The New York Times’s Krystal Plomatos on Operating Systems for Teams

Krystal Plomatos:

When you're working in subscription businesses, by definition, they are so dynamic and they are so volatile, that only using a playbook of what works is a death sentence. You have to continually add new colors to that palette.

Rob Goodman:

Hi everyone, and welcome to Now What?, the podcast from Wix about how technology is changing…everything. I'm your host, Rob Goodman, and in this series, we're talking all about evolution in business, design, development and beyond. In this new season of the show, we're diving into customer experience.

Rob Goodman:

As the world has rapidly transformed, customers’ expectations, behavior and needs have adapted with it. Paired with the emergence of new forms of social media, digital currency, the metaverse and so much more, navigating what this means for you and your organization can be a lot. We're bringing you fresh interviews and new insights from leaders that are reshaping business today to better prepare you for what's ahead.

Rob Goodman:

In this episode, we're talking about the future of subscription businesses and building an operating system for teams, with Krystal Plomatos from The New York Times. Krystal is an Effie and Cannes Lion award winner and Executive Director of Marketing for standalone products at The New York Times, where she oversees marketing for cooking, games — yes, like Wordle — Wirecutter, audio, kids, events and their TV and film businesses. In this expansive conversation, you'll get to hear from Krystal about the value and challenges of building subscription-based businesses, talk context switching as a full funnel marketer, and get to know programs she runs (like Learning Labs) at The New York Times.

Rob Goodman:

Whether you work in marketing, love The New York Times, or are curious about how to better communicate cross-functionally or swerve your career path in a new direction, this is the episode for you. I can't wait for you to hear my chat with Krystal, so let's get started.

Rob Goodman:

Krystal, welcome to the Now What? podcast. So great to have you here.

Krystal Plomatos:

Thanks, Rob. Super excited to chat with you.

Rob Goodman:

I'd love to get started and hear about your role at The New York Times. Can you describe it for listeners?

Krystal Plomatos:

Sure. I have been at The New York Times for coming up on almost two years. I will say, the first year I actually spent as a consultant working across the portfolio. I would say that is the dream position to be in, where you can be an outsider for a little while and just see how things get done, how things get made. Then my current role opened up, which is Executive Director of Marketing for what we call standalone products. Probably the shortest, easiest way to explain what that is: we basically create all the digital products that people reach for in between their news reading moments, think more fun lifestyle products like New York Times Cooking, games, Wirecutter, events, kids, our TV and film groups, so pretty fun stuff, but all digital products. Some of those are existing subscription businesses and then some of those are things that could potentially become subscription businesses.

Rob Goodman:

Amazing. I mean, what an array of products to market and bring to people and some of the experiences that I enjoy most in my daily life, so thanks for all the work that you and your team do to enrich our lives between the pages of The New York Times. I know that you and your team recently won a first for The New York Times, an Oscar. I would love to hear about how that project came about and congratulations.

Krystal Plomatos:

Oh, thank you. Yeah, no, we've done our fair share of celebrating, I'll put it that way. It was definitely a huge, momentous win for the company. Yeah, I would say, just to delineate for this audience, of course there's going to be the newsroom side that's going to focus on what is the content itself, what is the journalism, and how do you translate that story into film, how do you identify world-class talent, we had Shaq and Steph Curry were Executive Producers, we brought on Ben Proudfoot as the director, and then of course, Lucy, the star of the film itself. The title of the film is called Queen of Basketball. You had that rare convergence of the story, that even some of the most die-hard basketball players, like Shaq himself had never heard the story of Lucy Harris, who was the first female Olympian and was drafted into the NBA, an absolutely massive iconic talent. We have our newsroom partners who worked on that.

Krystal Plomatos:

Then I think one of the things that might be of interest to the audience is just that great content is a must-have, but even the world's best stories with some of the best storytellers isn't enough. You still need the marketing, you still need the pipes, you still need the distribution. Our team, where we came in, is basically several months before voting for the Academy takes place, we built out a multi-stage marketing campaign. That's just your classic let's just make sure that we are talking about Queen of Basketball at exactly the precisely right times when the Academy judges are watching the films, when they're thinking about voting, when they're actively voting, and using the pages and the power of the digital and print pages of The New York Times to really talk about that story, and then going dark when it's appropriate to do that too and placing things not just on our owned and operated channels, but also in some of the industry trades.

