Inside the New York Times' Plan to Build the Essential Subscription

Hardiman says she has spent most of her career at the intersection of journalism and tech, and that journalism runs in her family: her grandfather was a news anchor and her great-grandmother started one of the first TV stations in the Midwest. Her first stint at the Times lasted a decade, from 2000 to 2016. It included the shift from print-first to mobile-first, at a time when the paper had no mobile presence in 2006, and the 2011 move to a direct-to-consumer subscription model.

She recalls that there was skepticism, including inside the Times, about whether people would pay for journalism, and consultants suggested the business might one day reach one million subscribers if it was lucky. She then left for Facebook to learn product in a digital-first company. She joined to work on small-business messaging in markets like India, but after the 2016 election she moved to lead the news product and engineering teams in early 2017.

Hardiman calls that period "wartime product management". Facebook had treated content as either friends and family or public, and the team tried to separate factually accurate journalism from dubious or misleading material. She says chaotic problems are where product people thrive, since they require structuring crazy inputs into what is true, where there is conviction, and what to prioritize, along with grit and the ability to let other things slide.

After a year at The Atlantic, where she helped launch its consumer business, Hardiman returned to the Times in late 2019, right before the pandemic. She describes leaving in 2016 as an externship and says her return interviews felt like therapy, since people who had known her for a decade asked who she had become as a leader and what she had learned.

Asked what the Times' product is, she says it is the journalism, married to a useful user experience that helps people act on it. For about 150 years the product was a bounded, time-limited printed newspaper with built-in serendipity across news, opinion, culture and games. Digital opened that up, with websites, apps, newsletters and early VR/AR experiments, but the subscription model forced a destination-first approach because a direct customer relationship cannot rely on platforms alone.

That is why the Times has been rebundling the breadth people once found in the Sunday paper. The bundle now includes cooking, games, sports, Wirecutter and a new audio app, which she describes as six full product destinations. The next job, she says, is to put them together into the essential subscription for a curious English speaker.

Hardiman says a strategy exercise last year asked for the largest addressable market where the Times could be valuable every day. The answer was about 135 million people willing to pay for high-quality journalism-based products across news, games, cooking, sports, shopping recommendations and audio. The Athletic was acquired for the sports category.

She says three things must work. The Times needs the best news destination in the world, which she describes as the sun in a solar system: it is why the company exists, gives it trust and the biggest audience, and gives birth to satellite products with the same DNA of trusted journalism and real expertise. It also needs beyond-news products that engage people's passions and life needs, and a connected family of products so someone arriving through news or Wordle can discover the rest.

The ambition is 15 million subscribers by 2027, up from just over 9 million, and Hardiman says she believes it can be done. Later she explains that games work as a counterpoint to news: they let people take a break and feel like time well spent, not empty calories.

Hardiman oversees product and design, organized along two axes: functions and missions. Functions set standards of craft, career frameworks, promotion processes and skill development, while missions are cross-functional teams, led by a general manager, product leader or engineering leader. They include PMs, engineers, designers, data scientists, researchers and product marketers, and, where the product shapes journalism, editors.

There are three kinds of missions: consumer, monetization and platform. Editors are embedded in consumer missions such as news, cooking, games and audio, bringing their expertise to complement data and research. Monetization missions cover subscriber growth, including account ID management across games and news, and digital advertising with a privacy-safe first-party data program.

Platform teams, including the commerce engine, ML and experimentation tooling and basic infrastructure, are shared across the bundle so engineers can ship efficiently. Hardiman notes that apart from the editors, this would look familiar at a tech company.

Hardiman says the most inventive formats usually begin as one-off experiments from autonomous graphics, visual journalism and interactive news teams in the newsroom, where editors, journalists, engineers, data scientists and designers work together on one story. A reporter with decades on a beat, such as climate, often has the seed of the idea and then pulls in others. Her example is Jodi Kantor's story on workplace monitoring, which showed readers their own productivity score as they read it.

Because news moves so fast, those teams are freed from normal roadmap processes. Separately, a storytelling product team watches which experiments work and, with editors, tests them for product-market fit so they can scale across the report, including video, visuals and live. She says live coverage has broken out of "the tyranny of the article", with tweet-length updates filed from the ground in Ukraine.

