Pod Insights Lenny's Podcast An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO, the New York Times) About this episode Alex Hardiman is Chief Product Officer at the New York Times, where she oversees the company’s news, cooking, games, audio and advertising products. Previously, Alex was Chief Product Officer at The Atlantic, and before that she was Head of News Products at Facebook. We discuss how engineers and product people work with writers to create impactful stories, how teams build the incredible visualizations and experiences for NYTimes.com, how product teams are structured within the New York Times, and the good and bad about working at a company like the New York Times versus a FAANG tech company. We also talk about the details behind the New York Times’s acquisition of Wordle and uncover what the Times is dreaming up for its product over the next 10 years.
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Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/an-inside-look-at-how-the-new-york
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Where to find Alex Hardiman:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/alex_hardiman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrahardiman/
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:
• Miro: https://miro.com/lenny
• Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lenny
• Vanta: https://vanta.com/lenny
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Referenced:
• Jodi Kantor: https://www.nytimes.com/by/jodi-kantor
• Wordle: https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/
• Wordle Is a Love Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-game-creator.html
• Josh Wardle on Twitter: https://twitter.com/powerlanguish
• Eric Kim’s recipes: https://cooking.nytimes.com/ourcooks/eric-kim/
• Wirecutter: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/
• Framing Britney Spears: https://www.nytimes.com/article/framing-britney-spears.html
• Hard Fork podcast: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/podcasts/hard-fork-technology.html
• High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People: https://www.amazon.com/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil/dp/1732265100
• An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management: https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-Engineering-Management/dp/1732265186
• The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium: https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143
• Giovanni’s Room: https://www.amazon.com/Giovannis-Room-James-Baldwin/dp/0345806565/r
• The Daily podcast: https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-daily
• The Wire on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/the-wire
• Google Workspace: https://workspace.google.com/
• Slack: https://slack.com
• Figma: https://figma.com
• Mode: https://mode.com/
• GitHub: https://github.com/
• Fidji Simo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fidjisimo/
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Alex’s background
(07:37) How Alex fought disinformation on the news team at Facebook
(11:11) How some product people thrive in chaos
(14:13) Alex’s return to the New York Times
(16:22) What product means at the New York Times
(20:42) How the product team at the New York Times is structured
(26:20) How the New York Times makes stories come alive with balanced creative and technical teams
(33:15) The acquisition of Wordle
(42:00) What it was like to work at the New York Times during the onset of Covid
(47:11) How to avoid burnout on a product team
(49:26) How the New York Times has set itself apart with its subscription package
(52:21) How the New York Times’s products are rooted in helping in the real world
(52:54) Lenny’s tips for improving Wirecutter
(53:36) The differences and similarities on product teams in a news organization
(59:58) Lightning round
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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected] .
Transcript 13,393 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 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, you know, think about impact is growing a giant subscription business. That business exists 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, you know, impact for us is growing subscribers, but it's also when a deeply, you know, reported story triggers an important policy change or a new law. And so when you're a product manager, you're involved again in like driving specific metrics like engagement or subscribers.
0:45 Speaker 00 But you're also trying to help stories find their real audience in ways that trigger just this whole different side of of mission and purpose driven impact. And I didn't feel that when I was at a place like Facebook.
0:59 Lenny Rachitsky? 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. 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. She shares so many stories and insights about how the New York Times builds products, what it's like for product teams to work with journalists,
1:44 Lenny Rachitsky? what's good and bad about working at a company like the New York Times versus a FAANG 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.
2:04 Lenny Rachitsky? 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 colleagues to capture ideas, get feedback, and being able to iterate 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's 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 with Pen tool, or put their own images or mockups right into the Miro board.
2:49 Lenny Rachitsky? 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. Wanna see how I use Miro? Head on over to my Miro board at miro.com/leni 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 leni.
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4:49 Lenny Rachitsky? Alex, thank you for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
4:52 Speaker 00 Thanks so much, Lenny. It's really awesome to be here with you.
