Alex Hardimen

Alex Hardiman, Chief Product Officer of The New York Times, discusses her path from journalism to Facebook and back to the Times, and how the Times builds news, games, cooking, audio and advertising products around a subscription bundle strategy. The conversation covers team structure, editorial-product collaboration, the Wordle acquisition and integration, pandemic-era product work, and how impact is defined at a mission-driven news organization.

01Key learnings

• Define impact in service of mission: at a news company, subscriber growth matters, but so does a deeply reported story driving a policy change or law.
• Build an essential subscription bundle by pairing a trusted news core with adjacent products like games, cooking, audio and shopping that serve daily needs.
• Organize product teams along two axes: functions (craft, career growth, standards) and cross-functional missions (consumer, monetization, platform) with editors embedded in consumer missions.
• Keep editorial judgment independent: product teams help stories find their audience but do not influence which stories get selected.
• When acquiring a product, respect what users love; Wordle's integration required adding accounts to protect stats and streaks without changing the core game loop.
• Be transparent when unexpected problems occur during integration, as Alex describes explaining a word-coincidence incident so rumors don't fill the gap.
• During crises, be willing to blow up roadmaps and reorient teams around the mission, as the Times did with public COVID data and free safety coverage.
• Train recommendation algorithms on human editorial signal so editorial judgment scales to large audiences while still optimizing for engagement and conversion.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.