in having games join our portfolio.

[34:18] Wordle immediately because if you've played it, you know, it shares a lot of the DNA of other really successful word games that we have at the New York Times, like Spelling Bee or the Crossword Mini. I mean, if anything, Josh was really, you know, forthright that he created it because he was inspired by those games. And then in the context of just our subscription strategy games is such an important category for us. We really see games and demand for games is this, [34:44] basically like it's like a counterpoint to the news it gives people a chance to actually take a break it's fun it doesn't feel like empty calories it's really time well spent and we were just thinking of wordle as [34:56] such a wonderful addition to our games franchise to really give people more reasons to feel like they had a relationship with the New York Times every day. [35:05] So the whole thesis of the acquisition just made so much sense. And our team just very quickly engaged with Josh. And the acquisition talks were incredibly fast. I mean, the whole thing took place in a matter of weeks, which is way faster than any other acquisition I've been a part of. It was a very amicable process. And we were just super delighted to bring Wordle on board, but it happened in record speed. Wow. Yeah, it felt fast from the outside too. Like it became a huge deal and then, okay, New York Times buys them. That's impressive. [35:35] acquired The Athletic. How often are you acquiring companies? We also acquired The Athletic, and that was back in around the same time. I think for now, we feel like we actually have all of the major categories to make the essential subscription work. For us to get to 15 million subscribers, I really feel like

[35:54] news, sports, games, cooking, audio and shopping, like those, those are the categories. And we just have to make them the best possible versions of themselves, those products, so that we can really provide just tremendous value every day to people. So that doesn't mean that we won't make some other acquisitions. If anyone has the next Wordle, would absolutely love to hear about it. But I do think there's also, you know, a real lesson for a lot of companies, not only about when you acquire, like, [36:24] to create an acquisition. And we learned a lot just around Wordle in terms of kind of like what that process is like. And I just wanna say I'm really, [36:32] proud of how thoughtful and consider our games team was about the integration process because we're at all players feel such connection to the game and we really wanted to make sure not to interfere with the core magic of the experience i mean if you are you [36:46] an eight-year-old kid or an 88-year-old adult. There's real resonance with Wordle and people just have such a connection to it and we really wanted to make sure we didn't mess it up. And so, if you want to, like, do you want to go a little bit deeper just to tell me what that was like? Because we definitely learned a lot. So, [37:04] When we acquired Wordle, it was a simple web game with no back end. So that meant that people's stats and streaks, which was, you know, like that was the value in terms of like social currency that people were sharing after playing. Those stats and streaks were stored in local browsers. And it was really important for us, you know, to make sure that the game board experience in the core loop of the game remained unchanged. But we also found that because everything was stored locally and people care so much about their stats and streaks,

[37:32] If they got a new iPhone, if they switched browsers, all of a sudden they lost all of that history that they had with the game. So what we decided to do was undertake a project to connect Wordle to a New York Times account. [37:46] which was free because Wordle is a free game, just so that it knows who you are and so that your stats and streaks can be protected. And then we could also bring Wordle to more surfaces because we wanted, you know, if you go to the homepage of the news app or if you go to the games app, we wanted to make it easier to find because people would come for spelling bee or crosswords and they also wanted their Wordle. And it was a pretty big effort to rewrite Wordle in our tech stack, give people the ability to store their stats and streaks, [38:16] And we just tried to do it in a thoughtful way where we didn't break anything. The experience was hopefully seamless. And that the only thing you would notice that's changed is that the New York Times knows enough about who you are so that your stats carry over and you can you can play anywhere. [38:33] But that doesn't mean that there aren't some surprises along the way. And especially when you're doing back end work. We had this pretty crazy moment a couple of months ago, right when the Supreme Court's draft ruling on Roe v. Wade leaked. And an engineer on the GAINS team happened to notice that the Wordle solution the next day was Fetus, which is just an extraordinarily bad coincidence because the word had been loaded into the game by the game founder months beforehand.