4:55 Lenny Rachitsky? What's interesting is I think you may be the first product leader on this podcast who doesn't work at a big tech fang 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.
5:09 Speaker 00 Thank you. No, no, that sounds, that sounds awesome. Let's, let's dive right in.
5:12 Lenny Rachitsky? 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?
5:23 Speaker 00 Thanks for asking. I mean, I am, I've definitely spent most of my career like 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, what felt like a really interesting set of problems to solve. But when I just look at my family, there is a ton of journalism kind of in our, in our DNA. My grandfather was a news anchor on the West Coast, and I really revered him. And my great-grandmother, she was pretty amazing. 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
6:07 Speaker 00 news space. And that's how I first ended up at The New York Times. And I've, I've had two stints at The New York Times. My first stint was for a decade from 2006 to 2016. And it was during a really interesting time of a 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 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. And so we just really started investing in small mobile use cases, first on the margins,
6:50 Speaker 00 and then more and more aggressively until we were just leading with mobile and everything that we did. New journalism formats, new product features, new revenue opportunities, that type of thing. And then the second big thing that kind of marked my just 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 over the course of history, you'll get to one million subscribers if you're lucky. And so it felt like a really like big nervous bet at the at the time, but thank goodness it kind of helped make a market for for paid journalism that is has really helped a lot
7:33 Speaker 00 of news organizations, you know, find new ways to 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, 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. 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 and just wanted to sell their goods through social commerce, really looking at what WhatsApp and LINE and sort of other other regional
8:18 Speaker 00 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 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.
8:58 Lenny Rachitsky? Before, before we move on, I'm curious, okay. You were leading the news product at Facebook during the election during.
9:05 Speaker 00 Right after the election.
9:06 Lenny Rachitsky? Right after the election, after everyone is coming after Facebook, trying to tear it down. Wow. What, what year was that?
9:12 Speaker 00 So it was, I joined in early 2017 on that effort.
9:16 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
9:17 Speaker 00 And you know, the election was, was November 2016.
9:20 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh, my God. Before you move on, just like, what was, 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?
9:29 Speaker 00 I think about wartime product management, right? I mean, you're kind of coming in and, and I think there was, what I appreciated about the time inside of Facebook was that there was just this incredible humility, right? That was needed to really understand and first, first diagnosed that what was actually happening on the platform. And the approach to content on Facebook historically, it was very binary. You basically had content from Fens 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.
10:07 Speaker 00 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 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 coverage in that way. Let alone to have the right goals and kind of responsibilities and incentives.
10:48 Speaker 00 And so there was, there was just a ton of work to figure out how to make the platform far safer. And far more informative after I would say a pretty, a pretty intense election cycle.
10:58 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, I feel like you're, I was gonna ask you about this later, but you feel like you're drawn towards just crazy, 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, maybe a quick question there. What have you learned about just living in a world of just constant chaos and, and stress and urgency, endless urgency?
11:21 Speaker 00 I would say if you did ask my, my family and my husband, he would say that I'm always attracted to kind of the, the more chaotic problems. I, 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 fear and 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 and one single goal? Like this is, these are actually the conditions where product managers I think thrive. And for me, just having been in the journalism space for, you know, about two decades now, it's just been, or the tech space around news,
12:03 Speaker 00 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, 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.
12:44 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah. You said, you said PMs thrive in this. I, I think some do. Some are like, no, leave me, leave me out of that.
12:49 Speaker 00 I guess that's true.
12:50 Lenny Rachitsky? I, uh, there's a, 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 work maybe to the side of that. Cause 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, 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. And build stuff. It's pretty awesome.
13:21 Speaker 00 Awesome. Sometimes I'm sure there are moments too where it'd be nice to chill, but I, I am, I am drawn to, to those types of problems for sure. This feels like therapy, Lenny. I'm kind of been doing.
13:31 Lenny Rachitsky? Let's tell me about your mother.
13:35 Speaker 00 She's wonderful.
