Nov 13, 2022 · 1h 7m · lennys-podcast
An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO, the New York Times)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Alex Hardiman, Chief Product Officer at The New York Times, breaks down the organization's product strategy, contrasting civic-minded publishing with Big Tech, navigating high-stakes crises, and constructing an interconnected subscription bundle to reach 15 million subscribers.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 22.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 3.4 Guest teaching 4.2 Guest disagreement 0.1 Lenny pushing back 0.2
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 52:10 Rejecting the NYT Metaverse Framing
Alex pushes back on Lenny's metaverse comparison, arguing that NYT software is distinctly designed to drive real-world actions like voting and cooking rather than escaping into virtual environments.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 12:44 Challenging the 'All PMs Crave Chaos' PremiseLenny gently challenges Alex's assertion that product managers naturally thrive in chaos, contrasting her instinct to run toward the 'Eye of Sauron' with PMs who prefer calm execution.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 55:40 Algorithms Trained on Editorial Signal vs. Pure EngagementAlex educates Lenny on how NYT trains ranking algorithms on editorial importance scores rather than pure engagement metrics, contrasting full-stack publisher PMing with big tech feed ranking.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 52:55 Pitching the Design-Forward WirecutterLenny steps into product visionary mode by identifying an unmet market niche and pitching a high-taste, design-conscious variant of Wirecutter.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Career Beginnings: Journalism Heritage to Mobile Pivot | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Lenny opens by noting Alex's unique background as a non-FANG guest, prompting an overview of her career. Alex recounts her journalism family roots and her pivotal initial decade transforming The New York Times from print to mobile and paid subscriptions. | |
| Leading Facebook News in the 2016 Aftermath | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Alex discusses wartime product management at Facebook after the 2016 election, addressing platform responsibility and classifying reputable information. Lenny pushes on her appetite for high-intensity, chaotic environments with his 'Eye of Sauron' metaphor. | |
| Returning to The New York Times in 2019 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Lenny asks about the feeling of returning to The New York Times in 2019 after stints at Facebook and The Atlantic. Alex describes the interview process as a reflective, leadership-focused conversation with former colleagues. | |
| Defining Product Evolution: From Print to Digital Bundle | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Lenny compares defining product at Airbnb with The New York Times. Alex educates him on how journalism itself is the product, explaining the evolution from print UX to digital disaggregation and destination rebundling. | |
| The Solar System Strategy and 15 Million Subscribers | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Alex outlines the strategy to reach 15 million subscribers by 2027 using a solar system metaphor, where core news acts as the central sun giving gravity to satellite lifestyle products. | |
| Product Org Structure: Functions, Missions, and Editors | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Lenny asks about organizational structure and goal-setting. Alex explains the matrix of functional craft versus cross-functional missions (consumer, monetization, platform), highlighting the unique embedding of product-minded editors. | |
| Interactive Storytelling Formats and Newsroom Autonomy | 4 | 6 | 0 | 1 | Lenny asks how bespoke interactive visualizations are prioritized and built. Alex details the split between autonomous newsroom visual teams producing one-off stories and scalable storytelling platform teams operationalizing new formats. | |
| Acquisition of Wordle and Portfolio Expansion | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Alex shares the backstory of acquiring Wordle in early 2022, detailing how quickly the deal closed and how word games serve as a refreshing counterpoint to serious breaking news. | |
| Technical Integration of Wordle and Managing Crisis | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Alex explains the engineering hurdles of moving Wordle from browser local storage to NYT account backends, including managing public communication during the unfortunate 'fetus' word coincidence on Roe v. Wade draft day. | |
| Sponsor Message: Automated SOC 2 Compliance with Vanta | 2 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Following a sponsor read, Alex recounts the onset of COVID-19 in March 2020, working from a Vermont laundry closet while NYT engineers scraped public data to create the national COVID case tracking database. | |
| Preventing Burnout and Prioritizing Team Focus | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Lenny asks about combating team burnout during endless crises. Alex emphasizes aggressive prioritization, eliminating non-essential projects, and accommodating flexible work styles. | |
| The Future of NYT: Connected Products and Real-World Utility | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Alex presents the future vision of NYT as a connected ecosystem across news, audio, cooking, and shopping. When Lenny jokes about creating an NYT metaverse, Alex clarifies that NYT software is grounded in tangible, real-world utility. | |
| Product Feature Pitch: A Design-Forward Wirecutter | 5 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Lenny pitches a design-forward version of Wirecutter. Alex then unpacks how PM at NYT differs from tech platforms: owning the entire stack from content to distribution and training algorithms on editorial quality scores rather than pure engagement. | |
| Civic Purpose and the True Definition of Impact | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Alex elaborates on the concept of mission-driven impact in journalism, where business goals and subscription metrics serve the broader democratic purpose of seeking truth and triggering institutional change. | |
| Lightning Round: Essential Reading and Fiction Picks | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | In the lightning round, Alex recommends Stripe Press tactical books alongside James Baldwin's fiction classic Giovanni's Room to foster empathy and creative storytelling. | |
| Lightning Round: Audio Journalism and Television Masterpieces | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Alex highlights Hard Fork and The Daily for podcasts, and professes her love for rewatching HBO's The Wire, playfully spoiling major plot points and debating season quality with Lenny. | |
| Lightning Round: Daily SaaS Tools and Leadership Mentorship | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Alex lists NYT's core SaaS tool stack (Slack, Figma, Mode, GitHub) and praises Fidji Simo as an inspirational product leader and champion for women in tech, before closing the episode. |
Statements from this episode (23)
Hardiman: Consultants projected NYT would cap at 1M digital subscribers
“And we brought in consultants and they said, you know, maybe over the course of history, you'll get to one million subscribers if you're lucky.”
