Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)

25:55What are ways you encourage your sellers to offer the things that you think you're lacking? Back to that data -driven point, right? If we can clearly articulate that if you show more photos, you will help buyers understand your item in new ways and deeper ways, and you're more likely to make a sale. That's maybe a somewhat reductive example, but those are the types of things where we generally know either through the data that we observe based on activity on the marketplace and or through the research we're doing, that this will be valuable. The challenge is often, we have so many things that we want our sellers to do.

26:34What's the most important thing for them to do right now? And that maybe changes somewhat seasonally, right? We're slowly starting to get towards the holiday season, and that just has a heightened time of purchasing and contrast that with, you know, when it's around Mother's Day, maybe different type of inventory works really well. And so we need different inputs from our sellers. Because ultimately they're business people. They have limited time in the day, and they want to spend time making. So how can we make sure that the time they spend on Etsy managing their inventory, you know, offering customer support is as valuable as possible?

27:09Yep. So essentially in product messaging and recommendations and that you're showing to the sellers, is the way you communicate to them. Yeah, and to some degree, we use the buyer experience to kind of signal what matters, right? When we're clearly highlighting photos, then that's obviously a very, overly simple example. Seller's just noticing. Here's what the search experience is highlighting. As an example, yeah. And then really thinking about, you know, some of the kind of signals or the snippets of information that we highlight, you know, what goes into that? We know that great customer service, a seller will be providing, they'll be responding to, we call them combos, but messages on our platform, they'll be responding really quickly.

27:53And that's something that we then highlight in the experience and that, you know, if you're meeting that criteria, then we can start to signal to a buyer that, yes, this person offers really excellent customer service and you should, we can say your expectations accordingly. Awesome. Yeah. We saw the same thing at Airbnb, one of the things that I worked on, there was one of the bigger shifts in the marketplace was shifting Airbnb to an instant buying experience. And many hosts didn't want that because they really wanted to vet the guest and make sure they are happy with them, but it ended up being so important to conversion that we just encouraged them to turn it on and one of the ways that worked best is exactly what you shared where in a search experience, when someone came and searched, we just defaulted the search results to only show you instantly bookable listings and host started to realize, oh shit, this is where things are going.

28:38I think I gotta really take this seriously. Yeah. And that worked really well. Yeah, interesting. Pulling on that thread a little bit more, I'm curious what you've seen as some of the bigger conversion wins on the buyer side in terms of experience you've run that have had some of the bigger impact. I won't say we're consistently because that suggests that we don't know what we're doing. We do. We are often surprised by what works in an outsized way and what we think is gonna be a knock it out of the park's success ends up being of minimal value, but coming back to kind of maybe some of the themes I alluded to earlier, reviews of long bin really important.

29:13And when you're reviewing an item like said, that's unique, that's from an independent seller, the type of information that another buyer is looking for is maybe a little different than other marketplaces that they might or even platforms that they might be shopping on. And so really trying to lean into, well, what does it look like in a buyer's hand? In a buyer's home, maybe that gives the next purchaser a bit more confidence that it's the right size, it's the right color, whatever it might be. And so that's long been a track that has been very fruitful for us and continues to be something that we iterate on that we focus on.

29:47Just to understand that, essentially it's recommending to sellers, here's the photos you should have on your list. Rather, no, collecting from buyer. So a seller will give us the photos that they're gonna take and then we can augment those with, we call them buyer review photos, but ultimately the experience the purchaser is having either through photo or video is super, super valuable. Great, okay, cool. So adding specific photos, the fine help buyers convert. Keep going. And then the other side is really leaning into maybe more, McCourt unquote, behavioral economic tactics of just helping buyers make decisions.

30:28Signals and nudges is how you'll see it referred to in literature and we've seen great success in elevating little snippets of information that really help a buyer understand, oh, there is actually only one of these. Well, that could information to know it's something that then fits into their decision -making process that might have otherwise been buried. And so really the, yeah, leaning into the quick summaries, the easy, glanceable information that enables a buyer to gain enough confidence to say, yeah, this is out of these 100 million items or the results for this search query, this is the one that I feel best about buying.

31:06We've seen lots of success on that track as well. Those are track adirping be as well. One of the ways they did this is they called it a rare gem which is something that's available right now. It's very popular and they created this kind of iconography for it and engineers on the team in that for Halloween dressing up as a rare gem became like the whole thing at the company. And it was 20 better. Maybe his every home is a one of a kind, like there's only one left always. And there's always jokes about we should always be like, one left, you better book now. We had a great, I believe it was introduced, I don't believe.