13:36 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, great. That's, that's the end of that one. I'll let you finish your, uh, your career overview and then.
13:42 Speaker 00 Well, that's, I mean, I feel like you, we kind of just, um, you know, it, we're almost kind of at present, which is I, um, found that there was so much incredible experience that I was able to kind of soak up and lean at a place like Facebook. And for me, I really wanted to figure out how to apply that back into organizations that just had more of a, 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 ever since.
14:20 Lenny Rachitsky? Just, your timing is impeccable every time.
14:22 Speaker 00 It really is.
14:24 Lenny Rachitsky? I, uh, I was doing some research on you before this chat. And when you came back to the New York Times, there's all these stories about how, how big of a deal it was. Uh, returns to the New York Times. That must've 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 Speaker 00 I felt really lucky. I mean, when I left on the New York Times, uh, from 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. So I, um, I had a lot of 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,
15:26 Speaker 00 you know, my boss at the time, it did actually feel more like. Therapy where you, when you've worked with people for a decade before and you go in, the conversation isn't, you know, the normal list of, of interview questions. It's like, okay, here's what type of leader you were, you know, a couple of years ago. Here, 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 in a different point in your career and they're kind of pushing you to be better. And so I felt like I got kind of the, the best chance of a lifetime to come back and try to do my job better than I had been able to do it before.
16:11 Speaker 00 And that's, um, that's pretty cool.
16:13 Lenny Rachitsky? And you've been there three years at this point?
16:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, three years on Halloween. So coming up very soon.
16:18 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh, wow. That's three days from now when we're recording.
16:21 Speaker 00 Yeah.
16:21 Lenny Rachitsky? 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, and at Airbnb, we have this challenge where like, when we talk to hosts, here's the products, you know, like what, what is, what is your product? Is it in our homes? And you have to kind of help people understand, okay, when we talk product, we mean the website and app. What do you think of the product at the New York Times? And then is it a challenge to help people understand here's what the product team does?
16:47 Speaker 00 I, it, 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 really act on our journalism so that they can understand and engage with the world around them. And, you know, 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, I mean, it was a predictable structure. It was a very finite amount of news. So it was time bound, which I think is kind of a really kind of lovely thing in terms of setting expectation. It also has like the packaging of the newspaper, just such serendipity where you can move across news, opinion, culture, games.
17:31 Speaker 00 And so it's, it's a really kind of great bounded product in and of itself. But about 25 years ago, you know, 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 and news space to extend our reach. So our products then, our digital products were our website, our apps, newsletters. We dabbled with a lot in the VR, AR space early on. And so that, that was kind of, I would say like the, the first big extension of our products. When we then pivoted though to a subscription model, it was a really interesting moment where we actually had to take more of a destination first approach. And it was almost
18:16 Speaker 00 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, 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 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, you know, understand and engage with the world.
18:58 Speaker 00 So we have cooking, we have games, we have sports, we have wire cutter, right? Which is how, you know, a great recommendation surface. We're playing with a new audio app all around audio journalism. And so those, those are actually like, we have, you know, 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, you know, really wants to know what's happening and wants to be able to again, act and engage and make great decisions based on, based on the products that we build.
19:36 Lenny Rachitsky? Got it. So it sounds like the strategy is 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.
19:49 Speaker 00 I think that's right. We did this pretty great exercise and kind of strategy, strategy project 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 was that there are about 135 million people around the world who 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, cooking and recipes, sports, which is why we acquired The Athletic, shopping recommendations and audio. And so in order for us to like really capture as much of
20:31 Speaker 00 that audience and like 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. 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. But then that sun kind of helps you give birth to other satellite planets or products that have a lot of the same DNA, again, like great
21:12 Speaker 00 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, and 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 is the bundle. How do we create a connected family of products that puts all of those things together so that? Wherever 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.
21:55 Speaker 00 And it's a, it's a really, I mean, it's a huge ambition. We want to get to 15 million subscribers by 2027. We're at just over nine million today. And I really think we can do it.