Krystal Plomatos:

It's exciting, because you're going up with other studios that are also throwing their weight behind their films. Everybody wants to see their film take home this statue. I think it was just a perfect moment of really investing carefully and strategically and when it made sense to be live with that marketing campaign and when it made sense to go dark. Then you also have a very magic moment, I'm not sure how many people talk about this, but I think it probably is true in the Super Bowl, where you have to ready a campaign for if you win, you want to have those assets ready so that you can run as close to the announcement as possible. There's just this funny superstitious moment where you're like, "Are we going to get to run this celebration campaign? Yes or no?"

Krystal Plomatos:

Then of course on the Super Bowl side, you think of all those t-shirts, all those ball caps of so-and-so won the Super Bowl and who gets to be the team that actually gets to bring those all the way to production. I think that was probably one of the quirkier moments of putting together a campaign when you're marketing something for the Oscars.

Rob Goodman:

You've talked to me about this idea that you're running a team of full-funnel marketers, every stage of the funnel, every part of the customer journey. Talk to me about what it's like leading a team like that and your approach.

Krystal Plomatos:

I feel like, first of all, full funnel is a term that gets thrown around all the time. I always remind people, when we say full funnel, we really mean it. Our team really does go up, down, left and right. Starting at the top you have the awareness sliver of the funnel. Most people think of that as big brand campaigns, which come in with high dollar paid media. Sometimes, if you're lucky enough, you get to do the Super Bowl commercials of the world and whatnot.

Krystal Plomatos:

But there's another component of the top of funnel, which I think should get talked about more, which is earned media, earned media activations. Our team is thinking, again, how can we get people aware of our products and then how do we pull them a little bit deeper down and start to build affinity, a.k.a., positive feelings, the emotional payload that comes with what comes to mind when you think about a brand or product.

Krystal Plomatos:

That's also where you start to transition a little bit more into product marketing, and so the product marketing fundamentals come into play. You're also thinking about growth, now that we've made you aware, we've made you feel some feelings, we've used product marketing to help build a habit, build a daily habit, build a weekly habit with our digital products, and then hopefully by then we've done our job and you're willing to open up your wallet and pay. That's when we would talk about conversion and growth marketing.

Krystal Plomatos:

Then there's another component, which is upsell. How do we talk to you about other products that we have in our portfolio that you might be interested in given your daily habit and the way that you feel about our other products? Then there's a little bit of loyalty, how do we make you feel so good and so excited and so special to be part of this community?

Krystal Plomatos:

I think there's a couple things with being a truly full-funnel marketer, because as people think about managing their careers, I feel like in the old times, which, to be clear, are not that old, people built your whole 10 or 20 years being a performance marketer, being a “Capital-B” brand marketer and really building out that specialization. I think if you're trying to really future-proof your career and build a lot of optionality, the closer you can be to thinking truly full funnel, even if you're not actively in a role where you can work on product marketing or growth marketing or brand marketing. Are there people in your company that are working on that you can befriend, that you can learn from, that you could hang out with when they're doing creative reviews and presentations and learn some of that work? I think it's really helpful to have full command of the marketing funnel, because, in a short answer, left hand knows what right hand is doing, you know the full expression of that brand. It benefits you as you think about managing your career paths.

Krystal Plomatos:

I would say the shadow side of being a full-funnel marketer is that it is a ton of context switching and that could be really tiresome at times. Definitely have plenty of examples of what it takes to adapt a new mindset to be able to be a full-funnel marketer and what those trade-offs are and how you manage it.

Rob Goodman:

Can we dive into that? Your team is constantly context switching, what skills do you feel like it takes to thrive in an organization like yours that is operating across all these dimensions?

