Alex Hardiman
Chief Product Officer, The New York Times
Where to hear and read about Alex Hardiman1 episode or test
Alex Hardiman is Chief Product Officer at The New York Times, having worked in news at the Times, Facebook and The Atlantic. The most useful lesson from her is to build software around a core product and let the mission set the business goals, with domain experts inside the product teams.
We're a journalism company, but we're building just tremendous software. And so the product ambitions are only getting bigger and bigger.
An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO, the New York Times)
Alex Hardiman: the story and the lessons
1Alex Hardiman's path from the Times to Facebook and back
Hardiman grew up in a news family and aimed at news products. Her grandfather was a news anchor on the West Coast, and her great-grandmother started one of the first TV stations in the Midwest in the 1950s. Building things in news was her early dream, which is how she first reached the Times.
She says her family wouldn't be surprised by the path.
Her first decade at the Times drove two big shifts. From 2006 to 2016 she helped move the company from print-first to mobile-first, then to a direct-to-consumer subscription model in 2011, despite doubt inside the company.
In 2006 the Times had no mobile presence. Consultants said that with luck it might reach 1 million subscribers over its whole history.
She left to learn product at Facebook and landed in the misinformation fight. She first led a team serving micro sellers in India and other APAC markets. After the 2016 election she moved in early 2017 to lead news product and engineering.
Facebook could not tell trusted journalism from misleading content: a reputable newsroom and her younger brother declaring something true looked the same. The platform lacked the classification, goals and incentives to treat coverage differently.
She meets chaos by building structure and picking one shared goal. Her method is to decide what is true, where she has conviction and which problems matter most. She then rallies a team around one goal and lets other things slide.
Lenny's Eye of Sauron metaphor advises working beside the CEO's top priority. She heads straight toward it.
A year at The Atlantic made her a better product leader. She launched its consumer business there, then returned to the Times in late 2019, just before the pandemic.
She treated her 2016 exit as an externship. Working in different contexts built pattern recognition across a diversity of problems.
2How Hardiman's Times grows a subscription bundle
Hardiman treats news as the sun and other products as satellites. News carries the brand, the trust and the largest audience. Games, cooking, sports, shopping and audio share its DNA of trusted journalism, expert creators and strong product experience.
The bundle connects them so someone who arrives through news or Wordle can discover the rest. "News is the sun in the sense that it's why we exist."
The Times sized its market before choosing categories. A strategy exercise asked where the Times could be truly valuable every single day. It found about 135 million people worldwide willing to pay, and set a goal of 15 million subscribers by 2027, up from just over 9 million.
The resulting list of categories also tells the team when it has enough and should improve existing products instead.
A direct customer relationship came before the subscription business. The Times took a destination-first approach that rebundled its content on its own properties. Relying on platforms for distribution does not support a thriving subscription business.
Cooking, games, sports, Wirecutter and an audio app now stand as fully fledged destinations.
Acquisitions turned a news brand into a daily companion. Until this year the Times was a news brand with adjacent lifestyle products. Wordle and The Athletic, plus growth in Cooking and Wirecutter, changed that.
A day could run from breaking news to Spelling Bee, an Eric Kim dinner and a Wirecutter rice cooker. Hardiman says peers like the Journal, the Post, the FT and the Guardian do excellent work but none offers this range.
She sets business goals in service of the mission. Growing subscribers is the metric, but the subscription business exists to strengthen an informed democracy. Impact also includes a deeply reported story that triggers a policy change or a new law.
At Facebook the focus was scale, engagement and revenue, which she calls appropriate there. She did not feel the wider link between business and mission there.
3How Hardiman organizes product and editorial work
Every team sits on two axes: function and mission. Hardiman oversees the product and design functions, which own craft standards, growth frameworks, promotion processes and communities of practice. Cross-functional missions, led by a general manager, product leader or engineering leader, ship the work.
Missions are consumer, monetization or platform. Shared platform missions such as the commerce engine, ML and experimentation tooling scale across every product in the bundle.
Editors sit inside product teams next to PMs and engineers. Consumer missions include editors alongside PMs, designers, data scientists, researchers and product marketers. Editorial expertise is combined with data and research signal.
Hardiman says PMs are becoming more editorial and editors more product minded.
Editorial judgment trains the Times algorithms. Home screen algorithms train on editorial importance scores from the 2,000-plus journalists, and still work toward reach, engagement and conversion.
At Facebook, news ranking could only train on engagement, never on the quality of the piece.