22:07 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. I actually wanted to chat about goals and how you think about success as a product team. I imagine 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 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?
22:35 Speaker 00 Let's start with structure. So first, I just, 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. And it's, it is, 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. And the functions themselves are, 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,
23:16 Speaker 00 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. And they're all pursuing the same high level goals and objectives. And cross-functional missions at The Times, it can include a lot of the same skillsets 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.
23:57 Speaker 00 And I can talk more about that because it's a pretty interesting differentiating factor.
24:02 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, that's super interesting. So there's a journalist within cross-functional product teams.
24:06 Speaker 00 Exactly. And so, but we have three different types of missions. And so we have consumer missions, we have monetization missions, and we have platform missions. So editors are embedded within consumer missions. And that's, those are the missions that I oversee, where we're focused on creating really great products, again, in categories like news, cooking, you know, 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, you know, a lot of the normal signal that you look for in terms of data, research, and other 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.
24:48 Speaker 00 It is, 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 have, 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 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,
25:32 Speaker 00 you know, in the news space. And then there's a totally, a totally different third bucket of mission that we have, which is all of our platform teams. And so this is everything from, you know, 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 might organize at a tech company minus the editors.
26:15 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. On the infra piece, that reminds me of something I definitely wanted to talk about, which is something New York Times is really known for is the visualizations and these kind of immersive stories that you all put out. And I'm so curious just how that gets done. I feel like if I was at a, on a product team at a regular, like a big tech thing company, you'd be like, shit, all these ad hoc things they gotta 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 widgets and all that stuff? And then, and I was just reading a story about the, about climate change and it's this like, 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's that get done?
27:01 Lenny Rachitsky? Something like that.
27:02 Speaker 00 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 credit's due, 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, interactive news teams. So this is where we have editors, journalists, engineers, data scientists, designers, literally like all hunkered down together focusing on how to make one story come to life in the best possible way.
27:38 Lenny Rachitsky? Who has the idea usually? Is it like the journalists working on it? They're like, hey, I think we should make some really great?
27:43 Speaker 00 Exactly. Yeah. I mean, the, one of the, the things that, I mean, we have a newsroom of over 2,000 people. And so you basically have people who've been, you know, experts on certain beats like climate, for instance, for decades. And so they're the ones who, they, 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? And that's where the magic starts to happen when you kind of pull in all of those other skill sets together to, to help dream up how that story might be told.
28:19 Lenny Rachitsky? So they like, Alex, we, we need one of these for our story. Can you get us on the, on the, on the list? Like, how does, how does that process work?
28:26 Speaker 00 No, no. So, so these are teams that are really autonomous in the newsroom. So for, for one-off truly special features, like 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, our, a really incredible investigative reporter. You might know for some of her work that she did around me too, and Harvey Weinstein and that investigation.
28:47 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
28:48 Speaker 00 She recently did a piece on how employers are tracking and monitoring remote workers with tools like productivity scores. And the story itself was designed to show a person's own productivity score in the moment as they read the article.
29:02 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh shit.
29:02 Speaker 00 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 to say like, let's, let's figure out how to shape that story in the most magical way. And the speed of news is so fast that 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, and pieces. But on top of that, what we do have is a storytelling product team. And what they do is they really kind of take notice of things that
29:46 Speaker 00 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, but we're also shifting more of the distribution of stories into. Video into visuals into live. I mean, if you even look at live, you'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 give you a sense of what's happening in a very immediate and
30:30 Speaker 00 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 actually create the 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, is they're pulling off some pretty incredible work because they can operate in those two modes. It's like in the moment, in the moment of the story,
31:14 Speaker 00 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.
31:23 Lenny Rachitsky? That is super cool. What percentage of these fancy stories are using the platform and building on something that already exists versus like a one-off experiment, would you say roughly?
31:33 Speaker 00 The majority are on our platforms, hands down. Yeah, yeah.
