‘Only Go After Big Things’

Alex Hardiman remembers pitching a $3 billion idea to her manager at Meta, then told she was thinking too small. His response? Aim for ideas that change the company’s bottom line and “to only go after big things,” she told the Signal 2024 audience in Cincinnati this July.

As the chief product officer at The New York Times (and its first ever), Hardiman is living that lesson at one of the most storied brands in the world, driving new product launches and initiatives from letting readers shop cooking recipes with Instacart to expanding its addictive games platform, which Hardiman says people played 8 billion times in 2023. Every added feature is with the long game in mind, she says.

“We’re a 173-year-old company, and we intend to be here for at least another 173 years,” says Hardiman. “So when we make big moves, we want to drive generational change.”

You can hear more from this conversation between Hardiman and Signal 360’s John Battelle in the video or read our lightly edited transcript below.

TRANSCRIPT:

John Battelle
I’m very excited about this. I mean, this program is just so good. But just like everyone, I’m so excited to talk to, because I’m a consumer of almost all of the products in one way or another. More than YouTube on a daily basis, I spend with The New York Times. And it’s not just because I’m a journalist , it’s because all the other stuff The New York Times is now doing, and the woman behind that is with us. Please join me in welcoming Alex Hardiman, the Chief Product Officer of The New York Times. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming.

Alex Hardiman
Thank you for having me. It has been an incredible day so far. I’m inspired.

You’re getting good ideas?

So many. This concept is really brilliant. Thanks for having me.

I’m glad you’re here, and I can, you know, give you grief about how unintuitive is in fact, a Spelling Bee word.

I am the chief complaint officer, so feel free to bring it.

Obviously, The New York Times is a news organization, and that’s the core of the brand. I imagine it’s pretty busy in the office these days, because there’s a lot of news, a lot of news. But we’re not going to talk about all of that, and we won’t argue about politics. So I want to ask you this, because I’m in the media business, and it is a relatively new role, the Chief Product Officer at a media company. Because forever there was one product and it was the news, right? So what is the Chief Product Officer at The New York Times?

You would be surprised to actually still get that question from reporters at The New York Times. So it’s a fair one. I am the first Chief Product Officer, and it’s probably simplest to describe what a product is at The New York Times, and then it makes sense what I do.

In the most basic sense, our product is our journalism, and we try to marry that journalism with a really compelling and useful user experience that people can act on our journalism to understand and engage with the world around them. That applies to our whole portfolio of news and lifestyle products, which is so much more expansive than it was 10 years ago. We do have news and we’ll talk more about news, but we also now have market leaders in games, sports, cooking, shopping, and there’s some other spaces, like audio, where we’re trying to find fit. And so my job is two things, one, working across the leadership of the company to make sure that we feel like we are investing in the right news and lifestyle categories where we feel like we can win and we can meet a range of new news in life needs to become even more essential to our audiences. And then the second is, within those categories, how do we keep building more and more value and just stay relentlessly focused on growth. So I feel like I have one of the best jobs in the media business.

You do have the best job in the media business.

One of the best.

Of all the seven or eight jobs left you have the best one.I know you’re growing. A lot of other companies are growing, and one of the reasons you’re growing is because of the breadth of products and the innovation that you’ve brought and the fit you found by listening to your audience and expanding it? Can you break down how much percentage of time or engagement is with news. Is that kind of the monster of your business, and how much is it with Wordle or with Games? And Cooking and Audio, there’s a lot of stuff going on. So how does it break down? Maybe broad strokes.

Let’s do that. And your point, I know it’s a joke just about how few players are in the media space, but can I just contextualize where we actually fit in the media space, and then we can break it down.

We were in the news and lifestyle category, but we’re really in a bit of a class of our own, and it’s really hard to actually benchmark our competitive set. If you look at other news and lifestyle publishers, they are doing amazing work, but at a much smaller scale. We tend to bring in anywhere from 50 to 100 million people to our products every week, and that’s a normal week. In peak moments, it can be two to 3X that. If you talk to people in the publishing space, they’ll say, “Well, you’re at the top.” But the truth is, we have so much more room for growth.