[39:03] it was so important for us that we didn't have this lovely diversion from the news feel almost like it was commentary on a very contentious story that was happening. And so I don't know if you caught wind of that, but you'd think that you could easily change the word on the backend, but because we were midstream on the migration process and some users were on the original world game, others had migrated to the new version, it meant that we actually couldn't [39:33] for some people. And so this is a moment where we just, you know, had to come out and really kind of tell the world, we're mid integration. We're really not trying to communicate more than we're being a fun, you know, diversion from the news. Here's what happened and why. [39:50] everyone understood like if it's you know this is where like coming out being really transparent about the facts and in some cases just exposing more about the product development process really helps [40:00] demystify some of the rumors that people might otherwise think. It was one of those like, oh, man, couldn't have imagined that that type of terrible coincidence would happen. But you just have to be prepared for everything, even when you're integrating, which should just be a fun game. Yeah. And imagine no matter what you tell people, some folks are just not going to believe a very simple explanation of what was going on. [40:23] It's true. All you can do is be as honest and transparent. And what I will say is a lot of people still think we try to make Wordle harder. We don't. I promise. It's not a thing. Yeah, it's not like the crossword puzzle where it gets harder every day of the week. No, no, it's really, it's not.

[40:53] you've likely been asked about your SOC 2 compliance. [40:57] SOC [redacted address] to prove your company is taking proper security measures to protect customer data and builds trust with customers and partners, especially those with serious security requirements. Also, if you want to sell to the enterprise, proving security is essential. SOC 2 can either open the door for bigger and better deals or it can put your business on hold. If you don't have a SOC 2, there's a good chance you won't even get a seat at the table. But getting a SOC 2 report can be a huge burden, especially for startups. [41:27] time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Enter Vanta. Over 3,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC2. Vanta can get you ready for security audits in weeks instead of months, less than a third of the time that it usually takes. For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Just go to vanta.com [41:57] discount. Get started today. [42:00] Are there any other stories that come to mind that reflect just how interesting/ [42:07] wild it is to work at the New York Times as a product leader? I mean, if we sort of go back to when I started at the New York Times, because I started in late 2019, it was just right before the pandemic. And so it was pretty wild to come back to the company and to get sort of shifted into this moment of needing to build products that really were trying to help people through the moment at a time when our journalists were covering the story,

[42:37] It was COVID 24-7 in terms of work and life. And for me, I remember, you know, in the earliest days when we were first really reporting on COVID and kind of learning about it, we had reporters on the ground in Wuhan even before we knew how COVID was transmitted. And then when the world shut down for the times, we went fully remote in March 2020. And I remember the day so well because it was the beginning of spring break. Of course, all plans were canceled. My kids, I had no idea what to do with them. [43:07] put them in a car, drove to go see some friends in Vermont, and we decided we were going to do like a kid daycare pool share, just to kind of figure out how to keep working with someone overseeing the kids. And we got there late at night, and I literally just went into a [43:22] a laundry closet and I didn't emerge for two weeks because my slack was blowing up about all of the work that we needed to do to make our products as useful as possible. The kids were being crazy and we just had to get to work. And what was really stunning about this moment in time was that as people were getting sick and we were reporting about all of the trends that we were seeing, we saw that other institutions, especially the government, were not actually stepping [43:52] And so, [43:53] This is like a product leader is a real wartime moment where [43:57] You just need to blow up roadmaps, share context with everyone and say, OK, everyone, like we have a totally different mandate than what we did a couple of weeks ago. Given the needs and the world and like the mission of The New York Times and our purpose, which is to help people access information to make informed decision about their lives. We're going to do a whole bunch of new things. We're going to build a comprehensive public data set of cases. Nobody else is doing it. So we really just started kind of scraping and pulling this together.