Hardiman wants PMs to own content, distribution and product together. Times PMs work across the full stack. Her view is that the best products are born when journalism and product levers combine.
At Facebook the team controlled software and distribution but could not judge content quality.
Story formats start as newsroom one-offs, then get scaled. Embedded graphics and interactive teams skip roadmaps because news moves fast. A storytelling product team spots what works, tests product-market fit with editors and builds shared tooling.
Most of the Times' fancy stories now run on shared platforms. Jodi Kantor's remote-worker piece, which showed each reader their own productivity score, came from this model.
Product teams have no say over which stories get chosen. Newsroom and business sides sit under different leadership and collaborate intensely. Storytelling and live product teams sit in the newsroom.
They help stories find their widest audience, but selection stays with editors.
4Hardiman's calls on Wordle, COVID and burnout
Integrating Wordle meant rebuilding the back end and leaving the game alone. Wordle was a simple web game whose stats and streaks lived in the browser. The team rewrote it on the Times stack and linked it to a free account so streaks carry over.
The board and core loop stayed unchanged. "We really wanted to make sure not to interfere with the core magic of the experience." The deal itself took only weeks, faster than any other acquisition she has been part of.
She asks whether the company can integrate before it acquires. Players from 8-year-olds to 88-year-olds feel a bond with Wordle, so the games team moved carefully. Mid-migration, users were split across old and new versions.
On the day the Roe v. Wade draft leaked, the next answer was a loaded word that could not be changed for everyone.
The Times explained the Wordle mishap publicly and plainly. It said it was mid-integration and not commenting on the news, and explained what happened and why. Exposing the product development process helps demystify rumors.
Many people still believe the Times makes Wordle harder. Hardiman says it doesn't.
When COVID hit, she blew up the roadmap. In March 2020 the Times told teams they had a totally different mandate. Engineers were pulled from other teams to build a public COVID case dataset and zip-code lookup tools.
Half of the country came to the Times that month. The work began as one spreadsheet, and the clear mission kept teams unified despite the load.
The Times put public-safety coverage outside the paywall. Key COVID coverage was made free to everybody, even though the Times runs a subscription business.
It follows from the principle that business goals serve the mission. "If it was something related to public safety, we didn't put it behind a paywall."
Hardiman fights burnout by naming what the team will stop doing. The company first added time off, financial support, daycare help and health benefits. Now the bigger lever is focusing on the few things the team must do, because context switching is the hard part.
She says there is no perfect answer and the Times is not always perfect at it.
An inside look at how the New York Times builds product | Alex Hardiman (CPO, the New York Times)
Explains how the New York Times builds product around a subscription bundle, with editors embedded in product teams and journalism and software built together. Shows how the Times targets 15 million subscribers by 2027 (just over 9 million today) and how it integrated Wordle without breaking what players loved.
Hardiman grew up in a news family and aimed at news products. Her grandfather was a news anchor on the West Coast, and her great-grandmother started one of the first TV stations in the Midwest in the 1950s. Building things in news was her early dream, which is how she first reached the Times.
She says her family wouldn't be surprised by the path.
Her first decade at the Times drove two big shifts. From 2006 to 2016 she helped move the company from print-first to mobile-first, then to a direct-to-consumer subscription model in 2011, despite doubt inside the company.
In 2006 the Times had no mobile presence. Consultants said that with luck it might reach 1 million subscribers over its whole history.
She left to learn product at Facebook and landed in the misinformation fight. She first led a team serving micro sellers in India and other APAC markets. After the 2016 election she moved in early 2017 to lead news product and engineering.
Facebook could not tell trusted journalism from misleading content: a reputable newsroom and her younger brother declaring something true looked the same. The platform lacked the classification, goals and incentives to treat coverage differently.
She meets chaos by building structure and picking one shared goal. Her method is to decide what is true, where she has conviction and which problems matter most. She then rallies a team around one goal and lets other things slide.
Lenny's Eye of Sauron metaphor advises working beside the CEO's top priority. She heads straight toward it.
A year at The Atlantic made her a better product leader. She launched its consumer business there, then returned to the Times in late 2019, just before the pandemic.
She treated her 2016 exit as an externship. Working in different contexts built pattern recognition across a diversity of problems.
Hardiman treats news as the sun and other products as satellites. News carries the brand, the trust and the largest audience. Games, cooking, sports, shopping and audio share its DNA of trusted journalism, expert creators and strong product experience.
The bundle connects them so someone who arrives through news or Wordle can discover the rest. "News is the sun in the sense that it's why we exist."