If you look at the big video and music streamers, Spotify or Netflix, they have at least 20x the subscriber base that we have. We’re proud to have about 10 and a half million subscribers. But I think for us, it’s a pretty important indication that there we have to be more ambitious as a publishing industry. And we do have so much value creation ahead, if we think about it that way. So we’re kind of like a media platform, actually, of news and lifestyle products that sit somewhere between traditional publishing and the biggest players.

Within that to your point about news, we use this metaphor of the solar system to describe the power of news relative to other products, because it’s a really important distinction for us. News is the sun, meaning news is the reason why The New York Times exists full stop. It is the largest supply of quality coverage. It is also the largest supply of audience coming to us in a given week. It is what drives the most amount of engagement with subscribers, and it does drive the majority, well over half, of our subscriber business and our digital advertising revenue. It’s also so much more than politics and war.

When people think news, you probably think like breaking news. You think live, you think what happened last weekend, and that’s central, but news is also health and wellness and culture and love and relationships and all of these tools to live a really rich life, and that builds equity, and that builds trust and that builds expertise, and those are the elements that then give us brand permission to get into the other lifestyle spaces, like games, cooking, sports. And so people love Games, for instance, because they trust the umbrella of The New York Times brand. And that’s a very important sharing of brand permission that we have that goes from news to essentially the planets of, say, a lifestyle product like Games.

Within the lifestyle category, Games and sports are the two biggest. We’ve seen with Games just incredible growth. We’ve actually our first crossword launched in 1942 during World War II, when people really needed a reprieve from the intensity of the news cycle. So we do have a really long history and legacy with crosswords. But there was this real moment when Wordle just kind of woke people up to the idea that you could actually have a daily habit if you were younger, if you were more international, if you weren’t necessarily willing to commit 30 minutes a day to a crossword, and that’s if you’re really good. That was a really big moment for us to expand into that area. The Athletic which we acquired a few years ago, similarly, has huge market potential. And so we see that we bring in tens of millions of people through these on ramps of lifestyle products. And it’s been fantastic because these are people who are incremental.

There’s been a lot of talk about incrementality today, which I think is so important. For us lifestyle products bring incremental audience and incremental attention that actually complement news and don’t compete with it.

I have noticed, though, that, if I’m the middle of the Bee or Wordle, you’re not trying to push me to news. You’re leaving me alone, which I appreciate. Don’t change.

Can I tell you something really interesting, though we we really try to build games that are, we say, like thoughtfully made and thoughtfully played, because we want to be really thoughtful and respectful of your time. But the number of people who come to Games and then organically find their way to news is pretty astonishing. Or the number of people who come to Games and don’t just buy a game subscription, they buy the full bundle, it’s a pretty remarkable thing where Games is able to still help show the aperture of the brand.

That’s at least in part because the brands are consistent. I know there’s a New York Times editor making decisions about what words are allowed.

Like unintuitive.

Like unintuitive is not allowed, apparently. But others are that make no sense. But you can kind of feel that at work, and it feels like The New York Times is making editorial decisions, that you have an editorial point of view when it comes to your games, or to your cooking, or to the comments in the cooking and the moderation behind the comments in the cooking. I want to pull back for a second, given that we’re talking about the news business and everybody that you worked at the Times for quite a while during the probably, in the media industry. In the news industry, one of the most important pivots of any company, which was The New York Times, deciding, after some memos leaked, and some much introspection, to really focus on building a subscriber base and to really focus redouble your efforts in digital. You were part of all of that. And then you left for a little bit and took a hiatus.

An externship. A three and a half year externship.

But it wasn’t like you went to the Houston Chronicle. You went to Facebook, which was literally the bugaboo of the news industry. So what’d you learn in the belly of the beast?

How much time do we have? No, it’s a great question. Facebook, now Meta and the Times are very, very different companies, but there are a couple of things that I really valued from my time at Meta that are helping me and my teams, I think lead and drive value creation. The first is to only go after big things. I remember one of my very first product reviews. I came in and I was presenting what I thought was a $3 billion idea.

