YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Hardiman

lines on the record: 72
first: 2022-11-13
most recent: 2022-11-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“She's really Thanks. You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, all the usual channels. I would love to hear from anyone and would be delighted 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 pretty incredible. So I would love to give a shout out to her.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 feel like that's more of a success because it's just. Works behind the scenes, it blends in, and it just makes everyone so much more productive.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 our teams.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually came around and it's not at the top of my list, but there's more to it than I think I originally gave a credit for”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would probably say 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. Boiler alert. I'm so sorry. But that's not”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 was rewatching the wire right now.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone should listen to hard fork. It's great. But 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 Taverdisi 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 daily miracles that the New York Times is able to produce.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love Stripe Press. And so I think a lot of the books that they have are just such good references, like Elad Gill's high growth handbook. Or will Larson's an elegant puzzle? But I do think, and 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 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 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 more components of the human soul that I know it sounds kind of crazy, but those are, I find like those are a little sparks of ideas that ultimately kind of come back into making products and particularly news products where they're so creative 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 in the world of fiction. And so if you haven't read Giovanni's room.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks. There are so many other important purposeful products and problems out there to solve in the world. We've talked about this, Lenny, 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 other PMs just kind of do their best craft. So thank you for having all of us on here.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 mission and purpose-driven impact. And I didn't feel that when I was at a place like Facebook, but at the time, 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 mission impact goals. And it's pretty cool.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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, 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 the way that we 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 based on”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to structure their expertise into things that can actually translate into really great algorithmic decisioning. And that's just so different. No one else is really doing something in that space. So product managers are becoming very editorially minded. And we're also getting editors to become more product-minded. And I just think the how we work there is so different and so unique. It's just a very pretty fascinating part of, I think, how this sausage is made, if that makes sense.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We always start with expert editorial judgment to curate the most important and interesting stories. 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. And so at the times, you get all you have like 2,000 plus journalists and you're actually”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insights, et cetera. And an interesting example as I was trying to think about what would feel really different doing product at the time compared to, say, Facebook, is like, let's say you're at the product team and you're working on the home screen.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And so at the times when I think about how our best products are born, it'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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to just focus on two themes that I think 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's some really interesting differences. And the second is just on kind of the idea of impact. And I think how the definition and the understanding of impact can be pretty different. 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 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. 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I mean, totally up to you, but I.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then 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 Roose and Casey Newton's hard fork podcast, which is wildly fun, and just launched a couple weeks ago, if you haven't heard that. 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 the future for us. We really just think that the New York Times can mean so much more to so many more people. And so we're a journalism company, but we're building just tremendous software. And so the product ambitions are only getting bigger and bigger. And that's why I feel like I've got the luckiest job in the world right now.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“News and life needs in a way that doesn't just associate the New York Times with one categories. 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 B. 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 wire cutter.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The New York Times is in a pretty unique spot compared to other news organizations right now. And I have tremendous respect for other high quality organizations like the journal and the post and the FT and the Guardian. 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 wire cutter and some of our other offerings, 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”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 skill sets, 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Like all of 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. 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 was 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 pretty incredible. And the world responded, which was really validating too.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than that. And so we really made sure that we had that 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. A pretty incredible and kind of humbling experience”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say, okay, everyone, like we have a totally different mandate than what we did a couple weeks ago given the needs and 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. 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 and 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, 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 do better.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Husband and I panick packed, put them in a car, drove to go see some friends in Vermont, and we decided we were going to do like a kid daycare pool share just to kind of figure out how to keep working 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. 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 sort of shifted into this moment of meeting 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 in 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 Muhan even before we knew how COVID was transmitted. 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 plans were canceled. My kids, I had no idea what to do with them.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're on the original world game. Others had migrated to the new version. It meant that we actually couldn't change the word on the back end for everyone, only for some people. And so 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 wordle being a fun, you know, diversion from the news. Here's what happened, why. Everyone understood. Like, if it's, you know, this is where 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. One of those, like, oh man, couldn't have imagined that type of terrible coincidence would happen. But”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wanted, you know, if you go to the homepage of the news app or if you go to the games app, we wanted to. Carry over, and you can play anywhere. But that doesn't mean that there aren't some surprises along the way. And especially when you're doing back-end work, we have 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 Gaines team happened to notice that the Wardle 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 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 back end. But because we were midstream on the migration process and some use.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we definitely learned a lot. So when we acquired Wordle, it was a simple web game with no back end. 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 any iPhone, if they switched browsers, all of a sudden they lost all of 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, 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”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thoughtful and considerate our games team was about the integration process because we're little 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 didn't mess it up. And so if you want to like, do you want to go a little bit deeper just on what that...”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We also acquired the athletic, and that was back in around the same time. 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, I really feel like news, sports, games, cooking, audio and shopping, like 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 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such an important category for us. We really see games and demand for games as 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 more reasons to feel like they had a relationship with the New York Times every day. So 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the 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 as like this gesture of love for his partner. And I certainly wasn't the only person to 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 had already taken notice well before the piece 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 really successful word games that we have at the New York Times, like spelling B or the Crossword mini. But if anything, Josh was really, you know, forthright that he created it because he was inspired by those games. And then in the context of just our subscription strategy games,”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 has been like. So I first heard about Wordle in early January.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the newsroom has set it up. And something that is just, again, very interesting about the way that. Are set up is that we have our newsroom and then we have 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 our coverage. I mean, we have 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 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. That is what the newsroom kind of retains as editorial.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, what we have is we have a centralized interactive news team, graphics team, data journalism team. And so those editors partner with different journalists when they have really big stories to kind of help. Help bring their story to life”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the 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't operate in those two modes. It's like in the moment, in the moment of the story, 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, we'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 in Ukraine trying to give you a sense of what's happening in a very”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 figure out how to shape that story in the most magical way. 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 storytelling for really big stories 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 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. So these are teams that are really autonomous in the newsroom. So for one off truly special features, like I'll give you an example of one that I found to be particularly. I don't know if you read Jody Cantor, who is one of our really incredible investigative reporter, you might know for some of her work that she did around Me Too and Harvey Weinstein in that investigation. 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, yeah. I mean, one of the things that's, I mean, we have a newsroom of over 2,000 people. And so you basically have people who've been 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 really pull in others like from visuals, from interactives to say, 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 help dream up how that story might be told.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 credits do, 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and more efficient for really engineers to ship 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.”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 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 in the new space. And then there's a totally different third bucket of mission that we have, which is all of our platform teams. And so this is everything from”
2022-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source