[44:27] We pulled a bunch of engineers from other teams to go help build out that database. We launched entirely new formats and data tools to make our journalism a lot more easier to follow. You know, things like, you know, tools to be able to look up. [44:40] uh infection rates and eventually vaccination rates down at your like local zip code level we made our most important covid coverage free to everybody it was really important that if it was something related to public safety we didn't put it behind a paywall our mission is to to do better than that and so we really made sure that we had that information available to everyone we also just found that for journalists who hadn't actually been in wuhan they just needed tips to on [45:10] And it was just one of those really interesting moments where everything felt so crazy in this moment of crisis. But building purposeful products that made a really difficult moment feel [45:24] not only possible but promising, [45:26] was one of the most unifying moments, I would say, for our teams. Because even though people were working so hard and like balancing work life and personal life, no one doubted for a second that the work they were doing was of greater good for the world. And there's a real privilege in being able to kind of spend your time doing those things. But it's one of the biggest news stories of our lifetime. And to be at the forefront of that, I think for all of us was a pretty incredible

[45:56] So people talk about having impact and driving impact. And it's usually like move this metric some percentage. But that is some incredible impact, helping people... [46:08] avoid COVID, avoid dying, keeping their family safe. It's got to be some of the most fulfilling work that you and your team has done. And ideally, it wouldn't have happened, but it was also probably incredibly fulfilling. Thank you for saying that. I mean, one of the most validating things [46:24] metrics that we did look at was we realized that at the height of the pandemic, when there's just so much confusion about literally what to do, like how to live each day, in March 2020, we saw that half of the country came to the New York Times. And so there's something again, that is just so powerful about very straightforward data journalism, deep reporting, service guidance on like how to make a mask if you don't have one, just like all of these basics. And just seeing the whole [46:54] pivot from their normal job into this mode was pretty incredible. And the world responded, which was really validating too. [47:02] I imagine there's also a bit of burnout that happens working where it kind of goes on and on and on. You're like, oh, my God, when is this going to slow down? How do you help people avoid burnout? How do you catch burnout as a leader on a product team? This is one of the most honestly hard and important topics that I think we're always still grappling with. I mean, as a company, we really did try to lead originally with giving people more time off, more support with like financial support and other assistance with.

[47:32] daycare, health benefits, all of the basics. I think now what we're really trying to do beyond that is [47:41] be so much more focused on the things that we need to do and all of the things that we're really happy to stop doing. Because part of I think context switching is one of the things that is really, really difficult. It's hard to context switch in your job. It's really hard to context switch across your job in your life. There are a lot of things that we, you know, as a company can't necessarily control in people's lives. But within the job, the places where we can be so much more focused and thoughtful about a small number of important things [48:11] in time, that's really the place where we're really trying to come in and be as [48:16] empathetic and is honest about what we need to do and what we don't need to do. So a lot of it really comes down to, I think, making hard calls. We're not always perfect at it. You know, I'm sure that there are things that we could be more, more diligent about, but I would say over on balance, [48:31] We've seen a lot of people stay at the company because they're figuring out they work remotely. Maybe they come back to the office, they're figuring out how to live their life in a very different way from a couple of years ago. And we're really here to try to meet them and make that as possible as possible. We need incredible people across a bunch of different skill sets. [48:54] a bunch of different backgrounds. And the only way to do that is to really be, you know, very kind of flexible and accommodating in terms of trying to meet people where they are in their lives.

[49:03] But it's tricky. There is no perfect answer for this, but we're really trying because the success of the company only works when we have people who feel valued and like they can do their best work and live really rich lives on top of that. And I think we're all still figuring out what that looks like now that we're starting to come out of the official pandemic and really just learning how to live with COVID. Right. Absolutely. [49:27] Just a couple more questions before we get to a very exciting lightning round. Where's the New York Times in the next five, 10 years as a product, specifically different from other folks? And then broadly, I don't know if you have any insights or opinions on just what is the future of news? Do share. I think the New York Times is in a pretty unique spot compared to other news organizations right now. And I have tremendous respect for other high quality organizations like the Journal and the Post and the FT and the Guardian. They're just doing such incredible work. But when I go back to [49:57] to, [49:57] what differentiates us. It's this idea of becoming an essential subscription that really helps people. It meets their most important news and life needs across all of the categories that we've been talking about, like news, games, audio cooking, etc. And up until I would say this year, we were [50:15] more of a news brand with a collection of adjacent lifestyle products. But with the acquisition of Wordle and The Athletic, along with just the continued growth of Cooking and Wirecutter and some of our other offerings, I really do think that has transformed us into a brand capable of really being that essential subscription that helps every single day people with news and life needs in a way that doesn't just associate the New York Times with one category.