Krystal Plomatos:

I think it starts with knowing what you can control, which is not everything. Part of what you can control though is your mindset. I think as a people manager, as someone who's been a full-funnel marketer, it's being really intentional about what role you're playing, what slice of the funnel you're working in and communicating what that value is. I think that that's really important because what you have to remember is that if you're working with a product team, an engineering team, a business team, corporate strategy, they're not going to know the nuances of where a brand marketer's role begins and ends and where product marketing comes in and is it two people, they're just not going to know that. You, a) have to take it upon yourself. I hear myself saying, "You have to market your marketing," a lot. You have to market the value of what you're bringing to the table.

Krystal Plomatos:

I think you also have to clarify for those partners in the org, if you are a full-funnel marketer, they might have this perception of you as just being a marketer. That can be a trap, because if they don't see you as, let's say, a product marketer, they might think that you don't need to be in product meetings, meeting with engineers, doing grooming and backlogging sessions. You have to make sure that you're being very clear about when you're playing that product marketing role and therefore why you should have a seat at the table. Then there might be, in the case of a media company, if you're working on earned media, you absolutely have to be in lockstep with the newsroom. There are some times when an integrated marketer doesn't need to be so close to the newsroom, but for earned you absolutely do.

Krystal Plomatos:

You always have to be very precise in communicating what role you're playing. The context switching that you're doing to your own partners is just as important as talking and coaching yourself through the context switching that you're doing yourself as a marketer. I think probably a big learning as we've all become full-funnel marketers is making sure that we're readying our own mindset and just feeling like I'm in a product marketing head space. It means I'm not really thinking about some of these other things and really making sure that's where you're at. Then, conversely, turning around and making sure that all your cross-functional partner teams know, "Hey, I've got all of these specialties. I'm going to mode switch a little bit," and making sure that they're aware of that's actually quite unique. There's not as many truly, truly full-funnel marketers as you might think.

Rob Goodman:

Right. Let's switch modes a little bit here in the conversation. I want to talk to you about subscriptions and the subscription model for businesses. I know that you feel really passionately about subscriptions as the new generation of platform, of ways for business to engage with customers and users. Why do you think that the subscription model is the mode for the future of business?

Krystal Plomatos:

I think one reason why so many companies are so hot on subscription businesses is because it cultivates a feeling of control. You have a tremendous amount of data and tests that you can set up and measure, and so that makes people feel good because they think I can understand with a higher fidelity the forecast of this business and then I can also become more and more precise about what my most efficient marketing lovers are. You have that comfort that comes from data and things getting spit out into spreadsheets, and that is deeply comforting for many, many business leaders for very obvious reasons. Then I think there's a more emotional feeling which comes from when you've amassed enough data and you can observe these patterns, you feel like you're more in control of your destiny, you know the ebb and flow of your business. I think there's so much heat in subscription businesses because, again, it helps you become more precise in your forecasting and then more precise in how you attribute the effectiveness of marketing.

Krystal Plomatos:

I will say, as someone who's worked in B2C and B2B subscription businesses, respect that data, but also know when it's becoming a crutch, because you may hear yourself, your team, your organization, only looking to invest in marketing programs or make investments because you have the data to build a model you can somewhat predict what the expected return is. One of the things that you have to really fight for, as a marketing leader, is how to keep a lane open for marketing innovation and experimentation and doing things that may or may not have hearty data behind it.

Krystal Plomatos:

The reason why you need to do that is, yes, if you don't change, change happens to you, and all of those great maxims, but really, when you're working in subscription businesses, by definition, they are so dynamic and they are so volatile that only using a playbook of what you know works is a death sentence. You have to continually add new colors to that palette.

Krystal Plomatos:

I think one of the key pieces that I fought for with my team is to make sure that when we build our roadmaps, we play the hits, Fleetwood Mac style, we know what the hits are, we definitely double down on those, but I challenge my team to make sure that they are bringing things that fall under the first, biggest or only classification. It's the first time we've done something, it's the biggest attempt we've ever made, or we're the only team in the building right now that's thinking about this. That's where I see my team really come to life, and that's really exciting as a leader because the things you get to say yes to and the things you get to say no to are totally dynamic when you set your team up to pursue that.