The Times sized its market before choosing categories. A strategy exercise asked where the Times could be truly valuable every single day. It found about 135 million people worldwide willing to pay, and set a goal of 15 million subscribers by 2027, up from just over 9 million.
The resulting list of categories also tells the team when it has enough and should improve existing products instead.
A direct customer relationship came before the subscription business. The Times took a destination-first approach that rebundled its content on its own properties. Relying on platforms for distribution does not support a thriving subscription business.
Cooking, games, sports, Wirecutter and an audio app now stand as fully fledged destinations.
Acquisitions turned a news brand into a daily companion. Until this year the Times was a news brand with adjacent lifestyle products. Wordle and The Athletic, plus growth in Cooking and Wirecutter, changed that.
A day could run from breaking news to Spelling Bee, an Eric Kim dinner and a Wirecutter rice cooker. Hardiman says peers like the Journal, the Post, the FT and the Guardian do excellent work but none offers this range.
She sets business goals in service of the mission. Growing subscribers is the metric, but the subscription business exists to strengthen an informed democracy. Impact also includes a deeply reported story that triggers a policy change or a new law.
At Facebook the focus was scale, engagement and revenue, which she calls appropriate there. She did not feel the wider link between business and mission there.
Every team sits on two axes: function and mission. Hardiman oversees the product and design functions, which own craft standards, growth frameworks, promotion processes and communities of practice. Cross-functional missions, led by a general manager, product leader or engineering leader, ship the work.
Missions are consumer, monetization or platform. Shared platform missions such as the commerce engine, ML and experimentation tooling scale across every product in the bundle.
Editors sit inside product teams next to PMs and engineers. Consumer missions include editors alongside PMs, designers, data scientists, researchers and product marketers. Editorial expertise is combined with data and research signal.
Hardiman says PMs are becoming more editorial and editors more product minded.
Editorial judgment trains the Times algorithms. Home screen algorithms train on editorial importance scores from the 2,000-plus journalists, and still work toward reach, engagement and conversion.
At Facebook, news ranking could only train on engagement, never on the quality of the piece.
Hardiman wants PMs to own content, distribution and product together. Times PMs work across the full stack. Her view is that the best products are born when journalism and product levers combine.
At Facebook the team controlled software and distribution but could not judge content quality.
Story formats start as newsroom one-offs, then get scaled. Embedded graphics and interactive teams skip roadmaps because news moves fast. A storytelling product team spots what works, tests product-market fit with editors and builds shared tooling.
Most of the Times' fancy stories now run on shared platforms. Jodi Kantor's remote-worker piece, which showed each reader their own productivity score, came from this model.
Product teams have no say over which stories get chosen. Newsroom and business sides sit under different leadership and collaborate intensely. Storytelling and live product teams sit in the newsroom.
They help stories find their widest audience, but selection stays with editors.
Integrating Wordle meant rebuilding the back end and leaving the game alone. Wordle was a simple web game whose stats and streaks lived in the browser. The team rewrote it on the Times stack and linked it to a free account so streaks carry over.
The board and core loop stayed unchanged. "We really wanted to make sure not to interfere with the core magic of the experience." The deal itself took only weeks, faster than any other acquisition she has been part of.
She asks whether the company can integrate before it acquires. Players from 8-year-olds to 88-year-olds feel a bond with Wordle, so the games team moved carefully. Mid-migration, users were split across old and new versions.
On the day the Roe v. Wade draft leaked, the next answer was a loaded word that could not be changed for everyone.
The Times explained the Wordle mishap publicly and plainly. It said it was mid-integration and not commenting on the news, and explained what happened and why. Exposing the product development process helps demystify rumors.
Many people still believe the Times makes Wordle harder. Hardiman says it doesn't.
When COVID hit, she blew up the roadmap. In March 2020 the Times told teams they had a totally different mandate. Engineers were pulled from other teams to build a public COVID case dataset and zip-code lookup tools.
Half of the country came to the Times that month. The work began as one spreadsheet, and the clear mission kept teams unified despite the load.
The Times put public-safety coverage outside the paywall. Key COVID coverage was made free to everybody, even though the Times runs a subscription business.
It follows from the principle that business goals serve the mission. "If it was something related to public safety, we didn't put it behind a paywall."
Hardiman fights burnout by naming what the team will stop doing. The company first added time off, financial support, daycare help and health benefits. Now the bigger lever is focusing on the few things the team must do, because context switching is the hard part.
She says there is no perfect answer and the Times is not always perfect at it.