Alex Hardiman: belief

Transcript context

…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. I think that's right. We did this pretty great exercise and strategy projects over the last year. We took a look and we said, "What is the largest addressable market where The New York Times can be truly valuable every single day to a group of people? " What we found was that there are about 135 million people around the world we believe are willing to pay for the type of high quality journalism based products that the New York Times produces, in the categories of news, gameplay, cooking and recipes, sports, which is why we acquired the athletic shopping recommendations and audio. In order for us to really capture as much of that audience and really serve them well, there are really three things that we need to do to make that essential subscription work. The first is we absolutely need to have the best news destination in the world. When you think about the New York Times, we actually 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 just have the largest audience when you think about a funnel for our portfolio, and it's also where we just have the most amount of high quality coverage. But then that sun helps you give birth to other satellite planets or products that have a lot of the same DNA. Again, like great trusted journalism, great journalists who just have real expertise. A great product experience that allows you to really unlock that value distribution reach, and the other ingredients that you would need for successful products to work. We're really focused on building out beyond news products that really help people engage with their passions and life needs that go beyond news. Then, the third thing is what you're describing as the bundle, how do we create a connected family of products that puts all of those things together so that wherever you come into the New York Times, to news or maybe through Wordle, you know that you're having the best experience within that category. But then you also can quickly experience and discover everything else that we offer. That's the strategy and the vision, and it's a huge ambition. We want to get to 15 million subscribers by 2027. We're just over 9 million today, and I really think we can do it. Awesome. I actually wanted to chat about goals and how you think about success as a product team. I imagine the north star metric is what you just said, which is subscribers. If that's true, what other goals do you have across teams? Maybe even further, I'm packing a lot of questions into one question, but I'm curious just how your product team looks. How many PMs do you have? Roughly, how do you structure the teams? Then, roughly, what kind of goals do they all have to try and imagine the product team at New York Times?…

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