Rob Goodman:

Hi, everyone. I hope you're enjoying this episode. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about Wix Enterprise. If your business is scaling, Wix Enterprise is for you. With an all-in-one web solution for any business need, you get customizable design with low or advanced code environment, depending on what you need, and integrations that connect the tools you use today and might use tomorrow, like apps and third party APIs. You'll also get enterprise-grade security, the ability to assign team roles, add SSO login, customized permissions, and manage everything from a centralized dashboard. With 99.99% uptime, you'll get performance, plus reliability, in all the sites, landing pages, eCommerce destinations, internal experiences and campaigns that you run. That means uninterrupted, faster business for your customers and employees. Wix Enterprise comes with 24/7 support, plus a dedicated account management team and tailored solutions for your business. Ready to learn more? Visit wix.com/enterprise, that's wix.com/enterprise. Now, let's get back to the show.

Rob Goodman:

You talked about this need with the marketers on your team to market the marketing and share your knowledge internally and across teams, make it clear the work that's being done, how to collaborate. Do you have any advice or best practices around knowledge sharing internally, how to not only advocate for your team, but also present and put out information that ultimately is going to help in collaboration, in creativity and in working together as a larger organization?

Krystal Plomatos:

One of the first things I did when I got into this role was just sell this idea of we call them learning labs. Anyone can run a learning lab, it is simply saying, "Hey, I'm an expert in this. I'm super geeky about this thing and I want you to know what I know." We keep it really loose. Some people write a deck, some people keep it conversational, some people do a, "Here's five things I've learned about product marketing," and just drop it in a Slack. I would say creating language around what is this idea, how do we want to encourage this cross-sharing is step one.

Krystal Plomatos:

Step two, connecting it to an incentive that's going to motivate a marketer. Everybody is thinking about managing their career, which typically means getting promoted or getting recognition in the organization. I remind people that if you run a learning lab, it can open up doors for you to really grow your own personal narrative. What I tell my marketers is if you have an idea for a learning lab, I can get you an audience. Sometimes that just might be our team, our core team, which is valuable, sometimes it might be marketing executives, and sometimes it might be more broader across the rest of the marketing and communication work. Aligning it to incentives, I think, is a key piece of the strategy.

Krystal Plomatos:

There's another component, which is just how to be really realistic about how busy everyone is and making sure that you remind them, this can be a lightweight thing. You can spend, if you want, a whole Friday morning and grind on a deck and have a great, beautiful presentation, or you can go make yourself a cup of coffee and just sit with a notebook and just say, "What are three things I might tell an intern, knowing what I know now?" Again, just keeping things really lightweight.

Krystal Plomatos:

We have weekly one-on-ones. I ask my direct reports, we have a little box on their status sheet that's win of the week. It's meant to be just a small win, but if they are getting in the habit of after 52 weeks in a given year, they've written down 52 wins and all it took them was 30 seconds when they were just putting in a couple bullets, think about that. You've just increased the accomplishments, the value that you've created, the things that you've learned. I can look at that when I evaluate their performance, they can look at that when they write their own self reviews, but then you just also have your own artifact of everything that you're doing and learning, and that's important too. We're all doing too many things, we're all multitasking, but you get this little piece that's just for you.

Krystal Plomatos:

Then the last thing I will say, because I know that there's plenty of managers, is money matters, put some funding behind it. Spend and invest some honorariums in bringing in guest speakers, you can bring outside expertise in and light up your marketing org. You might want to help them invest in taking classes and taking courses. But I think the money piece is also important and worth talking about as well. The money signals that it's really a priority, that you're investing in your own personal development, but also taking that step to cross-share it with your peers.

Rob Goodman:

Talk to me about the idea of building an operating system for teams. I know this is something that you are thinking about, you yourself are trying to operate in this zone. To me, it's a really cool framework and really interesting and engaging framework to think about in terms of team management leadership. What does that mean to you, and how do you think an operating system for teams might work?

Krystal Plomatos:

Building an operating system for teams is probably the topic I think the most about and absolutely want to find and meet other people who think along these lines and cross-share ideas, but I think starting with a definition. An operating system is built on the quality of the inputs. What information are you feeding the machine? What are you putting into the system? When I stepped into this role, most marketers, you go and you do a listening tour and you really hear where are we strong, where are we weak, what's working, what's not working, what do you miss and envy about your former jobs that aren't apparent here, what would we want to beg, borrow, steal? You get a lot of intel from your people who you've hired, they're incredibly smart and talented, and so much of your work is just setting them free. To build an operating system, you have to start with the people that you have and draft off of what system do they want to be a part of. That's step one.