31:36 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, that makes sense. And then, just so I understand, so you said Jodi was the journalist that you mentioned. So she has like a product team dedicated to her work?
31:46 Speaker 00 No, what we have is, we have a centralized, interactive news team, graphics team, data journalism team. And so they, those editors partner with different journalists when they have really big stories to kind of help, help bring their story to life.
32:01 Lenny Rachitsky? 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 when you...
32:12 Speaker 00 You know what? To be totally honest, I'm not involved. So somehow it works. It just...
32:19 Lenny Rachitsky? That's, that's a great leadership sign. Like, it just works. You set it up and it's working. So that's great.
32:26 Speaker 00 And the newsroom has set it up. And something that is, that is just, again, very interesting about the way that... We are set up is that we have our newsroom and then we have our, 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, 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 product teams really help stories find their widest audience and be as like engaging and as impactful as can be. But product teams don't have any influence over the selection of the stories.
33:12 Speaker 00 That is what the newsroom kind of retains as, as editorial.
33:15 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay. So you mentioned Wordle and y'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, the exploration and purchase process and what was, what went on there?
33:29 Speaker 00 Wordle has been such a fun ride. So maybe 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 now like.
33:38 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, that sounds great.
33:39 Speaker 00 So I first heard about Wordle in early January because a New York Times reporter, Daniel Victor, actually wrote a piece about Josh Wardle, who's a software engineer in Brooklyn and how he had created the game really is like this, this gesture of love for his partner. And I certainly wasn't the only person to read, 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. He's on my team. He'd already taken notice well before the piece was, was published and he had already reached out to Josh to see if he would be interested in having games join our portfolio. And we just all loved Wordle immediately because if you've played it, you know, it shares a lot of the DNA of other
34:23 Speaker 00 really successful word games that we have at the New York Times, like Spelling Bee or the crossword mini. But if anything, Josh was really, you know, forthright that he created it because he was inspired by, 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. 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 such a like wonderful addition to our games franchise to really give people, you know, more reasons to feel like they had a relationship with the New York Times every day.
35:05 Speaker 00 So the 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 like record speed.
35:27 Lenny Rachitsky? 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, yeah, it's impressive. You said you acquired The Athletic. How often are you acquiring companies?
35:38 Speaker 00 We also acquired The Athletic and that was back in around the same time. I 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 15 million subscribers, we really feel like 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
36:19 Speaker 00 about when you acquire, like what's the opportunity, but also are you ready to actually integrate an acquisition? And we learned a lot just around Wordle in terms of kind of like what that process is like. And I just want to say I'm really proud of how thoughtful and considerate our games team was about the integration process because. Wordle 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 an eight-year-old kid or an 88-year-old adult, like there's real resonance with Wordle and people just have such a connection to it and we really wanted to make sure we we didn't mess it up. And so if you wanna, like, do you wanna go a little bit deeper just on what that feels like? Because we definitely learned a lot.
37:03 Speaker 00 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 were stored in local browsers and it was really important for us, you know, to make sure that the game board experience and 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, if they got a new iPhone, if they switched browsers, all of a sudden, they lost all of that, 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 Speaker 00 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, it was a pretty big effort to rewrite Wordle in our tech stack, give people the ability to store their stats and streaks, you know, bring games to all of our major surfaces. 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
38:29 Speaker 00 carry over and you can, you can play anywhere. But that doesn't mean that there aren't some surprises along the way and especially when you're doing backend work. 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 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. And it was so important for us that we didn't have this lovely diversion from the news feel almost like it was commentary
39:10 Speaker 00 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 change the word on the backend for everyone, only for some people. And so this was a moment where we just had to come out and really kind of tell the world, we're mid-integration, we're really not trying to communicate more than Wordle being a fun diversion from the news. Here's what happened and why. And everyone understood, like if it's, you know, this is
39:52 Speaker 00 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. 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.
40:16 Lenny Rachitsky? 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 Speaker 00 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.
40:34 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, it's not like the crossword puzzle where it gets harder every day of the week.
