Technical Product Manager II, Editorial Core
New York, NY
The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. That means independent journalism is at the heart of all we do as a company. It's why we have a world-renowned newsroom that sends journalists to report on the ground from nearly 160 countries. It's why we focus deeply on how our readers will experience our journalism, from print to audio to a world-class digital and app destination. And it's why our business strategy centers on making journalism so good that it's worth paying for.
Mission Overview & Responsibilities:
Over the past 170 years, The New York Times has pursued one essential mission: to seek the truth and help people understand the world. That mission has always been powered by world‑class journalism, and today it is supported by a growing product and technology organization building digital experiences that millions of readers rely on every day.
The Messaging group builds and operates the infrastructure that powers The New York Times' real‑time relationship with millions of readers through a multi-channel messaging ecosystem. Our systems support everything from high‑stakes breaking news alerts and editorial newsletters like The Morning to habit‑building campaigns for Games, Cooking, and Wirecutter.
Our platform is designed to foster habit formation and deepen engagement with the journalism that matters most, delivering personalized and relevant news to subscribers at every stage of their journey. We provide reliable, performant, and extensible messaging capabilities that ensure The Times remains a trusted resource that helps our readers understand the world better.
We are looking for a Technical Product Manager (TPM2) to lead the Editorial Core team. You will be the strategic bridge connecting our core messaging platform with the evolving needs of our Editorial and Marketing teams. We are looking for a balance of technical vision and relationship-building. You will partner with stakeholders to translate their vision into scalable platform features, ensuring that every initiative not only meets immediate business objectives and target metrics but also contributes to a more robust and extensible ecosystem for the entire organization.
This role is hybrid in New York City, with regular in‑office collaboration expected alongside your cross‑functional partners.
Responsibilities:
- Deliver the Reader-Facing Experience: Translate core platform logic and infrastructure into seamless, multi-channel messaging tools that newsrooms and marketers use to reach our audience
- Collaborative Planning: Partner with Editorial and Marketing to refine their goals into technical projects, ensuring every initiative strengthens our shared messaging system rather than creating isolated, one-off solutions
- Design Scalable Features: identify when a specific stakeholder request can be turned into a flexible tool that benefits the entire organization, balancing immediate business needs with a stable, long-term technical foundation
- Deliver Measurable Results: Ensure our messaging solutions are built to help stakeholders hit their targets, such as reader retention and habit formation, while keeping the overall system fast and reliable.
Execution and Delivery
- Lead the end‑to‑end product lifecycle for your area: discovery, requirements, prioritization, scoping, delivery, rollout, and iteration.
- Use data and experimentation (delivery metrics, funnels, reliability and latency metrics, qualitative feedback) to define goals, validate solutions, and identify new opportunities.
- Apply multiple prioritization frameworks and adjust scope to manage competing demands from different product teams while maintaining platform health and reliability.
- Ensure launches include appropriate rollout plans, alerting, and playbooks in partnership with engineering and operations, recognizing that messaging is mission‑critical during major news moments.
Technical Partnership
- Partner with engineering leads to align technical strategy with product needs for your area, including architecture, data flows, SLAs/SLOs, and dependency management across channels and upstream systems.
- Build an understanding of the messaging stack – queueing, throttling, templating, targeting, consent and preferences, vendor integrations – and use that understanding to make informed tradeoffs and realistic scope decisions.
- Define and monitor key system‑level metrics (e.g., delivery success rates, latency, error rates, capacity headroom) and use them to drive prioritization and communicate risk and progress.
Collaboration and Communication
- Build trusting relationships with partner teams (News, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, Marketing, Customer Care, Data) and document shared goals and roles across squads using the platform.
- Communicate plans, status, risks, and tradeoffs to technical and non‑technical audiences, including engineers, PMs, and leaders across missions.
- Manage escalations when messaging capabilities are blocked or at risk, providing a clear decision framework and options for stakeholders.
- Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.
- You will report to the Executive Product Director.
Basic Qualifications:
- 4+ years of experience in product management or technical product management, including work on platforms, infrastructure, data systems, or other technically complex products.
- Experience owning a product area end‑to‑end: define strategy, set metrics, shape roadmaps, and drive execution with cross‑functional teams.
- Proficient knowledge on architecture, APIs, data models, and system performance tradeoffs with engineers, and translating them for non‑technical partners.
- Experience using quantitative and qualitative data to make decisions and measure impact (e.g., delivery metrics, funnels, A/B tests, user research, logs and dashboards).
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with messaging or marketing technology systems (e.g., push platforms, ESPs, orchestration tools, CDPs/CRMs) or high‑scale event/streaming systems.
- Familiarity with data and analytics concepts such as funnels, cohorts, attribution, or experimentation, ideally applied to messaging or growth use cases.
- Exposure to data governance and privacy concerns in messaging contexts (consent, preferences, regulatory requirements) and interest in partnering with legal/privacy on compliant design.