Thomas Rhiel

Vice president, product

2024–present

• Product lead of Publishing Platform, an 11‑team product group that owns the path from journalist to reader, including the authoring tools, content model, and delivery systems behind everything The Times publishes, across all its brands.
• Since 2026, the group also includes the web and native app platforms that render that content for readers, with the goal of building them into a robust shared foundation for The New York Times, The Athletic, Cooking, Wirecutter, and Games.
• Leader of the technical product management function: defining the role and its expectations at The Times, building community and skill-building resources, and bringing TPMs together on the company’s platform and technical strategy.

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 in the native apps, rework how the newsroom produces it, and rebuild the platforms behind it. It shipped to every Times home screen, giving editors control over the page’s structure and, for the first time, the ability to deploy targeted and personalized experiences across platforms at will.

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. Now used by the entire newsroom, it made story authoring far more flexible and editorially driven, and brought collaborative editing to the newsroom for the first time.
• 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 reading experiences for stories published on Atavist’s web platform.
• Collaborated on the design and development of Atavist’s CMS, which lets writers build stories from 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, writing its help materials and keeping them up to date, easy to understand, and nice to look at.

Technical account manager

2011–2012

• Provided consultative support to top-tier publishers using Google’s DoubleClick ad serving products, and designed and helped build internal Google tools and sites.

Editorial fellow

• Maintained and helped develop TPM PollTracker, a web application that aggregated results from political polls nationwide, and wrote dozens of stories about trends in public opinion.

B.A. in English and political science

• Graduated summa cum laude
• Phi Beta Kappa