40:38 Speaker 00 No, no, it's really, it's not, it's not.
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41:27 Lenny Rachitsky? It's 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 SOC 2. 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/Lenny. That's V A N T A dot com slash Lenny to learn more and to claim your discount. Get started today. Are there any other stories that come to mind of just like, that reflect just how interesting slash wild it is to work at The New York Times as a product leader?
42:11 Speaker 00 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 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 and all The New York Times employees were trying to live through it. Like, 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.
42:52 Speaker 00 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, all plans were canceled. My kids, I had no idea what to do with them. So my husband and I panicked, packed, put them in a car, drove to go see some friends in Vermont. And we decided we were going to do like a, a kid daycare pool share just to kind of figure out how to keep working with, with someone overseeing the kids. And we got there late at night and I literally just went into 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.
43:35 Speaker 00 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 up to help people understand the basic facts about what was happening. And so this is like a product leader is a real wartime moment where you just need to blow up roadmaps, share context with everyone and say, okay, everyone, like we have a totally different mandate than what we did. A couple of weeks ago, given the needs in 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.
44:17 Speaker 00 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. 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. 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
44:58 Speaker 00 information available to everyone. We also just found that for journalists who hadn't actually been in Wuhan, they just needed tips too on internal safety guidance for reporting. And so we made that publicly available. 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 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.
45:40 Speaker 00 And there's, there's a real privilege in being able to to kind of spend your time doing those things. But it's, I mean, 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 and kind of humbling experience.
45:56 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow. People talk about having impact and like having driving impact. And it's usually like move this metric some percentage, but that is some incredible impact, helping people 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.
46:20 Speaker 00 Thank you for saying that. I mean, one of the most validating metrics that we did look at was we realized that at the height of of the pandemic, when there was 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 is 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 organization pivot from their normal job into this mode was was pretty incredible. And the, and the world responded, which was, which was really validating, too.
47:02 Lenny Rachitsky? 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?
47:16 Speaker 00 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 daycare, health benefits, literally like all of the basics. I think now what we're really trying to do beyond that is 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 and your life.
47:58 Speaker 00 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 the small number of important things that we must do at a given point in time, that's really the place where we're really trying to come in and be as empathetic and as 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 diligent about. But I would say over on balance, 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.
48:39 Speaker 00 They're like 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 skillsets, 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. 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.
49:24 Lenny Rachitsky? Right, absolutely.
49:27 Lenny Rachitsky? 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.
49:42 Speaker 00 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, you know, other high quality organizations like the Journal and the Post and the FT and the Guardian. They're, they're just doing such incredible work. But when I go back to what differentiates us, it's this idea of becoming an essential subscription that really helps people. It like meets their most important news and life needs across all of the categories that we've been talking about, right? Like news, games, audio, cooking, et cetera. And 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, some of our other offerings.
50:27 Speaker 00 I really do think like 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. So like, imagine that, you know, you open the New York Times app and 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, you know, 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.
51:12 Lenny Rachitsky? And just did exactly that, actually.
51:13 Speaker 00 Did you? And then, you know, 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, so this is, I think, like the future for us of 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. And I don't really see other. News organizations really operating at that scale and that ambition. And that's, that's the future for us. Like, we really just think that the New York Times can mean so much more to so many more people.
51:57 Speaker 00 And so we're a journalism company, but we're building just tremendous software. And so the, the product ambitions are only getting bigger and bigger. And that's, that's why I feel like I've got the, the luckiest job in the world right now.
52:10 Lenny Rachitsky? That is a compelling vision. I feel like 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.
52:21 Speaker 00 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. Like, we basically help you get access to information, decide how you're going to go to the ballot box, right? Like, we give you information to go cook. Like, it's, it's actually, there's something that I think is even more of a connection to the physical world. And 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.
52:48 Lenny Rachitsky? You can have your own competing metaverse. Um, 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 a design oriented version of Wirecutter. I don't know if anyone's thinking about that.