Now by product reviews, explain that in the tech world.

A product review is basically, it’s a product driven company. So a product review is when you come into Mark, or one of his direct reports, and you basically lay out your vision for how you’re going to drive whatever your portfolio is.

Zuckerberg, not Pritchard.

The other mark, the other mark, the lesser Mark. Just kidding. [laughter.]

I was so excited, and I laid this out, and the response that my manager could not have been more underwhelmed. And he said,’Who cares about $3 billion.’

With a B.

With a B. And I looked at him, and he said, ‘I want you to come back and show me what it would take to grow GDP in that market.’ That was a really big moment for me, because I was like, I was thinking too small. And so when you come back to the publishing industry, which has just been battered and really facing so many headwinds, it’s a really big reminder, I think that you know, for us at The New York Times, when we think about what we’re trying to do, we’re a 173-year-old company. We intend to be here for at least another 173 years. I think that at P&G, that really means something too as a company with incredible legacy and tradition. So when we make big moves, we want to drive generational change. So no small things, and really playing the long game, are two really, really important lessons that I took.

Are you, off script here. There isn’t a script, by the way. But are you happy with the Metas of the world right now, from your perch at The New York Times, do you think that they are good partners? Sorry, Facebook people who might be listening online.

Here’s what I honestly think. I think that it is really important for an organization like The New York Times to be very assertive about the role that it wants to play, and therefore how to drive value creation, and in our case, our own business. And when news organizations in the past have put too much reliance on a single platform to distribute their audience, to acquire their audiences, to really drive their revenues, I think that is very, very precarious, because for an organization like The New York Times, our mission is about seeking the truth and helping people understand the world, and we build a business that really helps enable that at scale. Other platforms have different incentives and different goals. Having them pick up and take on the mantle of assuming the responsibility of journalism, I just think as a publisher that that’s our job, and we will find ways to partner with fair value exchange. But that’s very different.

Absolutely. What a great segue to talking about AI, because all of those large platforms are, of course, major players now in AI. And then there’s a new one, open AI, at several new one, Anthropic, OpenAI, many of them backed by those big platforms, and you lead the Times approach to AI, and the company is a standout in the industry and in the headlines for holding out where many of your industry peers have said, ‘We’re going to cut a deal and get as much money as we can right now.’ I mean, from the Atlantic to the AP to a lot of hallowed, 100 plus year old brands have said, you know, we’re going to get a check cut to us right now from these guys because, we don’t want to fight. But The New York Times is suing OpenAI, and if it’s settled this morning, go ahead and make a fool of me, but it hasn’t settled yet, has it?

No.

No matter what, you’ll probably get more money from them if you do settle. But can you talk to me about how that decision was taken and sort of why that necessary tension between the leaders in AI in The New York Times.

It’s really, really interesting. So I’ll just start by saying that at the Times, we do believe that generative AI, I think like so many of you, it really has the potential to be one of the most powerful technologies, leading the next chapter of the internet and potentially the next chapter of our lives. You can see how we are covering it quite relentlessly in the news. Many of you might have seen, for instance, one of our tech columnists got in a conversation with an AI agent who fell in love with him and tried to break up his marriage. I mean, we’ve had some really fascinating reporting.

Kevin Roose.

Kevin Roose. And we are using AI in a bunch of ways to make our journalism more accessible across the business. So there really is a lot of potential. But what we believe is that it is incredibly important for LLMs and the tools to be built and used responsibly, and that means that for people who have an extraordinary amount of high quality content and IP that is very expensive to produce and often is produced at great risk, there just needs to be permission and value exchange. So if you read our complaint against actually both Microsoft and OpenAI, we basically state that we believe that they work together to use our content and our journalism without permission and without fair value exchange. So that’s really what that’s about.

I for one, hope that goes to trial. Just put it out there, because it would be a really fun trial to pay attention to.

