 Hi, everyone. Mika's very hard to follow. I'll just say that. So, as she already said, I'm Lisa Cam, and I'm here to talk to you about product leadership and some of what I've observed and things I've seen as I transitioned from a large technology company into traditional media. I'll be talking about some of the differences between FANG and the New York Times and corporate insights both from my experiences at Google and from some colleagues who came to the Times from Facebook and Amazon as they've observed very similar things. So, first of all, who am I and why am I talking about this? I spent time, I started in tech at several tech startups, none of which still exist and none of which you've ever heard of. So, those logos did not make the screen. I then spent a long time at IBM where I worked on IBM.com, and then went and did stints at two financial services companies. At the time, and this was a while ago, I found that they were not as focused on technology as I wanted to be, and they were really treating technology at that time as sort of second-class citizens. So, I left, I went to Google and said, I will never go back to a non-technology company. Okay, so, I then spent 12 years at Google, foreign user experience, and eight in product management. Switching into product management at Google was really hard. I didn't fit the classic mold of a product manager, but the opportunity to work there as a product manager was phenomenal. I learned so much, and my understanding of what works, what doesn't was just really strong after that. Little over three years ago, I was recruited to the New York Times, and it was a really exciting opportunity, but I had this moment of thinking, it's not a tech company. But as I thought about it more, I realized that in the 12 years I'd been at Google, the entire world had changed, and that while no the New York Times isn't known for being a tech company, every company is a tech company in some ways these days. Every company needs tech to move forward and to move ahead. And so I thought about it, and I talked to the folks, and decided it was worth a shot. They really seemed to know what they wanted tech to do and why they needed it. So I took a chance and went from a Fang company to a company that's 171 years old. I'll be talking about four different areas of similarities and differences I saw between my time at Google and my experiences at the New York Times. Google and the New York Times are both companies with huge ambition and huge impact, but I'd say at the times there's sort of a much sharper sense of mission and purpose. Deep customer focus is key to all products. Fang companies know this better than anyone else, they know this really well. We have a deep customer focus, but it's a more designed and targeted one. We target our readers, our journalists, and our engineers. Core product skills remain very similar, but we have to look a lot to creativity and reinvention. We've been delivering papers to doorsteps for a very long time, and that's not our focus, our primary focus now. We still do that. We still do that. Subscribe, it's awesome. But we also do draw on that legacy to do a whole lot more. Lastly, much of how we work is similar, but I've seen some really notable differences in scope, impact, and flexibility. I'm going to give some quick context of how the Times is structured. I've found that understanding org structure can be really critical to understanding how companies work and how things play out. Plus, our org structure is a little unusual. At the top of the slide, in its own line, in its own spot, I have the newsroom. The newsroom is really its own organization. It has its own reporting line, it doesn't even report into the CEO. It is its own thing with its own independent direction. It's fascinating. There are a customer and a collaborator, and I'll talk more about that. But the key thing is that really they're a part of a separate organization, and they are a separate organization. Within our digital product org, which we call X-Fun, we generally report along functional lines. And the functions are very similar to what you'd see at a tech company. Product, marketing, tech design, PMO. Somehow I am not rattling through them all right now, but the functions are really how we grow talent, grow people, and make sure that people understand what it means to be a great product manager or a great engineer and understand those sort of functional areas. The X-Fun were also grouped into missions, which enables us to have clear leadership across common groupings of work. I, for example, lead the core platforms mission, which builds a lot of underlying technology, and as such, I work with leadership across all of the other missions to be sure we're all sort of heading in the same direction and are aligned on a set of priorities. Now that I've covered org structure, let's move on to some of the actual work. As I mentioned earlier, at the times we have really significant impact and ambition. You'll find people at the times are every bit as driven to do great work as what you'd see at any fang company. But in addition, we've got a really sharp mission in focus, and that mission and purpose really drives why so many people are there and doing the work we're doing. Our mission, to seek truth and help people understand the world. Big mission, but it's been our mission for over 100 years. It's a mission that we believe is deeply meaningful, and for all of us who work here, it's really... We're here in part because of that mission. It's a real driver and a real motivator. The journalism matters, making independent journalism accessible and available matters. And growing our business matters by extension, growing our revenue is how we continue to support and invest in the newsroom to continue to move ahead. That said, for the last 15 years, our industry has faced an existential transformation. We've needed to radically change our business model to survive. In 2011, we released our paywall. At the time, it was not popular, and consultants said there might be a million people in the world who'd be willing to pay for a subscription. Might. Companies said, OK, and got to work. Over the next several years, they saw what worked, what didn't, and really grew their ambition till the publicly stated goal was to hit 10 million subscriptions by the end of 2025. We actually hit that number last year. So despite those successes, we think we've only hit a relatively small share of what we view as our potential market. As our CEO noted during our investor day, we see the potential target audience of English language readers who would be interested in news, sports, shopping recommendations, all we have to offer, as closer to 135 million adults. And those are people we believe are willing to pay for one or more English language subscriptions. So with that, since we apparently can't just keep a nice simple goal, our new goal is to hit 15 million subscribers by 