Alex Hardiman: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? Let's start with structure. First, I love this question talking about my team because I love hyping them. They're amazing, and our success is truly only as good as our people. Yeah, it is so true. For us, when we think about our org structure, the way to set that up so that our people can really do their best work is that we have two axis. We have functions and then we have missions. I oversee two functions, which is the functions of product and design. The functions themselves, it's normal of what you would find in terms of functional responsibilities. We focus on standards of craft and excellence, career growth, career frameworks, equitable promotion processes, community of practices, skill development, all of that. But missions is where a lot of the work happens. These are cross-functional teams, very similar to what we had at a place like Facebook. These cross-functional teams are led by usually a general manager, a product leader, or an engineering leader. They're all pursuing the same high level goals and objectives. Cross-functional missions at the Times, it can include a lot of the same skill sets that you would find at a tech company, PMs, engineers, designers, data scientists, researchers, product marketers. But the big difference is we also have editors, if it's a product space that directly shapes our journalism. I can talk more about that because it's a pretty interesting differentiating factor. Yeah, that's super interesting. There's a journalist within cross-functional product teams?…

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