Functions and Missions: The Two-Axis Org
Craft and careers live in functions; delivery lives in cross-functional missions with three flavours
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
Hardiman runs the NYT product org on two axes. Functions (product, design) own standards of craft, career growth, promotion equity and skill development. Missions are cross-functional delivery teams pursuing shared high-level goals, and they come in exactly three types: consumer, monetization, and platform. The distinctive move is that consumer missions embed a fourth discipline — domain experts (at the Times, editors) — alongside PM, eng, design, data science, research and product marketing.
Origin
Alex Hardiman's structure at The New York Times, explicitly modelled on the cross-functional team pattern she worked in at Facebook, with the addition of embedded editors as the differentiating factor.
Core principles
- 01People development belongs to functions; outcomes belong to missions
- 02Every mission is exactly one of three types: consumer, monetization, or platform
- 03Domain experts embed inside consumer missions — they are team members, not stakeholders
- 04Monetization and platform missions build once and scale across the whole portfolio
- 05Editorial independence is preserved structurally: product teams help stories find their audience but hold no influence over which stories get selected
How to run it
- 1
Split the two axes explicitly
Declare which axis owns what. Functions own standards of craft and excellence, career growth frameworks, equitable promotion processes, communities of practice and skill development. Missions own the goals and the shipping.
Pro tip Say out loud that missions are 'where a lot of the work happens' — otherwise functional leaders quietly re-absorb delivery.
- 2
Classify every mission into one of three buckets
Consumer missions build the destination products (news, cooking, games, audio). Monetization missions build centralized commercial products (subscriber growth, digital advertising). Platform missions build shared infrastructure (commerce engine, ML platform, experimentation tooling).
Pro tip Monetization and platform missions must build things that work as well in one product as in another — e.g. a first-party privacy-safe ad program that works in cooking as well as in news.
Watch out A mission that can't be classified into one of the three is usually a project, not a team.
- 3
Embed domain experts in consumer missions only
Where the product directly shapes the domain output (journalism), put the domain expert — a product-minded editor — inside the team. Their expert judgment sits alongside the normal data, research and insight signals when defining the problem and choosing the solution.
Pro tip Select for domain experts who are product-minded and PMs who are domain-minded; the two roles should be converging, not negotiating.
Watch out Do not embed domain experts in monetization or platform missions — those are centralized and shared, and domain input there creates local optimisation.
- 4
Preserve the independence boundary
Keep separate leadership structures for the domain org (newsroom) and the business org (product). Product teams can sit physically inside the newsroom and collaborate intensely, but the domain org retains sole authority over the domain decision (story selection).
Watch out Blurring this line is how commercial incentives leak into editorial choices — the structure, not the goodwill, is what protects it.
In the wild
Rather than each product building its own signup and billing, the subscriber growth mission builds account and ID management centrally, so a subscription purchased through Games works identically to one purchased through News. The digital advertising mission likewise builds one privacy-safe first-party program that works across cooking and news alike.
→ Commercial capability is built once and scaled across the entire bundle instead of being re-solved per destination.
Consumer missions in news, cooking, games and audio include editors on the team. Hardiman: 'having editors involved, particularly like editors who are very product-minded, it kind of brings in the best of their expertise and marries it with a lot of the normal signal that you look for in terms of data, research, and other insights.'
→ PMs at the Times become editorially minded and editors become product minded — a convergence Hardiman calls the most gratifying and unique part of working there.
Common mistakes
Treating domain experts as reviewers instead of teammates
If the editor (or clinician, or lawyer, or teacher) only shows up to approve or veto at the end, you get expert judgment applied as a gate rather than as an input. Embedding them in the mission means their expertise shapes the problem definition and the creative solution, not just the sign-off.
Letting missions own career growth
When delivery teams also own promotion and craft standards, standards fragment across teams and promotion becomes a function of which mission you happen to sit in. Keeping craft, growth and promotion on the functional axis is what makes them equitable and consistent.
Is it for you?
Best for
A product leader in a mission-driven or domain-heavy organisation (media, health, education, finance) where deep non-tech expertise must shape the product
Not ideal for
Small orgs where a single team ships everything — the two axes only pay off once there are enough teams that shared platform and commercial layers exist
From the transcript
“the way to set that up so that our people can really do their best work is that we have two axes. We have functions…”
“We focus on standards of craft and excellence, career growth, like growth frameworks, equitable promotion processes, community of practices, skill development, all of that. But…”
“we have three different types of missions, and so we have consumer missions, we have monetization missions, and we have platform missions. So editors are…”
“product teams really help stories”
“product teams don't have any influence over the selection of the stories.”
From the episode
An inside look at how the New York Times builds product
Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times)