Krystal Plomatos:

I think step two is just reminding people that they have the power to create and instigate a culture that they're proud of and that they're happy to be a part of. Not everybody gets to work at their dream job, and so reminding people that, "Hey, when we have a meeting, it's an open conversation about what kind of team dynamic we want to have," and as a manager, you're asking them their opinions and their thoughts, it's really energizing. It feels like, again, you have control over how you spend those 40-plus hours a week with all these people. Step two is just reminding people the power they have and to use it and to flex that power.

Krystal Plomatos:

Probably a third principle, if you're ever trying to build something new, especially team culture, because it's kind of fuzzy, it's this intangible, somewhat emotional thing, one thing that I have really learned is that when you're doing something new, you've got to tell them, tell them what you told them, and tell them again. We can borrow principles of media. If you're making a marketing campaign, a media strategist is going to tell you need to market this message seven times, or a frequency of 10, or whatever it is. Again, when you're trying to build this team operating system, you have to email it, Slack it, verbally say it and remind them, "This is what we're doing and also this is why we're doing it." Repetition matters, because if you're building something as ineffable as a team culture, a team operating system, you have to ground it, you have to define it and you have to make sure that everybody's using that shared language.

Krystal Plomatos:

The next step is going to be anytime you see behavior that speaks back to that system that you're trying to build is to really celebrate and encourage it. For example, if I'm all about learning labs and cross-sharing and tapping into your teammates, when I see my directs either give or get formal shout outs, we have a tool, Workday, a lot of companies and enterprises use it, as soon as I get the auto-notification that they have taken that moment to shout out a teammate or they've gotten one, I drop that in the Slack. I'm like, "Hey, by the way, thank you for doing this." You are creating positive feedback loops for the behavior that ladders back to that culture so that people, again, feel excited to act on that.

Krystal Plomatos:

Then I think if you wanted to test, is our culture clear, is it working, has the signal been received? This is the scary thing for some managers, is your team behaving in that way that you set up that was built from their desires and ambitions, even when, in my case, I was on vacation for a week. When you step away and you spin away, does your team feel super clear on what you're trying to do and why you're trying to do that and do they still carry out those behaviors while you're away?

Rob Goodman:

Let's switch gears and I would love to hear from you, I've been asking every guest this season, about a thing you've been doing, a go-to daily or weekly practice of yours over these challenging couple of years, but more so just generally, that has helped your personal life, helped your professional practice, that maybe listeners might hear and get excited about possibly incorporating into their work.

Krystal Plomatos:

Rob, the timing of this question is great because I literally just came back from a week-long vacation in the Caribbean and didn't check email and all of these things. But what that vacation did was it renewed my discipline to do something that I was doing occasionally, and I would like to make it more of a daily habit, which is you've got to treat those first morning minutes when you wake up as precious. Imagine those minutes would cost someone $10,000 a minute. How do you want to spend the first minutes of your morning, because it's going to dictate the tone for the rest of your day. When you open your phone and you start reacting and responding to everybody else's needs, hopes, fears, tweets, memes, all of these things, that's it. You've surrendered your day to what everybody else wants from you, and someone always wants something from you.

Krystal Plomatos:

This vacation helped me really renew my desire to wake up and not reach for my phone and the calendar and the inbox and Twitter and all of the things and spend some time doing something that is for me. Sometimes that's just reading a paperback book, I did that this morning. I was reading this really amazing super geeky book on systems thinking by Donella Meadows, and I was having one of those mornings where you just feel like you're dog-earing every page and highlighting everything. That was just for me, but I was so excited to find someone to talk about this book with. Sometimes that's going for a walk outside. If you just let your body wake up and see what the world is doing, like what is the temperature today, do I hear bird song, am I dressed right for the weather, really, really letting your body ease into a morning.

