An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times)
Alex Hardiman, CPO at The New York Times, discusses building products for news, cooking, and games, detailing how NYT integrates journalism with tech, manages high-stakes situations like COVID-19, and successfully acquired Wordle.
Deep Dive Analysis
18 Topic Outline
Alex Hardiman's Career Path to NYT CPO
Leading News Product at Facebook Post-2016 Election
Thriving in Chaos as a Product Leader
Returning to the New York Times
Defining Product at the New York Times
New York Times Product Strategy: The Bundle
Structure of Product Teams at the New York Times
Creating Immersive Stories and Visualizations
Acquisition and Integration of Wordle
Working at NYT During the Onset of COVID-19
Avoiding Burnout on Product Teams
The New York Times' Vision for the Next Decade
Differences in Product Management: News vs. Tech
Defining Impact in a Mission-Driven Organization
Book Recommendations
Favorite Podcast and TV Show
Commonly Used SaaS Products
Respected Industry Thought Leader
5 Key Concepts
Wartime Product Management
This concept describes operating in a high-stress, urgent environment where product leaders must quickly diagnose problems, create structured models, prioritize effectively, and rally teams around shared goals. It requires grit, resilience, and the ability to focus on critical issues without a clear playbook.
NYT Solar System Metaphor
This framework describes the New York Times' product strategy where news is the 'sun,' representing the core mission, brand heritage, and largest audience. Other products like cooking, games, and sports are 'satellite planets' that share the same DNA of trusted journalism and great product experience, extending value beyond news.
Two Modes of Storytelling Product Team
The storytelling product team at the New York Times operates in two distinct modes: in-the-moment, where they collaborate with editors on unique, experimental features for specific stories without relying on roadmaps; and system-level thinking, where they build end-to-end tooling and platforms to scale new storytelling formats across products.
Full Stack Product Ownership (News)
Unlike big tech platforms that control software and distribution but not content, product managers at the New York Times own the journalism/content, distribution, and products. This requires PMs to blend art and science, valuing expert editorial judgment alongside KPIs and customer insights to create impactful experiences.
Mission-Driven Impact (News)
At the New York Times, business goals (like subscriber growth) are in service of the mission to seek truth and help people understand the world, rather than the other way around. Impact extends beyond metrics to include deeply reported stories triggering policy changes or new laws, giving product managers a broader aperture for their work.
6 Questions Answered
At its core, product at the New York Times is its journalism married with a compelling and useful user experience. This has evolved from a print newspaper to digital products (website, apps, newsletters) and now includes a bundle of offerings like news, cooking, games, sports, Wirecutter, and audio journalism, all aimed at helping people understand and engage with the world.
Product teams are structured along two axes: functions (product and design) and missions. Missions are cross-functional teams (PMs, engineers, designers, data scientists, researchers, product marketers) focused on high-level goals. Consumer missions, which shape journalism, also embed editors, while monetization and platform missions focus on subscriber growth, advertising, and shared infrastructure.
Many compelling formats start as one-off experiments by embedded teams in the newsroom (graphics, visual journalism, interactive news) where editors, journalists, engineers, data scientists, and designers collaborate to bring a single story to life. A separate storytelling product team then identifies successful experimental formats and works to scale them into reusable tools and systems for broader application across the report.
The New York Times acquired Wordle very quickly, in a matter of weeks, due to its alignment with their successful word games and subscription strategy. The integration involved connecting Wordle to a New York Times account to protect user stats and streaks (previously stored locally) and making the game available across more NYT surfaces, while carefully preserving the core game experience.
Product teams shifted focus to build purposeful products, including a comprehensive public dataset of COVID cases, new data tools for local infection/vaccination rates, and making critical public safety coverage free. This was a 'wartime moment' where roadmaps were blown up to help people access essential information and make informed decisions during a crisis.
At the New York Times, product managers work across the full stack (journalism, distribution, products), requiring them to blend artistic editorial judgment with scientific data analysis. Unlike tech platforms that might only control software and distribution, NYT PMs structure journalistic expertise into algorithmic decision-making, training algorithms on editorial importance scores, not just engagement.