53:06 Speaker 00 Tell, tell me more.
53:07 Lenny Rachitsky? Just Wirecutter is 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? My house and is the best. Like, I'll be okay not the best best if it looks nicer. So like a design lens to Wirecutter.
53:23 Speaker 00 Oh, so like if it's, it's Wirecutter meets high taste, basically. I like that. I like that. Okay.
53:31 Lenny Rachitsky? I think there's a market there.
53:32 Speaker 00 I'll, I'll definitely bring that back to the team. That's okay.
53:35 Lenny Rachitsky? There you go.
53:36 Speaker 00 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? And I mean, totally up to you, but I, if, if, if that's, if that's something that you, you'd be interested in talking through.
53:55 Lenny Rachitsky? Absolutely.
53:55 Speaker 00 I'm going to just focus on two themes that I think are, are pretty interesting. So the first is just how we work at the New York Times. And we talked a little bit about working with journalism, and there are 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. So first, just on like the idea of like 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, et cetera.
54:38 Speaker 00 And so we actually do see a lot of crossover between product managers from tech companies who come to the New York Times or tech PMs at the Times who kind of 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 real limitations on understanding what was 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 Speaker 00 And so at the Times, when I think about how our best products are born, 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, et cetera. And like 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. We always start with expert editorial judgment to curate the most important and interesting stories.
56:08 Speaker 00 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, 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 pieces of information based on an engagement outcome. We couldn't actually train it based on the quality of that piece of information itself.
56:51 Speaker 00 And so at the Times, you get all, you have like 2,000 plus journalists and you're actually trying to structure their expertise into things that can actually translate into really great algorithmic decisioning. And that's, that's just so different. No one else is, is really doing something in that space. So product managers are becoming very editorial reminded. And we're also getting editors to become more product minded. And I, I just think that how we work there is so different and so unique. It's just a very, a pretty fascinating part of, I think, the how the sausage is made, if that makes sense.
57:21 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I think that's a really important topic of just like how it's different and why it's worth considering trying something like the New York Times as a place to work. Anything else that you want to share before we ramp up?
57:33 Speaker 00 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 some, a place like Facebook is just how different the definition of impact can be. You know, 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, you know, we also have a huge ambition to grow our subscriber base. But 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
58:16 Speaker 00 the way that we, you know, think about impact is growing a giant subscription business, that business exists 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, you know, impact for us is growing subscribers, but it's also when a deeply, you know, reported story triggers an important policy change or a new law. And so when you're a product manager, you're involved again in like 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 of mission and
58:57 Speaker 00 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 and mission and impact goals. And it's, it's pretty cool.
59:14 Lenny Rachitsky? It does feel like it would be hard to find more meaningful impactful work. And so that really resonates.
59:20 Speaker 00 Oh, thanks. There, there's so many other important, purposeful products and problems out there to solve in the world. We've talked about this, Lani, but 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, you know, other PMs just kind of do their best craft. So thank you for having all of us on here.
59:56 Lenny Rachitsky? Love that as a closing thought. Well, we reached our very exciting lightning round where I'm just gonna 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?
1:00:11 Speaker 00 Great.
1:00:11 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay. What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?
1:00:17 Speaker 00 I love Stripe Press. And so I think a lot of the books that they have are just such good references, like Alad Gil's High Growth Handbook, or 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, 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 and the form. 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 places where I go first. But I do think, and I, I know this is like the humanities major in me, I also always try to balance books and my own reading time and recommendations with fiction. I just think
1:01:02 Speaker 00 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, 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, you know, more, 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, of ideas that ultimately kind of come back into making products, and particularly news products where they're so creative in, in like, the way that they tell stories. And so, I always try to give people like, one pragmatic recommendation, and then one slightly more field recommendation over, over in the world of fiction. And so,
1:01:45 Speaker 00 if you haven't read Giovanni's Room, it is incredible and devastating, and I absolutely recommend it.
