Thomas Rhiel

Vice president, product

2024–present

• Product lead of the Messaging & Publishing mission, with broad ownership of publishing and messaging platforms that serve the core New York Times product and newsroom, as well as other NYT brands: Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic.
• Leader of the technical product management function, helping further define the function within The Times, sharpen role expectations, create community, provide resources and skill-building opportunities, and bring together TPMs from across teams to discuss the company’s platform and technical strategies.

Executive director, product

2022–2024

• Product lead of the Publishing group, which is responsible for content management and publishing systems at The New York Times. Teams within Publishing own article authoring and editing, home screen production, newsletter and push notification creation, personalization workflows, photo and video editing and management, content tagging, and core platforms and capabilities.

Product director

2020–2022

• Product lead for Scoop Tools, a group of teams responsible for designing and building applications that power home screen production, newsroom workflow management, article authoring and editing, and newsletter and push notification creation.
• Led an initiative to reimagine the home screen (on the web and native apps), rework how the newsroom produces it, and revamp the underlying platforms and technologies that power it.

Senior product manager

2019–2020

• Product lead for two teams: one building Oak, a web application used by the newsroom to edit and publish articles (read more here); and another responsible for the architecture and expressive capabilities of New York Times article pages across platforms (web, apps, off-platform).

Product manager + design lead

2016–2019

• Product and design lead for Oak, a new story creation and editing tool.
• Design lead for Scoop, the content management system used within the Times to produce and publish the paper, online and in print.

Director of reader experience

• Designed and developed beautiful reading experiences for users of Atavist’s web publishing platform.
• Collaborated on the design and development of Atavist’s innovative CMS, which allows users to create stories by piecing together flexible content blocks.
• Contributed art direction and story design to The Atavist Magazine, a 2015 winner of the National Magazine Award.

Founding editor

• Founded an online publication dedicated to telling in-depth stories about Brooklyn, named the borough’s best longform website by The L Magazine.
• Designed and built Bklynr’s subscription-based website.
• Oversaw the twice-monthly production of Bklynr by recruiting writers, editing stories, designing issue layouts, and occasionally contributing.
• Created “Block by Block, Brooklyn’s Past and Present,” an interactive map representing the year of construction of Brooklyn’s 320,000-odd buildings, which was included in The Best American Infographics 2014.

User education specialist

2012–2013

• Worked with the Google Drive product, marketing, and design teams to make Drive easier to learn and use.
• Wrote Google Drive’s help materials and kept them up to date, easy to understand, and nice to look at.

Technical account manager

2011–2012

• Provided consultative support to top-tier publishers that use Google’s DoubleClick suite of ad serving products.
• Designed and helped build internal Google tools and sites.

Editorial fellow

• Maintained and helped develop TPM PollTracker, a web application that aggregated and organized results from political polls conducted nationwide.
• Wrote dozens of stories about political polling and trends uncovered by public opinion surveys.

B.A. in English and political science

• Graduated summa cum laude
• Phi Beta Kappa