Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It is really cool. It's one of the, I think, most gratifying parts of working at a news organization like the Times. But if you work on a different mission, like a monetization mission, we have two really big ones. One is subscriber growth, the other one that's also really important is digital advertising. They build centralized commercial products that we can then scale across all of the products in our bundle. The subscriber growth team, for instance, they look at making sure that we have really great account ID management for subscribers. If you're buying a subscription through games or through news. Or, if you're on the digital advertising team, you're trying to make sure that we have a first party data program that's really privacy safe, that works as well in cooking as it does in the news space. Then, there's a totally different third bucket of mission that we have, which is all of our platform teams. This is everything from monetization platforms like our commerce engine, which is so important, because we're a subscription business, to data platforms where you might have our ML platform or experimentation tooling, to just basic infrastructure. Those are shared across the bundle, which just really helps make it so much easier, more efficient for really engineers to ship code and do their best work. A lot of this actually, I think, probably is pretty familiar to how you might organize at a tech company minus the editors. Awesome. On that info piece, that reminds me of something I definitely wanted to talk about, which is something New York Times is really known for is the visualizations and these immersive stories that you all put out. I'm so curious just how that gets done. I feel like if I was on a product team at a regular, like a big tech FAANG company, I'd be like, "Shit, all these ad hoc things I got to do for all these stories, such a pain in the butt." That's so important to the New York Times and the online experience. I'm curious just like what is it like to build these things, say the election widgets, and all of that stuff? Then, I don't know, I was just reading a story about climate change and it's this really beautiful immersive story of just what is happening with the world. There's a bunch of questions there, but I guess roughly just how does that get done, something like that? Well, first, thanks for saying that. I really appreciate it. I do think there's something really special about some of the ways that we marry the journalism and the presentation. I want to start just by giving credit where credit's due, which is I think some of the most interesting and inventive and compelling formats, they actually do start off as one-off experiments that are spun up in the newsroom by embedded teams that we have within graphics, visual journalism, interactive news teams. This is where we have editors, journalists, engineers, data scientists, designers, literally all hunkered down together focusing on how to make one story come to life in the best possible way.…

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