[50:45] you are starting with a great breaking news story. And then you skip over to the latest coverage in China. And then you decide that you want to take a small break to play Spelling Bee. And then you want to plan a Korean dinner party with Eric Kim, who I don't know if you know, has some of the best Korean recipes. He's amazing. And then you're like, wow, I need a rice cooker to be able to make that recipe. So I need to go get the best recommendation from Wirecutter. I just did exactly that, [51:15] I would love to go watch the Britney Spears documentary, which is also kind of part of the New York Times franchise, which is amazing. Or I want to go, you know, listen to Kevin Roos and Casey Newton's Hard Fork podcast, which is wildly fun and just launched a couple of weeks ago, if you haven't heard that. So this is, I think, like the future for us and being a connected family of products where we can meet so many different needs that are first anchored in news, but then stretched into other facets of your lives. [51:45] see other news organizations really operating at that scale and that ambition. And that's the future for us. We really just think that the New York Times can mean so much more to so many more people. And so we're a journalism company, but we're building just tremendous software. And so the product ambitions are only getting bigger and bigger. And that's why I feel like I've got the luckiest job in the world right now. That is a compelling vision. I feel like [52:13] you can build your own metaverse in the New York Times where you just spend all your days inside the New York Times suite of products. Can I say though, there is a big difference. I think that for us, our software actually helps people with real world outcomes in a very different way. We basically help you get access to information, decide how you're going to go to the ballot box. Right? We give you information to go cook. There's something that I think is even more

[52:43] It is very different from what the metaverse is doing, but that's where we feel like we can drive as much impact as possible. You can have your own competing metaverse. Here's a quick Wirecutter suggest idea for you while we're chatting. I feel like Wirecutter, I use it all the time. Everything I buy is based on Wirecutter recommendations. But I feel like there's an opportunity for design oriented version of Wirecutter. I don't know if anyone's thinking about that. [53:05] Tell me more. Just wire cutters like functional stuff. It's like, here's the best. I don't know, rice cooker. But like, what's like the cutest, but also the best? What's like the cross section of looks good? [53:16] in my house and is the best. I'll be okay not the best best if it looks nicer. So like a design lens to wirecutter. So like if it's wirecutter meets high taste basically. I like that. I like that. Okay. [53:31] I think there's a market there. I'll definitely bring that back to the team. Okay, there you go. There's one. Yeah. There's just one other whole theme. And I don't know if you want to chat through it, which is what are some of the kind of similarities and differences between product management in news organizations? I mean, totally up to you. Yeah. Yeah. If that's something that you'd be interested in talking through. Absolutely. I'm going to just focus [54:01] how we work at the New York Times. And we talked a little bit about working with journalism and there's some really interesting differences. And the second is just on the kind of the idea of impact. And I think how the definition and the understanding of impact can be can be pretty different.

[54:16] So first, just on the idea of how we work, I mean, there are a lot of similarities. I would say that product managers at the Times and at tech companies, they have a lot of the same skills. Like we look for a great product sense, great execution, great leadership and drive. Any good PM needs to know their industry, their customers, their market, their business, etc. [54:46] go over to tech companies. And I think that that's wonderful. But a key difference of when you're a product manager working at the New York Times is that you work across the full stack of the product, meaning we own our journalism and our content, we own our distribution, and we own our products. And that's really different from working at a big tech platform. Like when I was at Facebook, we controlled the software and the distribution, but we didn't control the content, right? We had [55:16] passing through, was it high quality content, low quality content? And it just led to, again, a lot of challenges that we already talked about. [55:23] And so at the times when I think about how our best products are born, [55:27] That's when you bring journalism and product levers together. And that means that PMs at the Times really need to understand the blend of art and science. And so they really need to value expert editorial judgment as they're also looking at individual KPIs, customer research and insights, etc.