Just really quick can we go back to games for a second? Because I’m addicted to the Bee, and sometimes I spend more time with the Bee than I do with the news. And then I feel guilty, and I’m probably the reason, or at least one of them, that people go back and forth because I’m “Oh, I got to go back and read some more news before I can earn my way back to figuring out whatever the pangram is.” So I’d be curious, that’s also probably true for people in food. Are you seeing this as is it growing faster than the overall news? What insights are you seeing from people who are using all of those products? Any change over the last few years?

Let me talk about Games, and then about people who use multiple products because they’re kind of interesting and distinct. Games has just been fun. I’m not going to lie. Actually, my head of Games, if he were here, would maybe roll his eyes a little bit. But I actually call Games the Taylor Swift strategy, because if you think about it, what product can bring together 88-year-olds, multi generations, up to 98-year-olds with such an amazing power to bridge and bond over Wordle connections, Spelling Bee, the Mini.

You must be 20% of SMS messages every time Wordle comes out.

But it’s not just me. Questlove came in and he told us he’s like, “I wake up every morning, I pray, I do my affirmations and I go try to beat my two Wordle groups. Two, because he doesn’t have one, he had two. It has such a powerful habit. So what we have found with Games is that the growth has been really explosive. I mean, we had 8 billion game plays last year. We have tens of millions of people coming in every day and every week, more people play Wordle or Connections now than watch the top prime time and cable TV shows at night. It’s really powerful. And the cultural relevance piece, that is the thing that is been so deep and so wonderful to see. So the growth rate of Games, I have to say, has really surpassed our expectations.

But then what we find is that Games is a great on ramp into other products. Games to the Athletic and sports. Games to News. And from an economic perspective, when people have a really strong habit with just two products in our portfolio, they are more likely to buy the bundle. They are more likely to engage and retain longer, and very importantly, they are more engaged. They’re more likely to pay more over time with a higher ARPU. And so that is the whole model working, where a single product with a high growth rate, like Games will actually start to drive more growth for other products in the portfolio, and incentivize subscribers to actually take the whole thing, because economically, it just makes more sense. That’s why we’re really leaning into the power of each individual funnel and then getting better at cross promoting them, but in a way to your point where if you just want games, we’re not going to push you to Gaza. We want to make sure that you still feel like you’re in control. That’s not happening.

I want to give you an opportunity, because I think like a marketer a lot, and when I heard 8 billion, was it?

8 billion plays last year,

I think, how do I get me some of that? How do I get in there? Thank you for not pushing us to Gaza. But maybe also don’t push us to an ad, which you don’t. But  what are the ways that marketers can engage in this new world, and are you open to co-creating? This is something that P&G has been extremely good at over the years. Is co-creating new ways of engaging with consumers, leveraging new habits.

Absolutely. We, for a very long time, had built a premium digital ad business within news that was derivative our subscription business, premium ad canvases tied to our first party data program, because we now have little over 160 million direct relationships, and so a very high quality, high attention audience. We have now been extending those capabilities and those offerings to Games to sports and other products In the bundle, and the results have been fantastic, actually. We’re very interested, obviously, in partnering with marketers to understand their objectives and to figure out what we can do that is custom and really high efficiency. And I think there’s this meme that The New York Times is really just all politics and news, but we do have all of these other moments of joy and wonder that we create for consumers, which are some of the strongest habits that we have.

We have worked in Cooking with brands like Instacart to figure out how to help like for us, our cooking strategies is to make it easier for people to find and make something delicious in under 30 minutes on any given day. The idea of being able to click with Instacart to get the ingredients delivered in under an hour to then cook that recipe, that’s brilliant. It’s a win win on both sides. So really very interested in figuring out how to work with marketers on true value creation generation that is bidirectional in both ways, because there’s so much more value to co create together. So there’s a lot within news, but also really outside of news as well.

I wish we could keep going. I’d love to go like deep inside the media beltway with you, but we’ll have to end it there. Please join me in thanking Alex Hardiman for coming to Signal.

Thank you.