Hardiman: Facebook historically divided feeds into friends and public content
“And the approach to content on Facebook historically was very binary. You basically had content from friends and family, and then you had public content, and public content could come from anywhere.”
Rachitsky: PMs should avoid the CEO's 'Eye of Sauron' top priority
“There's a metaphor I like to use when I give PMs advice on where to work within a company, 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…”
Hardiman: Thriving subscription businesses require direct customer relationships over platform distribution
“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.”
Hardiman: NYT's global addressable market is roughly 135 million subscribers
“And what we found was that there are about a hundred and thirty-five million people around the world. We believe are willing to pay for the type of high quality journalism based products that the New York times produces. In the categories of news, gameplay, co…”
Hardiman: NYT will reach 15 million subscribers by 2027
“We want to get to fifteen million subscribers by 20, 27, right? Just over nine million today. And I really think we can do it.”
Hardiman: NYT embeds newsroom editors into cross-functional product teams
“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 prod…”
Hardiman: The New York Times newsroom exceeds 2,000 employees
“We have a newsroom of over 2000 people.”
Hardiman: Most interactive NYT stories use shared internal platforms
“The majority are on our platforms hands down.”
Hardiman: NYT product teams have no influence over editorial story selection
“Product teams don't have any influence over the selection of the stories. That is what the newsroom kind of retains as editorial.”
Hardiman: NYT views games as an essential counterpoint to news
“We really see games and demand for games is this 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.”
Hardiman: NYT acquired Wordle in a matter of weeks
“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 like record speed.”
Hardiman: NYT has the product categories needed to reach 15M subscribers
“I think for now, we feel like we actually, we have all of the major categories to make the essential subscription work. For us to get to fifteen million subscribers, we really feel like news, sports, games, Cooking, audio, and shopping.”
Hardiman: Wordle had no backend and stored user stats locally
“So when we acquired Wordle, it was a simple web game with no backend. 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 we…”
Hardiman: Scheduled Wordle answer after Roe v. Wade leak was 'fetus'
“We had this pretty crazy moment a couple months ago right when the Supreme Court's draft ruling on Roe v Wade leaked. And an engineer on the games team happened to notice that the wordle solution the next day was fetus, which is just an extraordinarily bad coi…”
Hardiman: The New York Times did not make Wordle harder
“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.”
Hardiman: NYT built a public COVID-19 database because nobody else was
“We're going to build a comprehensive public data set of COVID cases. Nobody else is doing it. So we really just started kind of scraping and pulling this together in what was a single spreadsheet at the time.”
Hardiman: Half of the US visited NYT in March 2020
“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.”
Hardiman: Wordle and Athletic transformed NYT into a multi-category subscription
“Up until I would say this year, we were 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, …”
Rachitsky: There is a startup opportunity for a design-forward Wirecutter
“I feel like there's an opportunity for design oriented version of Wirecutter.”
Hardiman: NYT PMs own content, distribution, and software unlike Big Tech
“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 …”
Hardiman: NYT trains algorithms on editorial importance scores from journalists
“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…”
Hardiman: Facebook feed algorithms optimized for engagement, not content quality
“When I was at Facebook and we were focused on news ranking and feed, all we could do was train pieces of information based on an engagement outcome. We couldn't actually train it based on the quality of that piece of information itself.”