Krystal Plomatos:

I know there's a million blogs and books about having morning rituals. Even if you don't want to do the work of having that ritual, it's just the principle. Did you do something that made you feel good that was just for you? Then you appoint your hour when you're like, "Okay, and now I will walk the dog and do all of these other things," but protecting that time in the morning, I think, is something that's deeply, deeply fulfilling.

Rob Goodman:

I love that. I think it's something that I know, and I'm sure listeners know, but to hear it through your experience and your voice as that reminder and the value there is in that, in setting the intention and holding that space sacred, I think is so, so important. I know personally I'm going to take that experience as advice and work on incorporating it into my daily rituals as well.

Rob Goodman:

While I have you here, I want to ask about The New York Times and apps and experiences. What is your go-to app or daily visit from The New York Times? What's the product that you can't put down?

Krystal Plomatos:

Yeah. We have an audio app that is in beta. We've had our podcast business, everyone knows The Daily, maybe The Ezra Klein Show or Still Processing or Sway with Kara Swisher.

Rob Goodman:

Yeah, of course.

Krystal Plomatos:

But we've built an audio destination so that you can access our shows, but not just our podcasts. We narrate a lot of our journalism, so we have narrated articles, and then we marry that with the same kind of human editorial curation. The same ethos in which we program the front page of the paper, whether that's the print paper or the digital paper, we bring that curation to the audio app. That's been really fun to play with.

Krystal Plomatos:

I really do, I use all of our apps. I'm sure you play Wordle, and then after you've got your Wordle fix you've got to go to Spelling Bee and some of our other games, but it's just really fun, because if you think about a clock, we've got an app for when you're in the morning when you're getting ready, maybe it's news and maybe it's a little bit of game to lighten the morning, and that 6:00 hour with New York Times Cooking and the first glass of wine, that's also really great and special. Yeah, we've been busy building out a suite of apps, for sure.

Rob Goodman:

Amazing. I love that visualization that no matter the time of day, no matter the activity, there's a New York Times app or a product or service that's there to accompany you or serve you or entertain you in some way. Krystal, thank you so much for joining the show. It's been such a pleasure talking to you and really appreciate all your insights and everything you've shared with us today.

Krystal Plomatos:

Rob, it was such a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you so much for having me on.

Rob Goodman:

What a fantastic interview with Krystal from The New York Times. There were so many standout moments from our chat, I'm going to try to call out just a few of them. First, when Krystal talked about the challenges of being a full-funnel marketer, and specifically about the importance of education and communication with partners, getting into the specifics about your role and what you do, and especially for those that are in multidimensional roles, letting people know that you're in X or Y mode or that you're switching hats, that way everyone knows the role you're playing and also why you need a seat at the table too.

Rob Goodman:

Next, this idea of market your marketing, I love this, market the value of what you bring. Part of the way that Krystal and her team does this is via the learning labs program she started. The learning lab idea is such a great way, whether in a short presentation or even in a Slack message, to formalize the process of idea, sharing and learning across an organization. It's a great way for your team to show off their expertise while sharing knowledge.

Rob Goodman:

There's so much more, I loved from this chat, like the win of the week idea, where at the end of the year you're sitting on 52 wins you can reflect back on or using conversations about promotions, and all that goodness on building an operating system for teams, reinforcing behaviors, building habits, setting up frameworks for learning and collaboration. It's all worth a rewind and a re-listen.

Rob Goodman:

If you want to learn more about Krystal, you can find her on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'm sure you all know where to find The New York Times online, in print or in app. Be sure to check out our show notes at wix.com/nowwhat, that's where we'll add these links and more that we discussed in this episode. As always, thanks so much for listening.

Rob Goodman:

This is Now What? by Wix, the podcast about how technology is changing…everything. Be sure to subscribe and follow the show wherever you're listening to get new episodes first, and please rate, review and share this show with your friends and colleagues too. Now What? podcast is produced and hosted by me, Rob Goodman, Executive Producer for Content at Wix. Audio engineering and editing is by Brian Pake at Pacific Audio. Music is composed and performed by Kimo Muraki. Executive Producers from Wix are Susan Kaplow and me, Rob Goodman. You can learn more at wix.com/nowwhat. We'll see you soon.