[55:48] An interesting example, as I was trying to think about what would feel really different doing product at the times compared to, say, Facebook, is like, let's say you're at the product team and you're working on the home screen. [55:59] We have [56:01] always start with expert editorial judgment to curate the most important and interesting stories. But on top of that, we're training algorithms on specific data sets like editorial importance scores that actually come from our journalists. And what that allows us to do is actually scale editorial judgment to a large group of readers. And those algorithms, what I think is just like really great is they're trained on editorial signal. [56:28] And then they can still work towards driving towards outcomes like reach, engagement, conversion, et cetera. And that's just like such a different way of thinking. Like when I was at Facebook and we were focused on news ranking and feed, all we could do was train. [56:43] pieces of information based on an engagement outcome, we couldn't actually train it based on the quality of that piece of information itself. And so at the times you get all you have like 2000 plus journalists, and you're actually trying to structure their expertise, [56:57] into things that can actually translate into really great algorithmic decisioning. And that's just so different. No one else is really doing something in that space. So product managers are becoming very editorially minded, and we're also getting editors to become more product minded. And I just think the how we work there is so different and so unique. It's just a very, pretty fascinating part of, I think, how this sausage is made, if that makes sense. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I think that's a really important topic of just how it's different

[57:27] trying something like the New York Times as a place to work. Anything else that you want to share before we ramp up? - I think the only other thing that I have kind of come to learn when you're doing product management at a news organization compared to a place like Facebook is just how different the definition of impact can be. [57:48] When I was at Facebook, we were incredibly focused on scale, engagement, and revenue, which is very appropriate. At a company like the New York Times, we also have a huge ambition to grow our subscriber base. But one thing that's really interesting is that our impact and our business goals are in service of our mission, which is to seek the truth and help people understand the world, not the other way around. [58:18] is growing a giant subscription business. That business... [58:23] exist to strengthen and inform democracy at a time when people are struggling to understand basic facts and struggling to understand each other. And that means that impact for us is growing subscribers, but it's also when a deeply reported story triggers an important policy change or a new law. And so when you're a product manager, you're involved again in driving specific metrics [58:53] in ways that trigger just this whole different side of mission and purpose-driven impact. And I didn't feel that when I was at a place like Facebook, but at the times, I think it just gives kind of product managers a bit of a broader kind of aperture in the ways that they think about the relationship between business goals and mission and impact goals. And it's pretty cool.

[59:13] It does feel like it would be hard to find more meaningful, impactful work. And so that really resonates. Oh, thanks. There's so many other important purposeful products and problems out there to solve in the world. We've talked about this, Lenny, but... [59:27] I just think that product managers and product thinking in so many contexts inside and outside of tech has never been more important in the world than right now. And so we need product managers everywhere, like diagnosing key problems and issues, coming up with radically novel solutions like this is the moment. And so it's really great to have your podcast and so many other resources out there to kind of help new and other PMs just kind of do their best craft. So thank you for having all of us on here. [59:57] Well, we've reached our very exciting lightning round where I'm just going to ask you, I have six questions. I'll get through them pretty quick. And whatever comes to mind, fire off. We'll go through it fast and fun. Sound good? Great. Okay. What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people? I love Stripe Press. And so I think a lot of the books that they have are just such good references, like Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook. [1:00:27] Will Larson's an elegant puzzle and then some of the more topical ones like revolt of the public I just find that they're evergreen in terms of their utility anyone can find value in them and I just love the craft of the books themselves I mean they are like amazing products in terms of the content in the forum so that those are like in the in the product context and work context those are those are hands down I would say that the place is where I go first but I do think I I know this

[1:00:57] books, and my own reading time and recommendations [1:01:01] with fiction. I just think it's actually like sometimes some of the best ideas and inspiration come when you go like one or two steps away from kind of the core books that kind of are related to your practice. And so right now I'm actually rereading Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. It's just so beautiful and so lyrical and it sort of gets at more components of the human soul that I know it sounds kind of crazy, but those are I find like those are little sparks of ideas that [1:01:31] and particularly news products where they're so creative in the way that they tell stories. And so I always try to give people one pragmatic recommendation and then one slightly more field recommendation over in the world of fiction. And so if you haven't read Giovanni's Room, it is incredible and devastating, and I absolutely recommend it. Wow. I feel like I just keep buying books after doing these podcasts. There's so many books I've got to read. [1:02:01] Imagine someone leading product, the New York Times would recommend something product, tactical, and then just like a beautiful piece of fiction. So I'm the cliche. I love it. No, no, no. I wouldn't put it that way. Okay. What's a favorite other podcast that you like to listen to? You mentioned one already. Is that the one? Everyone should listen to Hard Fork. It's great. But I just think the daily continues to be. And again, I know it sort of sounds self-serving, but being able to just listen to Michael Barbaro and Sabrina Tabardaisi once a day.