2027. And to do that, we're going to need to double our 20 to 21 subscriber base. The Times is a company with remarkable impact. The scale we operate can feel immense. But I sometimes describe The Times as a company that punches above its weight. Our influence outweighs our size. The entire company is only about 5,800 people, and 2,600 of those are in our newsroom working on the news gathering and reporting side of the business. So we're tiny compared to a company like Google. And while big news events, such as our election coverage, bring in traffic that is massive for journalism, we just don't operate at the scale of a Fang company. Fang companies, for everything they do, have billions of users a day. That said, this can actually provide some great opportunities for product managers in many ways we can move faster and cover a much broader spectrum of the stack with every product we work on. To trade off, I've certainly known people at Google who have spent a full year for one box on the search results screen. And that box is going to be seen billions of times. But personally, I find it a lot more compelling to work on some of the bigger, more strategic projects that are possible to do at a smaller, more agile organization. Our clarity of mission has also allowed us to develop a single, clear product vision that's across our entire product suite. We aim to be the essential subscription for every curious English-speaking person seeking to understand and engage with the world. And we very much have a mission-first approach to product development. Google started as a technology-driven company, and that approach has led to incredible advances. But as a product manager, it could be frustrating at times. I'd have an engineer come up to me with something really, really cool they've developed and say, you're the product manager. I need a use for this. Sometimes there was a use, sometimes there wasn't. There's no question that giving the engineers the freedom to explore and create new technologies is amazing. And one of the ways Google has been so successful, the engineers who engage in deep research change the world, but they don't necessarily know the next step and how to maximize the impact and how to drive that forward. And it creates some odd tensions at times. I've heard similar stories from friends and colleagues at Amazon and Meta. As a much smaller company, our entire product development org is small compared to a fang. We need to be much more strategic in what we work on. That's where having a clear sense of mission and vision becomes so critical. So at the times we have developed a clear product vision, so we know where we need to be. Having such a clear vision also enables us to break our work down into core strategic goals we are pursuing. Once again, critical to providing a sense of direction and providing more clarity around what work to prioritize. We want to be the best news destination in the world. That's first and foremost. The ability to create and deliver impactful, independent journalism is the cornerstone of everything we do. We're also looking to become a more important part of people's everyday lives. Sometimes people are looking for timely news or investigative reporting. Other days, they may want to play wordle or get shopping recommendations or catch up on what their favorite sports team is doing. These are all different sorts of needs we can help. There is so much we do across different parts of daily life, but people aren't always aware of that. So we've really shifted to having a major focus be on our bundle and how to connect people across all of the different products we own. We really see an incredible synergy between that core news and the lifestyle products that support a series of everyday needs. To deliver on that, we're really working, and one of the key product focuses we have these days is driving the connections between the areas. News should help people find other content, and the other apps should point people back to the news if it's appropriate and contextual, when it makes sense. We also just know from all of our research that people who engage with more than one of our products have better overall engagement rates and better retention rates. So we really want to be sure people are engaging across a wide swath so they understand the value they're getting. Next, I'm going to move on to customer focus. Customer focus is critical. While our TAM is much, much smaller than that of a Fenton company, customer focus remains important no matter what the company or the TAM size is. I mean, customer focus is the core of product management. Bank companies are amazing in having a strong commitment to it. Amazon's mission is explicitly focused on customer-centric innovation and it's really the core of any iterative product work. This requires PMs to be data-driven, understand the customers they're serving, understand the problems they're solving, and know how to move forward with that. We do a lot of research and develop much of our product roadmaps and direction based on what we find from that research and what we understand about how people use our products. As I said, we're very data-driven. One example is focusing on features and what features we should build. We're very much looking to drive engagement and retention within each product. I've already spoken about our desire to drive engagement and connection across the products, but we want each product to have its own sort of sticky and strong nature. So we've done really deep research. This shows features that are better for engagement or retention and gives a sense of how we will do some prioritization around where we're going. In the last slide, I talked about our customer focus and the data-driven nature of our work. The external-facing parts of our work are the most familiar to people, but we have some really important internal customers who also require significant focus. My organization develops platforms, which enables others at the time to deliver content and features that will reach our readers. But I need to think about multiple sets of customers simultaneously. The readers are the obvious ones. Readers, gamers, everyone who comes to us and uses all the things on our site. But next, we have the newsroom. The newsroom is both a collaborator but also an absolute first-class customer of ours. We need to meet their needs. We need to understand their needs. We need to deliver against their needs, which is a very different type of customer than you would find in a lot of companies. And lastly, the engineers. We have to be sure our engineers can develop and deliver and really be able to do some of the best, most impactful work of their lives. It's really hard because we're a smaller organization, so our platforms need to be really empowering. The net result of all of this is that we're really looking across three different, very specific sets of customers and having to deliver against the