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Lenny's PodcastAn inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO, the New York Times)
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Inside The New York Times: Building Mission-Driven Products At Scale
- Alex Hardiman, Chief Product Officer at The New York Times, explains how the company builds digital products that serve both a business model and a civic mission to inform the world. She contrasts mission-driven product work at the Times with her experience at Facebook, including the post-2016 election reckoning with misinformation. The conversation covers the Times’ bundle strategy (news, games, cooking, sports, audio, shopping), its unique collaboration model between product and newsroom, and detailed stories like integrating Wordle and building COVID tools under extreme pressure. Throughout, Alex emphasizes how product teams at the Times define impact through both subscriptions and real-world societal outcomes.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasAnchor product strategy in a clear mission, then let business goals serve that mission.
At the Times, subscription growth and engagement are pursued explicitly to support the mission of seeking truth and strengthening democracy, which shapes prioritization, product decisions, and how impact is defined.
Organize around cross-functional missions that include editorial leaders, not just tech roles.
Consumer product missions at the Times include PMs, engineers, designers, data, and crucially editors, enabling products that marry journalistic judgment with strong UX and data-driven decision-making.
Turn one-off experimental formats into scalable platforms once you see real signal.
Highly bespoke interactive stories and visualizations often start as newsroom experiments; a dedicated storytelling product team then abstracts successful patterns into reusable tools and systems across the report.
Treat acquisitions like Wordle with extreme care for user trust and product “magic.”
The Times rewrote Wordle in its stack, added free account sync to preserve stats and streaks, and carefully surfaced it across properties—while learning hard lessons about edge cases like the “fetus” puzzle during the Roe v. Wade leak.
In crises, be ready to blow up roadmaps and rapidly reorient around emergent needs.
During COVID, the Times pivoted overnight to build a national case dataset, local data tools, and free critical coverage, reallocating engineers and product teams to match the urgency and societal stakes of the moment.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesOur 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.
— Alex Hardiman
These are actually the conditions where product managers, I think, thrive—taking crazy inputs and creating a structured model to find the most important problems to solve.
— Alex Hardiman
When you’re a product manager here, you’re driving metrics like engagement or subscribers, but you’re also trying to help stories find their real audience in ways that trigger a whole different side of mission and purpose-driven impact.
— Alex Hardiman
At Facebook, we controlled the software and the distribution but we didn’t control the content. At The Times, we own our journalism, our distribution, and our products.
— Alex Hardiman
We want to build the essential subscription for any curious English-speaking person around the world who really wants to know what’s happening and make great decisions.
— Alex Hardiman
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
