Wartime Product Management
In a crisis: blow up the roadmap, share context, restate the mandate from the mission
- Difficulty
- Expert
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 91%
Hardiman's playbook for the moments when the world changes faster than your plan — Facebook after 2016, the Times at the onset of COVID. Rather than re-prioritising the existing roadmap, you discard it, share full context with everyone, and derive a brand-new mandate directly from the mission. Then you reallocate people across team boundaries, ship the things the world urgently needs, and deliberately suspend business rules (like the paywall) where the mission demands it.
Origin
Alex Hardiman's term for the mode she led in twice: at Facebook's news product team immediately after the 2016 US election, and at The New York Times in March 2020 as COVID hit.
Core principles
- 01Humility first: diagnose what is actually happening before you build
- 02The mission, not the roadmap, generates the crisis mandate
- 03Shared context beats detailed instruction when nobody has a playbook
- 04Suspend commercial rules where public safety is at stake
- 05Grit and the ability to let other things slide are both required — you cannot keep the old backlog alive
How to run it
- 1
Diagnose with humility before building
Resist the urge to ship. First unpack what is actually happening — at Facebook that meant realising the platform's binary model of content (friends-and-family vs public) couldn't distinguish factually accurate reporting from dubious propaganda, because it was never built to classify coverage at all.
Watch out A platform not built to classify the thing you now need to judge cannot be fixed with a ranking tweak — check whether the goals, responsibilities and incentives themselves need rebuilding.
- 2
Blow up the roadmap and say so
Explicitly cancel the plan rather than trying to fit the crisis into it. Tell the whole org: we have a totally different mandate than we did a couple of weeks ago.
Pro tip Derive the new mandate out loud from the mission ('our purpose is to help people access information to make informed decisions about their lives') so people can generate their own next actions.
- 3
Reallocate people across team lines
Pull engineers off their existing teams and put them on the crisis build. The Times pulled engineers from other teams to build out the COVID case database, which started life as a single scraped spreadsheet.
- 4
Build what nobody else is building
Look for the gap where the institutions that should be serving people aren't. The Times noticed that other institutions, especially government, were not helping people understand the basic facts — so it built the comprehensive public COVID case dataset, local zip-code-level infection and vaccination lookup tools, and new data formats.
Pro tip The crisis-mandate test is 'nobody else is doing it, and our mission says we must' — not 'this is on strategy'.
- 5
Suspend the business rules the mission overrides
The Times made its most important COVID coverage free to everyone: if it related to public safety, it did not go behind the paywall. It also published its internal reporter-safety guidance publicly for journalists who hadn't been in Wuhan.
Watch out Be explicit that the suspension is scoped (public-safety coverage), or the exception becomes the new default.
- 6
Come back down: focus, and name what you'll stop
Wartime mode is not sustainable. Coming out of it, be honest about the small number of important things you must do and all the things you're happy to stop doing — context switching is the burnout mechanism you can actually control.
Pro tip Burnout is fought with hard prioritisation calls, not just perks: 'a lot of it really comes down to, I think, making hard calls.'
Watch out Leaving the wartime tempo running after the crisis passes is how you lose the people who carried it.
In the wild
The day the world shut down, Hardiman drove to Vermont, went into a laundry closet and 'didn't emerge for 2 weeks'. The org blew up its roadmaps, shared context, and pivoted: scraping a comprehensive public COVID case dataset from a single spreadsheet, pulling engineers off other teams to build the database, launching new data tools down to zip-code level, dropping the paywall on public-safety coverage, and publishing internal reporting-safety guidance.
→ In March 2020, half of the country came to The New York Times. Hardiman calls it one of the most unifying moments for her teams — nobody doubted the work was of greater good.
Hardiman joined Facebook's news effort in early 2017 amid the reckoning over misinformation, disinformation, election integrity and platform responsibility. The work started with diagnosis: unpacking the categories of public content to separate factually accurate, journalistically-crafted information from the dubious and the misleading, on a platform that had never been built to classify coverage at all.
→ A body of work to make the platform safer and more informative — and a durable lesson that a platform's goals, responsibilities and incentives, not just its ranking, have to change.
Common mistakes
Re-prioritising instead of blowing up the roadmap
Trying to slot crisis work into the existing plan keeps the old commitments alive, splits attention, and guarantees you ship the urgent thing too slowly. The mandate has to be replaced, not reordered.
Treating burnout as a benefits problem
Time off, daycare support and health benefits are the basics, not the fix. The controllable driver is context switching — and the only real lever is being ruthless and honest about the small number of things that must be done and the many things you will stop doing.
Is it for you?
Best for
A product or org leader whose company has been overtaken by an external crisis that makes the current roadmap irrelevant
Not ideal for
Ordinary urgency — invoking wartime mode for a missed quarter burns the org's trust and its capacity for the real thing
From the transcript
“I think about wartime product management,”
“this is like a product leader is a real wartime moment where you just need to blow up road maps, share context with everyone, and…”
“We're going to build a comprehensive public data set of COVID cases. Nobody else is doing it, so we really just started kind of scraping…”
“We made our most important COVID coverage free to everybody. It was really important that if it was something related to public safety, we didn't…”
“In March 2020, we saw that half of the country came to the New York Times.”
“So, a lot of it really comes down to, I think, making hard calls.”
From the episode
An inside look at how the New York Times builds product
Alex Hardiman (CPO at The New York Times)