needs of each of them. Core product skills. The core product skills we focus on at the times will feel very, very familiar to people in technology companies. There are very few things about our product job ladder that would be a surprise. Strategy, leadership, execution, these are always critical. Cross-functional collaboration is another area we focus on, both across product and technology teams, but we also have to collaborate with the newsroom and ensure our work is supporting theirs. The other major set of skills we lean really heavily into are creativity and re-evention. Many tech companies talk about disrupting an industry, but we are the industry we're disrupting. We've always been looking at how to reinvent what it is that we do in order to drive forward the same mission we've had for such a long time. When the New York Times was solely a physical paper delivered to doorsteps, life coverage wasn't something you could have even conceived of. We now regularly run live coverage on our site, enabling people to get deep insights from our highly knowledgeable journalists as events are unfolding. Likewise, we've just launched an audio app, which enables a new method for people to access valuable content we create in different ways and provides our subscribers the ability to listen to content and interact with our content in situations such as driving, where reading just isn't possible. Product people need to be able to look at what we have and develop ways to more deeply engage our readers and empower our journalists while iterating and reinventing the content and against the mission we've had for such a long time. Next up, how we work. At the team level, we bring together a collection of different skills to deliver on specific initiatives. The exact composition of the teams varies depending on the goals of the project, but at the core, we're working cross-functionally to deliver against our priorities. This is a very familiar model. Working in cross-functional teams is very familiar. This is how we generally worked at Google. I do find there are several significant differences in how we work to how a large technology company works. Some of them, as a result of differences in size of the organization, we are just much smaller. Others are more closely tied to the unique nature of our business. At the beginning of this presentation, I talked about the reach of the New York Times and how we deliver with a team of fraction the size of a Fang company. No one would ever say we have the scale of a Google. We do have impact. We drive a lot of impact, but it's often in getting information out in the legislation that may come as a result of our investigative journalism as the next step. So impact is a different beast in some ways. Scale also turns out to be a mixed blessing, and scale doesn't fully align with scope and impact. Google's small pieces of work in very complex environments take so long, but billions of people see the outcome. A colleague of mine who came to the Times from Amazon observed the same thing. At the Times, you get the opportunity to have increased breadth in your work, but you need to take a bigger swing to deliver on it. He described the environment at Amazon as one where there weren't so many green-filled spaces and there weren't so many spaces where you could really move ahead without stepping on other toes. As a smaller organization, deeply focused on our transformation, people have had the opportunity to lead much broader initiatives and have more impact against the whole of our products. And that impact is phenomenal. It just isn't billions of views. Flexibility is also really key. New cycles are not always predictable. My first week at the New York Times was the week before we all went remote for COVID. That was certainly a situation in which every road map, every plan, every direction, everything was tossed out the window in order to allow us to focus on the public service functions of the Times, which meant sharing everything we could about health and safety outside of the paywall so it would be available to anyone who needed it. We also have found situations that are more amusing where we have a plan to launch something. We hear a rumor that there's going to be a big breaking news story. We postpone the launch a couple of days. The news story doesn't happen. Okay, well, whatever. Then we launch, and then the news story breaks, and suddenly we've got massive traffic, and it's like, oh, this was not what we wanted for launch day. The most recent time that happened was just a couple of weeks ago, and everything was awesome and it went well, but there was still that moment of, we just rearranged everything to avoid this. So flexibility is key when you're in an organization where you just don't control the timelines. Another difference I see is that many of our product managers work in areas that just aren't as much a part of the Fang companies. At the times we create and we distribute much of our own content, so product managers can work incredibly closely with the journalism who are developing that content and help them with creating the content types. They also work on our publishing tools, product managers, which cover everything from underlying systems and infrastructures through new features through the content itself. On the platform side, we need to be delivering work to support our growth and business models. At the same time, we're working to modernize parts of the technology step, of our technology stack that have been put to uses that were never conceived of when they were built. It really gives product a much more end-to-end role in the work and in shaping the formats and platforms we use. Fang companies tend to be quite specific in what they're looking for in product managers, though it's absolutely loosened up over the years. When I transferred into product to Google, there were a lot of hoops to jump through. One of the things I've really loved about being outside of Fang company is how much more opportunity there has been for people who haven't come from sort of more traditional product management-type backgrounds to transition in. It's been great to watch that change, see how open the company is to a broader range of product backgrounds and see how much success we've had because of it. We have highly technical PMs who would be right at home at a Fang company. We also have people who are great at working with the newsroom and great at connecting people. And we have people just across such a wide range of skill sets that it's been really fun and just great to watch. So just to wrap it up, much of what we do at the Times would feel quite familiar to people at Fang companies, but we do have differences, which leads to different focuses and some different priorities. So with that, I'd like to thank everybody for the opportunity to speak today. I hope this has been useful in giving a sense of some of the product work we can do in. Thank you.