Wartime Product Management

Structured approach to leading product during crisis and chaos

Alex Hardiman
An inside look at how the New York Times builds product

Wartime Product Management

"I think about wartime product management, right? You're coming in, and there was this incredible humility that was needed to really understand and first diagnose what was actually happening." - Alex Hardiman

What It Is

Wartime product management is a leadership mode that kicks in during crisis situations—when normal roadmaps become irrelevant, context is unclear, and teams need to rapidly pivot to address urgent, high-stakes problems. Unlike peacetime PM work (optimizing existing products with clear metrics), wartime requires abandoning plans, sharing context broadly, and focusing the entire organization on a singular urgent mission.

Alex Hardiman experienced this both at Facebook after the 2016 election (dealing with misinformation) and at the New York Times during the COVID-19 pandemic. In both cases, the standard product development approach had to be replaced with crisis response.

How It Works

Wartime product management operates on different principles than normal product work:

1. Blow Up Roadmaps When crisis hits, existing priorities become irrelevant. The first step is acknowledging that planned work must pause. At the New York Times during COVID, teams abandoned their regular roadmaps entirely to focus on pandemic response.

2. Share Context Rapidly In wartime, information asymmetry is the enemy. Leaders must quickly get everyone on the same page about the new reality, the changed priorities, and why the normal rules don't apply.

3. Diagnose Before Acting Despite urgency, humility is critical. At Facebook post-2016, the team had to first understand what was actually happening on the platform before they could fix it. Rushing to solutions without understanding the problem makes things worse.

4. Focus on the Most Important Problems Crisis creates infinite urgent demands. Wartime PMs must ruthlessly prioritize, identifying the small number of things that truly matter and explicitly letting other things slide.

5. Unify Around Mission Crisis creates purpose. When the New York Times pivoted to COVID coverage, "no one doubted for a second that the work they were doing was of greater good for the world."

How to Apply It

When crisis hits your product or organization:

  1. Acknowledge the crisis explicitly - Communicate clearly that you're entering a different mode of operation
  2. Assemble cross-functional war rooms - Pull needed experts from wherever they are in the org
  3. Create shared context - Ensure everyone understands the situation, stakes, and priorities
  4. Diagnose first - Resist pressure to act before understanding the problem
  5. Establish a singular focus - What is the one thing that matters most right now?
  6. Let other things slide - Explicitly deprioritize normal work that doesn't serve the crisis response
  7. Move fast but not recklessly - Speed matters, but rushing to wrong solutions is worse than pausing to understand

When to Use It

  • External crisis affecting your users (pandemic, security breach, economic shock)
  • Internal crisis threatening your business (competitor disruption, platform changes, PR disaster)
  • When existing roadmaps become irrelevant due to changed circumstances
  • When your product can serve an urgent need that didn't exist before

Signs you need wartime mode:

  • Your Slack is "blowing up"
  • Your normal metrics don't capture what's important anymore
  • Your customers' needs have fundamentally shifted overnight
  • No playbook exists for the situation you're facing

Source

  • Guest: Alex Hardiman
  • Episode: "An inside look at how the New York Times builds product"
  • Key Discussion: (00:09:28) - Discussion of wartime PM at Facebook post-2016; (00:42:52) - COVID crisis response at NYT
  • YouTube: Watch on YouTube

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