The Foundation for New Product Development
Discussing innovation through product development can involve many different teams. At The New York Times, our R&D team focuses entirely on transformational changes. Conversely, our new ventures team is focused on building products to reach incremental audiences. Our guiding principle is to create delightful and fun content for our users. Furthermore, we look to take advantage of what The Times offers as a leading news organization.
Currently, we manage three products – Crosswords, Cooking and Parenting. Of the three products, Crosswords is the most mature and has a very strong subscription base. Cooking is at mid-stage and we recently introduced a paywall for subscribers to drive new revenue. Finally, our newest product is Parenting, which is in early-stage development and being built from the ground up.
From a structural standpoint, our team is very tight-knit and shares complete ownership of our daily operations. Everyone is aware of our business performance – including the editorial and design teams. Even if they don’t have direct accountability for revenue, at least they feel a sense of shared responsibility for the business doing well.
Teams own their roadmaps and can make their own tradeoff decisions. As a result, our group moves faster than other groups at The Times. Furthermore, we restructured our teams to remove as many layers of management as possible.
Our strategy and levers for business performance are clear. Above all, we are a subscription business first and think about what is most beneficial for our daily users. For example, our cooking business drives revenue from a variety of sources (meal delivery service, cookbooks, etc.). However, we focus on our subscribers first and ensure that our content reflects the preferences of our primary audience.
In summary, our team operates with some degree of independence. That said, we use the credibility and trust in The Times to our advantage in setting up our products for success.