An inside look at how the New York Times builds product

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 than that.

This is a product leader, it's a real wartime moment where you just need to blow up roadmaps, share context with everyone and say, 'Okay, everyone, we have a totally different mandate than what we did a couple weeks ago.'

Alex Hardiman was discussing how news organizations adapt their editorial processes during major breaking news events, where traditional content planning becomes impractical.

The speed of news is so fast that you don't have time to mess with roadmaps. We really have teams who are freed up from some of the normal processes around that, so they can really just focus on storytelling for really big stories and pieces.

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.

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 important scores that actually come from our journalists.

One thing that's really interesting is that our impact and our business goals are in service of our mission, which is to seek the truth and help people understand the world, not the other way around.

When you're a product manager, you're involved again in 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.

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.

At the Times, when I think about how our best products are born, it's when you bring journalism and product lovers together. That means that PMs at the Times really need to understand the blend of art and science.

I just think that that's where product people thrive. The idea of being able to take all of these crazy inputs, trying to create a very structured model to figure out, 'Okay, what is true? Where do we have conviction? Where do we have questions? What are the most important problems to solve?'

What they do is they really take notice of things that are starting to work in more of the experimental phase, some of these one-offs. 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.

Wordle is a popular daily word puzzle game that was acquired by The New York Times in 2022.

This was a moment where we just had to come out and really 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.' Everyone understood.