[1:02:31] just like bring in journalists to talk and unpack a meaningful story. It's so interesting. [1:02:36] visceral. And I just find it to be one of the daily miracles that the New York Times is able to produce. Yeah, it's wild. I can't imagine a daily thing like that doing that. Impressive. What's a recent favorite movie or TV show that you've seen that you really enjoyed? I am pretty old school. I am actually rewatching The Wire for the third time. Wow, that's a lot of time commitment. It is. And I have very little time. But every five years, [1:03:06] the characters, the storylines. It's just one of the best made series for television efforts, a work of art. And so I am that person. That is another cliche who is rewatching The Wire right now. What's your favorite season? [1:03:18] I would probably say season three, but [1:03:22] I mean, when Stringer Bell passes away, it's just, I mean, it's the culmination of just so much. I probably shouldn't say that for anyone who hasn't seen The Wire. Oh, that's like the worst thing ever. Spoiler alert in reverse. Spoiler alert. I'm so sorry. But that's not the character name. That's the actor, right? Right? Is that? No, no, I really just totally spoiled that. Okay, that's cool. So you haven't seen it at this point? It's over. You lost. Oh, oh boy. How awful. That's like a cardinal sin. [1:03:52] the school system is also just the actors are incredible. I mean, it's some of the best acting that I think has existed over the last couple of decades. So again, if you haven't seen it, please do yourself a favor and watch it. It's worth every episode. Would you agree season two is the worst? You know, I thought that until I rewatched it and I actually came around and it's not at the top of my list, but there's more to it than I think I originally gave it credit for.

[1:04:22] Okay, great. What are like four to five SaaS products that your company uses most that you find really useful? [1:04:29] Probably pretty classic. We use G Suite, Slack, Figma, Mode, GitHub. Those are the ones that I think just get hands down the most amount of usage across our teams. And the fourth one was Mode? Yeah. Is there any interesting new recent one that's like top of mind while we're on this topic? Not really. Okay. Great. [1:04:51] The winners keep winning, huh? These products. If it's not, if it works, yeah. Yeah. If anything, it's like when you don't talk about the SaaS products you use, I feel like that's more of a success because it's just, it works behind the scenes. It blends in and it just makes everyone so much more productive. Yeah. I imagine all these companies have the New York Times logo on their site of people using that. Maybe. That'd be a big deal when you guys adopt a product. Final question, [1:05:21] thought leader and thinker? - This is a hard question, but I would say one of the people who I find to just be [1:05:27] a really tremendous product thinker, leader, and ally for women is Fiji Simo. I was lucky enough to work with her and for her when I was at Facebook. And just watching the way that she, what she did with Facebook, what she then is doing at Instacart, and the way that she really just helps so many other women in the field figure out, you know, how to be better at their craft, how to have more opportunity. It's, I don't know how she has as many hours in her day, but she's, she's pretty

[1:05:57] I would love to give a shout out to her. Awesome. I will try to get her on this podcast. [1:06:03] Oh, I mean, that would be amazing. All right. She's really good. I need to do. Awesome. Good recommendation. Alex, this was amazing. I learned so much. This is such a fun conversation. Thank you again for doing this. Two last questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more? Maybe think about working at The New York Times and otherwise, how can listeners be useful to you? Thanks. You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, all the usual channels. I would love to hear from anyone and would be delighted to also talk about what it's like to do product at The Times. [1:06:33] really useful is what is the one feature that would make the New York Times more essential and more valuable to you in your daily life? I would love to hear from people on that front. All right. I shared mine, a design oriented wire cutter. I will be looking for that. [1:06:49] Awesome. Alex, thank you again so much for doing this. Thank you so much, Lenny. This was really fun.