Q&A with Sara Hines, Director of Product, Parenting at The New York Times
By: Tesnim Zekeria
Tags: Product, Journalism, New York Times, Subscriber Spotlight

Q&A with Sara Hines, Director of Product, Parenting at The New York Times

This week, The Idea caught up with Sara Hines to learn about how the NYT Parenting section was built, and its plans for 2020. Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.

Can you give me a brief overview of your team and role?

I am the director of product for New York Times Parenting. We are a website that provides evidence-based guidance for new and expecting parents as they navigate the transformational journey of welcoming, raising, and, ultimately, surviving children. We’re part of a business unit called New Products and Ventures which also oversees the Times’ cooking and crosswords offerings. Our newsletter was launched in March 2019, and our site was launched shortly thereafter in mid-May 2019.

As the director of product, I lead a team of product designers, product managers, and engineers. A lot of us are parents of small children, so we have a lot of passion for this particular product. We work in close collaboration with our editorial team to create the best user experiences around the content that’s produced.

Tell me more about the Times’ decision to go into the parenting space.

As our audience has grown, the Times has been finding ways to add value to our readers’ lives beyond our core news business; so, that’s where Cooking and Crosswords come in. When we were considering lifestyle verticals that would add value to our readers, we looked at a broad set of areas like books, travel, and audio. Parenting was identified as an area of interest, so a team was hired to research the space and learn more about user needs, the audience, the competitive landscape, and services that we could potentially offer. They looked at everything from activity-finding services to memory keeping apps to lifestyle content.

Additionally, as The New York Times, we recognize that our competitive advantage in any space is the quality of our content and the journalistic rigor. So, we’ve centered NYT Parenting’s value proposition on this premise.

How many people in total work on parenting?

Around 20. We operate like a start-up, but with the stability and support of a large company.

How did you enter the product space?

I came into this role in a rather roundabout way. I have a BFA in photography and spent the first five years of my career working in non-profit art organizations. I ended up going to business school and worked in digital advertising and digital strategy after graduating. In 2016, I joined the Times to lead the retention efforts for our subscription business. In that role, I thought a lot about what drives habit, why people engage with the Times continually, and why they’re willing to pay for The New York Times on an ongoing basis.

When I came back from my first maternity leave in 2017, I heard rumors that the Times’ was interested in doing something in the parenting space. I was excited about this given that it was very germane to my existence.

Ten months later, when I was pregnant with my second child, the Parenting team landed on a content premise and were ready to bring on business strategists to think about how to take the product to market. I joined the team as a business lead and growth partner. I actually had my second daughter exactly one month before we launched our site in beta. So, I spent the summer of 2019 literally inhabiting the mindset and user needs of our target audience.

When I came back from my second maternity leave, the Parenting site was doing well and the needs of the team were more heavily weighted to figuring out how to build habit-driving experiences. As a result of this, I transitioned into more of a product role.

What were some of the challenges the team faced when building this vertical?

One of the biggest challenges is that we were starting from a content docket of zero, meaning that we had to do a tremendous amount of upfront investment in producing core, evergreen content from scratch around topics like child milestones, sleep training, and bottle feeding.

When Cooking started, they were able to build product experiences based on the Times’ legacy of food content and archive of 15,000 recipes. With Parenting, however, our focus is to provide deeply researched and evidence-based guidance — so, we can’t just repackage content. And, because we were building content for a separate site, we built our own proprietary CMS and essentially created a parallel ecosystem to the core news operations.

In just eight months, we published over 200 pieces of deeply researched content. We’re really interested in 1) informing readers on the practical applications of the best available research and 2) debunking contradictory and non-scientific information. So we’ve hired editors and writers with science writing backgrounds and have even had medical professionals write some of our guides.

We also try to balance this type of content with personal stories from parents and news reports. Our editorial team is constantly assigning stories on a daily basis. One of our early pieces of reporting was during the Fisher Price Rock n’ Play recall where we revealed that many daycares were still using them despite the public health warnings.

What does NYT Parenting have in store for 2020?

My team has been thinking a lot about parent behaviors and how an app would fit into our potential offerings from a user experience.

Parents are an interesting demographic because they’re very busy but also very exacting. Fundamentally, there are two behaviors that parents engage in that I would like NYT Parenting to displace. First, I want NYT Parenting to prevent parents from going down a Google hole. Secondly, I hope that our content dispels the myth of the perfect parent that you often see on Instagram. By elevating the voices of parents alongside our research, I want parents to actually feel seen and heard by NYT Parenting.

What is the most interesting thing (product, tool, article, social channel, special project, redesign, etc.) that you’ve seen from a media outlet other than your own?

I’m really interested in the rise of dad media like Fatherly and dad twitter. I feel like we’re coming off the decade of the mom-fluencer. I think there’s a problematic, cultural orientation towards dads as the third wheel, so I’m really interested in portrayals of dads as involved figures.

Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, wrote a piece for us pushing for paternity leave, and he just launched a podcast called Business Dad that focuses on the realities of working dads. This is so important because we’re finding that paid parental leave is still not enough. It’s been a women’s issue for so long, and I don’t think the workplace can change for working parents until we even the playing field for taking leave.

This Q&A was originally published in the January 21st edition of The Idea, and has been edited for length and clarity. For more Q&As with media movers and shakers, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.