Alex Hardimen

AI strategy should focus on using algorithms to scale human expertise and judgment rather than just optimizing for engagement.

"We're training algorithms on specific data sets, like editorial important scores that actually come from our journalists. What that allows us to do is actually scale editorial judgment to a large grou..."

Shifting to a direct-to-consumer subscription model requires building a 'destination-first' approach to own the customer relationship.

"The second big thing that marked my journey at The New York Times was the shift to a direct to consumer subscription model... it helped make a market for paid journalism, that has really helped a lot..."

Managing through a crisis requires 'wartime' humility to accurately diagnose problems before attempting solutions.

"I think about wartime product management, right? You're coming in, and I think there was... this incredible humility that was needed to really understand and first diagnose what was actually happening..."

The most valuable PMs are those who can navigate problems that lack a pre-existing playbook.

"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 has ever really done..."

In content-heavy organizations, cross-functional teams should include subject matter experts (like editors) directly in the product mission.

"Cross-functional missions at the Times... 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 th..."

Effective collaboration in creative industries requires balancing data-driven KPIs with expert human judgment.

"Product managers at the Times really need to understand the blend of art and science. They really need to value expert editorial judgment as they're also looking at individual KPIs, customer research..."

Product vision in media should center on the core content (journalism) enhanced by a user experience that drives real-world engagement.

"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 journalis..."

Use a 'solar system' model to define a product portfolio where a core 'sun' product provides the brand equity and audience for satellite products.

"We have the solar system metaphor where for us news is the sun in the sense that it's why we exist. It is what gives us our brand heritage and reputation. It's what instills trust. It's also where we..."

Align business goals (like subscriptions) as a means to fund and achieve a broader societal mission.

"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...."

Prioritization requires creating a structured model to separate known truths from hypotheses and rallying the team around a single goal.

"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..."

In times of crisis, leaders must be willing to completely discard existing roadmaps to address immediate, high-stakes mandates.

"It is 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.'"

When shipping an acquired product, prioritize technical integration and feature parity (like stats/streaks) to maintain user trust.

"It was a pretty big effort to rewrite Wordle in our tech stack, give people the ability to store their stats and streaks, bring games to all of our major surfaces. We just tried to do it in a thoughtf..."