Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times)

November 13, 2022

AI Summary

5 min read

Alex Hardiman, Chief Product Officer at The New York Times, discusses how product teams build and scale journalism-driven experiences across news, cooking, games, audio, and more, with business goals serving the mission to seek truth and help people understand the world.

Product Strategy: Bundling for Subscriptions

NYT aims for 15 million subscribers by 2027, up from over 9 million, by creating an "essential subscription" bundling news (the "sun" at the core) with satellite products like games (including Wordle and Spelling Bee), cooking, sports (via The Athletic), Wirecutter, and audio. These leverage shared DNA—trusted expertise, strong UX, and broad reach—to meet daily news and life needs, shifting from disaggregated digital distribution to a rebundled destination for direct customer relationships. Algorithms personalize based on editorial judgment scores from journalists, scaling quality signals toward metrics like engagement and conversions.

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What you'll learn

1 **[00:40] Mission and Impact at NYT**
2 **[05:12] Career Path and NYT Transformations**
3 **[09:00] Post-2016 Election at Facebook**
4 **[16:18] Defining NYT Product and Evolution**
5 **[22:06] Org Structure and Team Goals**
6 **[26:14] Immersive Storytelling and Formats**
7 **[33:14] Wordle Acquisition and Integration**

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Show Notes

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 Business & 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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