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

“Exactly. 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 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 like 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.”
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 include a lot of the same skill sets 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. And I can talk more about that because it's a pretty interesting differentiating factor.”
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
“Let's start with structure. So, first, I just love this question talking about my team because I love hyping them. They are amazing. And our success is truly like only as good as our people. Yeah, 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, 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 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
“Products that put 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. And it's a really, I mean, it's a huge ambition. We want to get to 15 million subscribers by 2027, right? Just over 9 million today. And I really think we can do it.”
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 actually have the solar system metaphor where for us uses 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 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, 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”
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
“Think that's right. We did this pretty great exercise and kind of strategy projects over the last year. 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 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 really capture as much of 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,”
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
“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 understand and engage with the world. So we have cooking, we have games, we have sports, we have wirecutter, right? Which is a great recommendation surface. We're playing with a new audio app all around audio journalism. And so those are actually like we have 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 really wants to know what's happening and wants to be able to again active.”
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
“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 wave of products in the 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 was kind of, I would say, like 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 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 coverage. And so that's where we, again, we really started rebundling the breadth and depth of value.”
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 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. And so it's a really kind of great bounded product in and of itself. But about 25 years ago, we started shifting over to digital, the web, and mobile, the world just fully opened up.”
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
“Here's what type of leader you were, you know, a couple of years ago. Here are the conditions on the ground now. How do you feel about X? How do you feel about Y? 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 best chance of a lifetime to come back and try to do my job better than I had been able to do it before. And that'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 felt really lucky. I mean, when I left on the New York Times, 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 come back and just do my job better because 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 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, you know, my boss at the time, but it did actually feel more like therapy where when you've worked with people for a decade before and you go in, the conversation isn't, you know, the normal list of interview questions. It's like, okay.”
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
“Well, that's, I mean, I feel like we kind of just, you know, we're almost kind of at present, which is 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 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 relaunched 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 since.”
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
“Awesome sometimes. I'm sure there are moments too where it would be nice to chill, but I am drawn to those types of problems for sure. This feels like therapy, Lenny. I'm kind of into it.”
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
“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 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.”
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
“Would say if you did ask my family and my husband, he would say that I am always attracted to kind of the more chaotic problems. 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 figure out, okay, like what is true? Where do we have conviction? Where do we have questions? What are the most important problems to solve? How do you prioritize? How do you get a team rallied around shared context in one single goal? Like this is these are actually the conditions where product manager setting 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, 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.”
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 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 worse 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. And so 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 intense election cycle.”
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
“Back to that time. I think about wartime product management, right? I mean, you're kind of coming in. 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 diagnose what was actually happening on the platform. And the approach to content on Facebook historically was very binary. You basically had content from friends and family and then you had public content and public content could come from anywhere. It could come from a reputable news organization or it could come from my younger brother posting something and declaring it to be true. 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”
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 was focused on building out a team that was really trying to help microsellers 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 regional 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.”
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
“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, I'll get to one million subscribers if you're lucky. And so it felt like a really like big nervous bed at the time. Thank goodness he kind of helped make a market for paid journalism that has really helped a lot of news organizations find new ways 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 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
“Of 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 and then more and more aggressively until we were just leading with mobile on 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 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”
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 for asking. I mean, I am definitely spent most of my career 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 rolling with it and sort of following 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 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 new space. And that's how I first ended up at the New York Times. And 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.”
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
“One thing that's really interesting is that our impact in 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 an informed democracy at a time when people are struggling to understand basic facts and struggling to understand each other. 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 mission and purpose-driven impact.”
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