1:01:50 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow. I feel like I, I just keep buying books after doing these podcasts, and so many books I gotta read. And I'm also feeling like, the combination of books you recommended is exactly what I would imagine someone leading product that New York Times would recommend. Something product, tactical, and then just like, a beautiful piece of fiction.
1:02:08 Speaker 00 So I'm, I'm the cliche. I love it.
1:02:10 Lenny Rachitsky? 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?
1:02:18 Speaker 00 Everyone should listen to Hard Fork. It's great. But I, 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, just like, bring in journalists to talk and unpack a meaningful story. It's so visceral, and I just find it to be one of the, the daily miracles that the New York Times is able to produce.
1:02:41 Lenny Rachitsky? 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?
1:02:51 Speaker 00 I am pretty old school. I am actually rewatching The Wire for the third time.
1:02:56 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow, that's a lot of time commitment.
1:02:59 Speaker 00 It is, and I have very little time. But every five years, my husband and I, we just can't get over the characters, the storylines. It's just one of the best made series for television ever. It's a work of art. And so I am that person. That is another cliche, who is rewatching The Wire right now.
1:03:17 Lenny Rachitsky? What's your favorite season?
1:03:19 Speaker 00 I would probably say it's season three, but 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.
1:03:32 Lenny Rachitsky? Spoiler alert, in reverse.
1:03:34 Speaker 00 Spoiler alert. I'm so sorry.
1:03:36 Lenny Rachitsky? But that's not the character name. That's the actor, right? Right is that?
1:03:39 Speaker 00 No, no, I really just totally spoiled that.
1:03:41 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, that's cool.
1:03:44 Lenny Rachitsky? It's over. You're lost.
1:03:46 Speaker 00 Oh, boy. How awful. That's like a cardinal sin. But I do think season four, when it starts to get into 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.
1:04:06 Lenny Rachitsky? Would you agree season two is the worst?
1:04:09 Speaker 00 You know, I thought that until I rewatched it and
1:04:12 Lenny Rachitsky? Interesting.
1:04:13 Speaker 00 I actually came around and I, it's not at the top of my list, but there, there's more to it than I think I originally gave it credit for.
1:04:20 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow, I like this. Okay, great. What are like four to five SaaS products that your company uses most that you find really useful?
1:04:29 Speaker 00 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, across our teams.
1:04:41 Lenny Rachitsky? And the fourth one was Mode?
1:04:42 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:04:43 Lenny Rachitsky? Is there any interesting new recent one that's like top of mind while we're on this topic?
1:04:48 Speaker 00 Not really. Okay.
1:04:50 Lenny Rachitsky? Great. The, the winners keep winning, huh? These products.
1:04:55 Speaker 00 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 think, I feel like that's, 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.
1:05:09 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, I imagine all these companies have the New York Times logo on their site of people using that stuff.
1:05:14 Speaker 00 Maybe.
1:05:14 Lenny Rachitsky? That'd be a big deal when you guys adopt a product. Final question, who else in the industry do you most respect as a thought leader and thinker?
1:05:22 Speaker 00 This is a hard question, but I would say one of the people who I find to just be 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 incredible. So I would love to, to give a, a shout out to her.
1:06:00 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. I will try to get her on this podcast.
1:06:03 Speaker 00 Oh, I mean, that would be amazing.
1:06:05 Lenny Rachitsky? All right.
1:06:05 Speaker 00 She's, she's really.
1:06:06 Lenny Rachitsky? My 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?
1:06:22 Speaker 00 Thanks. You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, all the usual channels. I would love to hear from anyone and would be delighted to, to also talk about what it's like to do product at the Times. And then the thing that would be 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.
1:06:43 Lenny Rachitsky? All right. I shared mine, a design oriented wire cutter. I will be looking for that.
1:06:49 Speaker 00 Thank you.
1:06:49 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. Alex, thank you again so much for doing this.
1:06:52 Speaker 00 Thank you so much, Lenny. This was really fun.
1:06:56 Lenny Rachitsky? Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
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