21 Actionable Insights
1. Embrace Chaotic Problems
Product managers should seek out and embrace chaotic problems, as these conditions allow them to thrive by structuring inputs, identifying core issues, prioritizing, and rallying teams around shared goals.
2. PMs as Universal Problem Solvers
Recognize the universal importance of product managers and product thinking to diagnose key problems and develop radically novel solutions across all industries, not just tech.
3. Cultivate Grit and Focus
Develop grit and resilience to navigate tough problems, focusing intensely on the most important issues at hand while being willing to let less critical things slide when necessary.
4. Gain Diverse Product Experience
Work in various product contexts to improve pattern recognition, learn to solve a wider range of problems, and enhance your ability to navigate complex situations.
5. Organize Teams by Functions & Missions
Structure your organization with both functional groups (e.g., product, design) for craft and growth, and cross-functional mission-based teams focused on high-level goals and objectives.
6. Adopt Dual Product Development Modes
Product teams should operate in two modes: rapid, in-the-moment decision-making for urgent needs, and long-term system-level thinking to build scalable tooling and consumer experiences.
7. Focus on Real-World Impact
Design products that directly facilitate real-world outcomes for users, such as enabling informed decision-making or practical actions, to maximize tangible impact.
8. Integrate Editorial Judgment in Product
For products that shape journalism, embed product-minded editors within cross-functional teams to combine their expertise with data and research, ensuring high-quality, impactful content.
9. Structure Expert Knowledge for AI
Leverage the expertise of your specialists by structuring their knowledge into data sets that can be used to train algorithms, enabling scalable and high-quality algorithmic decision-making.
10. Train Algorithms with Quality Signals
On platforms where you own the content, train algorithms using quality signals (e.g., editorial importance scores from journalists) in addition to engagement metrics, to ensure content quality drives outcomes.
11. Blend Editorial Judgment with Data
Product managers should value expert editorial judgment as an “art” alongside “science” from KPIs and customer research, integrating both qualitative and quantitative insights for decision-making.
12. Foster Product-Minded Editors
Encourage editors to develop a product mindset, understanding how their editorial judgment can be structured and scaled through product and algorithmic decision-making.
13. Reduce Burnout Through Focus
To combat burnout, increase focus on essential tasks and actively decide what to stop doing, reducing context switching and providing clarity for teams.
14. Free Public Safety Information
Prioritize public safety by making critical information freely accessible to everyone, especially during crises, rather than placing it behind a paywall.
15. Transparent Communication During Migrations
When facing unexpected issues during product migrations, be transparent with users about the facts and the development process to demystify rumors and maintain trust.
16. Preserve Core Product Magic
When acquiring products, prioritize preserving the core magic and user experience that made them successful, integrating thoughtfully to avoid disruption and ensure a seamless transition.
17. Protect User Data with Accounts
Implement user accounts to protect valuable user data, such as stats and history, ensuring continuity and accessibility across different devices and platforms.
18. Broaden Product Distribution
Expand the reach of your products by making them easily discoverable and accessible across multiple existing surfaces and applications within your ecosystem.
19. Separate Editorial and Business Leadership
Maintain the independence of your content by establishing distinct leadership structures for editorial and business sides, even while fostering intense collaboration between them.
20. Offer Flexible Work Accommodations
To attract and retain diverse talent, be flexible and accommodating to employees’ life circumstances, meeting them where they are to enable them to do their best work.
21. Diversify Reading for Inspiration
Balance your reading with both pragmatic, work-related books and fiction, as inspiration and new ideas can often come from stepping away from your core practice.
5 Key Quotes
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.
Alex Hardiman
I just actually think that that's where product people thrive. Like the idea of being able to take all of these crazy inputs, trying to like create a very structured model, right. To figure out, okay, like 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? Like this is, these are actually like the conditions where product managers heading thrive.
Alex Hardiman
I mean, we have a newsroom of over 2000 people. And so 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, you know, 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?
Alex Hardiman
This was 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. Um, here's what happened and why, and 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 demystify some of the rumors that people might otherwise think.
Alex Hardiman
But building purposeful products that made a really difficult moment feel not only possible but promising 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.
Alex Hardiman