Alex Hardiman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh, wow. That's three days from now when we're recording. I wonder when this comes out. I'm curious, at a company like New York Times, which is, I imagine people think when they think product, they think it's the newspaper. At Airbnb we have this challenge where when we talk to hosts, "Here's the product." You're like, "What is your product? Is it our homes?" You have to help people understand, "Okay, when we talk product, we mean the website and app." What do you think of the product at The New York Times? Then, is it a challenge to help people understand, here's what the product team does? It's a really good question. 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. For about 150 years, our product was pretty simple. It was a printed newspaper, which is still very beloved today, but the UX of the newspaper was, it was a predictable structure. It was a very finite amount of news. It was time bound, which I think is a really lovely thing in terms of setting expectation. It also has the packaging of the newspaper just such serendipity, where you can move across news, opinion, culture, games. It's a really great bounded product in and of itself. But about 25 years ago, when we started shifting over to digital, the web, and mobile, the world just fully opened up in a way. We just saw this really tremendous disaggregation and distribution of our journalism. We really tried to meet the moment by building a wide array of products in the news space to extend our reach. Our products then, our digital products were our website, our apps, newsletters, we dabbled with a lot in the VR/AR space early on. That was, I would say, the first big extension of our products. When we then pivoted though to a subscription model, it was a really interesting moment where we actually had to take more of a destination first approach. It was almost like the beginning of us rebundling all of what we did, but on our own destination again, in digital destination. Because in order to build a really thriving subscription business, you really need a direct relationship with your customer as opposed to just relying on platforms to really distribute your coverage. That's where, again, we really started rebundling the breadth and depth of value that people once found in the Sunday newspaper at digital scale. Now, today, our product bundle includes even so much more than news, which I hope we'll talk about a little bit more later. We've really scaled our products in a bunch of different categories where we feel like we can really help people understand and engage with the world. We have cooking, we have games, we have sports, we have Wirecutter, which is a great innovation surface. We're playing with a new audio app all around audio journalism. We have now six fully fledged different product destinations. The next thing for us to do is to really figure out how to put those together into a bundle that really becomes the essential subscription for any curious English speaking person around the world, who really wants to know what's happening and wants to be able to, again, act and engage and make great decisions based on the products that we build. Got it. It sounds like the strategy is a subscription bundle where you just keep bundling awesome stuff into this bundle. It's an obvious thing everyone has, whether you want cooking or games or The New York Times online.…

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