That team works in two modes: in the moment with editors, making calls without perfect data, and building end-to-end systems and tooling when not shipping at news speed. The majority of such stories now use the platforms. Hardiman is not involved in how reporters get time from the interactive teams, saying "somehow it works", and she stresses that product teams never influence which stories are chosen.

Hardiman says she first read about Wordle in January in a Times column about its creator, Josh Wardle, and that Jonathan Knight, general manager of games, had already contacted him. The game shared DNA with Spelling Bee and the Crossword Mini, and fit the strategy of games as a counterpoint to news. The deal took place in a matter of weeks, faster than any other acquisition she had been part of.

She says the Times has the categories it needs for 15 million subscribers, though it would still like to hear about the next Wordle. The real lesson, she says, is to ask whether you are ready to integrate. Wordle was a simple web game with no backend, with stats and streaks stored in local browsers, so players lost their history if they changed phone or browser.

The team connected Wordle to a free Times account, rewrote it in the Times tech stack, and put it on the main surfaces while leaving the core game board untouched. A coincidence then arose: the next day's answer, loaded months earlier by the founder, was "fetus" just as the Supreme Court draft ruling on Roe v. Wade leaked. Mid-migration, the word could not be changed for everyone, so the Times explained transparently what had happened, and Hardiman says the explanation was understood.

Hardiman started in late 2019, just before the pandemic, and recalls the Times going fully remote in March 2020. Reporters were already in Wuhan before transmission was understood. As a product leader, she says, it was a wartime moment: roadmaps were blown up, context shared widely, and a new mandate set around the mission of helping people make informed decisions.

The team built a comprehensive public data set of COVID cases that began as a single spreadsheet, with engineers pulled from other teams. They launched new formats and tools, including lookups of infection and later vaccination rates at the zip-code level. The most important coverage was made free because public-safety information should not be behind a paywall, and the internal safety guidance for reporters was published as well.

She says at the height of the pandemic half the country came to the Times, and that the whole organization pivoted from its normal job. On burnout, she says the company first offered more time off and support such as daycare and health benefits, and now focuses on doing a small number of important things and stopping others. The Times is now hybrid, with people back in the office a couple of days a week while still allowing fully remote staff.

Hardiman says the Times is in a unique position among news organizations. Until this year it was a news brand with adjacent lifestyle products, but with Wordle and The Athletic, plus growth in cooking and Wirecutter, it can become the essential subscription for news and life needs every day. She paints a user journey: breaking news, coverage of China, a break with Spelling Bee, a Korean dinner party with Eric Kim, and a rice cooker recommendation from Wirecutter.

She adds that the bundle also includes the Britney Spears documentary and the new Hard Fork podcast, and says she does not see other news organizations operating at this scale and ambition. When Lenny jokes that it sounds like a metaverse, she argues that the Times' software connects people to real-world outcomes, such as deciding how to vote or what to cook.

Rachitsky suggests a design-oriented Wirecutter that picks the best product that also looks good in the home, and Hardiman says she will take it back to the team. Her own request to listeners is to say which single feature would make the Times more essential in their daily life.

Hardiman says Times PMs need the same skills as tech PMs, including product sense, execution and leadership, and many move between the two. The key difference is that they work across the full stack: the Times owns its journalism, its distribution and its products, whereas at Facebook the company controlled software and distribution but not content. The best products are born when journalism and product lovers work together, so PMs must value expert editorial judgment alongside KPIs and research.

On the home screen, the team starts with editors curating the most important stories, then trains algorithms on editorial importance scores from journalists, which can still optimize for reach, engagement and conversion. At Facebook, she says, ranking could only be trained on engagement, not on the quality of the information. Times PMs are becoming more editorially minded, and editors more product minded.

Asked about Substack, she says the Times is not anti-algorithm, only wants algorithms that reflect editorial judgment, and she likes writers making a living from their craft. With trust in institutions falling, trust in individual experts matters, so the Times is helping its journalists build subscribe-only newsletters and podcasts, a mini platform within the Times. Her closing point is that at the Times business goals serve the mission of seeking truth and helping people understand the world, so impact includes both subscribers and a story that triggers a policy change or a new law.