The New York Times

The New York Times isn't a typical startup—it's a 150-year-old institution that has repeatedly reinvented itself at critical moments. When Alex Hardiman returned to the Times in late 2019, the organization had already begun its transformation from print to digital and launched a direct-to-consumer subscription model back in 2011. That initial bet was controversial; consultants had warned that maybe 2 million subscribers was realistic "if you're lucky." But the Times proved skepticism wrong, becoming a market-maker for paid journalism across the industry.

Hardiman's first decade at the Times (2006-2016) was consumed by two massive transformations. First came the shift from print-first to mobile-first thinking—in 2006, the Times had virtually no mobile presence, but by recognizing the iPhone's potential early, the organization reimagined journalism for a new medium. Second was the subscription pivot in 2011, which required rebundling the value people once found in the Sunday newspaper into a digital destination they'd pay for.

When Hardiman returned in 2019, the organization had already learned that bundling worked. The strategy was clear: identify the largest addressable market where the Times could be valuable every single day, and build products in those categories. Analysis showed approximately 135 million people worldwide would pay for high-quality journalism-based products in news, games, cooking, sports, and audio.

Unlike traditional SaaS startups, the Times had an established subscriber base to work from. But growth required expanding the bundle. Games proved critical—games don't feel like news, they're fun, they give people daily reasons to return. The launch of Wordle in January 2022 became a perfect case study. When a Times reporter wrote about Josh Wardle (a software engineer in Brooklyn who'd created the game as a gift for his partner), everyone inside the Times immediately recognized its potential. The games team, led by general manager Jonathan Knight, had already reached out to Wardle about joining their portfolio. Within weeks—faster than any acquisition Hardiman had been part of—the deal was done.

The Wordle integration revealed the complexity of product work at a mission-driven organization. The core game loop had to remain unchanged; people had emotional connections to their streaks and stats. But Wordle originally stored everything in local browser storage, meaning players lost their progress if they switched devices or browsers. The solution was to migrate Wordle to the Times' tech stack and connect it to free New York Times accounts, preserving stats while enabling play across all the Times' surfaces.

The integration was mid-stream when a bizarre coincidence occurred: the Wordle solution for the day the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade draft ruling leaked happened to be "fetus"—a word loaded months prior by Wardle. Because some users were on the original game and others on the new version, the Times couldn't uniformly change the word backend. Instead, they chose radical transparency, explaining the technical reality to the public. The gamble paid off; rather than spark conspiracy theories, honesty diffused tension.

The COVID-19 pandemic presented another defining moment. In March 2020, when the world shut down, the Times pivoted entirely. Hardiman went remote (famously working from a laundry closet in Vermont while managing childcare), but the mission became paramount. The organization launched a comprehensive public COVID dataset (which nobody else was doing), built new data tools for tracking cases and vaccination rates by zip code, made critical COVID coverage free, and published internal safety guidance for reporters. At the height of the pandemic, half the U.S. came to the Times for information. It was impact in its purest form.

Today, the Times operates six fully fledged product destinations: news, games, cooking, sports, audio, and shopping (via Wirecutter). The strategy is deliberately bundling them into a single essential subscription. The organization structure reflects this ambition—instead of siloed teams, the Times uses "missions" (consumer missions like games and news, monetization missions like subscriber growth, and platform missions providing shared infrastructure). Editors are embedded within consumer product teams, ensuring journalism shapes product decisions while remaining independent from commercial pressures.

With over 9 million subscribers and a goal of 15 million by 2027, the Times is proving that even century-old institutions can execute product discipline. The key differentiator: purpose isn't secondary to metrics. Purpose drives metrics. As Hardiman notes, the Times exists to "seek the truth and help people understand the world"—that mission informs every product decision, from how stories are told to which games are bundled to how acquisitions are integrated. It's product management as a force for democratic health.