31:39I know it was introduced as an issue or a bug, but we ended up showing four stars and the fifth star when it was a half star got rendered as a horse emoji. And so for a second there on Etsy, we had four stars in a horse showing up for some of our review ratings. And that spawned a huge amount of internal fun and then back to the year point around Halloween, we had a few teams being four stars in a horse. It was pretty interesting. It was like five people were four people were star and there's a horse person. Yeah, exactly. Today's episode is brought to you by one schema, the embeddable CSV importer for SAS.

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33:01Spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products. Customers get frustrated by useless messages like error online 53 and never end up getting started with your product. One schema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product. For listeners of this podcast, one schema is offering a $1 ,000 discount. Learn more at oneschema .co slash leddie. So going down this track a little bit more, one of the biggest wins for Airbnb's search experience was this very small idea of just what if you open each listing in the search results and in new tab and that had been converting like 1 % like increasing conversion by 1 % is there anything like that that you remember that you've done of just like holy moly that was so simple but such a big win.

33:47Yeah, we have similar learnings around that exact example. Oftentimes, I think about kind of effort and reward. So it might be a smallish GMS win or conversion rate win but it was a one line text change. And we've seen those where we add a small snippet of, maybe we feel like it's almost marketing copy and it ends up having an outsized impact. We had one example where we added some text to the cart experience and we just saw huge uplift that we really, really didn't expect. It was more us communicating our values as a business and it was something that really seemed to resonate with our buyers and so that drove conversion.

34:30We've got examples where it's a one line copy change and it's quite shocking the impact that that can have. I'm curious with that change actually was the text change that had that much impact if you can recall. We've long and continue to invest in sustainability and the text change was in our cart where we call out Etsy Offset's carbon emissions from every delivery and just adding that simple line of text was something that like I said, really resonated with our buyers and the type of customer that comes to Etsy and really had drove conversion. And Ronnie Kohabi on the podcast who's one of the leading experts on experimentation and he had the stat that 80 % of experiments fail across at each company on average.

35:12Does that sound about right in terms of how you guys find experiments working out? Yeah, awesome. Okay, what is your just general philosophy and experimentation? Does everything run as an experiment? Do things sometimes not run an experiment? How do you think about that at Etsy? Right now the vast majority of our changes do and to be perfectly candid, I think that's one of our growth edges as a product org and maybe even as a company is bringing in different ways to validate changes because to some degree or maybe the way I think about experimentation, that's the highest bar. That proves with near absolute certainty that there's a causal relationship between the change you made and the KPI that you wanna move.

35:57But I think that that is, it may be misses the point in some changes or some areas where you're working towards a bigger net new thing or this specific change won't really be indicative of the greater whole you're building towards. So we've, like I said, I mentioned earlier, we've long been a very AP testing driven organization, not least because Etsy's kind of background in history has deep, deep roots in an incredible engineering culture and so that's kind of really tried and true. So the vast majority of things are tested in that way. We're expanding how we think about looking at cohorts over time, I mentioned retention earlier, that to some degree, it necessitates a different type of tests when we look at our SEO work.

36:43It's, you can't think about it in exactly the same ways but the through line is, is the change that we're making adding value and that's what we wanna try to understand. A .B. testing is a great way to do that. There are others, some of which which starting to employ, others that will continue to investigate and think about how we can leverage. Is there an example of anything, and if there's not, that's totally cool, if something that you shipped that was maybe negative on the experiment results or you just didn't want to write as an experiment? When we're collecting inputs from sellers, we just simply don't feel it's appropriate to not either show or honor, right?

37:20Like we talk about a tried and true practice of sales and discounting. If a seller offers something on sale, then we need to show that. We're really curious about how that actually drives by our behavior and there's ways that we can kind of construct pre -post analyses and things like that to try to understand the impact. But ultimately, those are the kind of areas where we are on the side of looking at our data in different ways. And so we have maybe a slightly different degree of confidence in the value, but we're still confident that it does help the marketplace as a whole. That's a great example.

37:56And I'm not sure what I do there, that is tricky. So we've been talking about conversion. I'm curious in terms of acquisition, what you've seen work and just generally, how do people find Etsy? How do you drive top of funnel for Etsy? This is two sides to Etsy, right? There's the seller in the buyer, getting in the way back machine. We would, on the seller side, we would be at craft fairs like Renegade and other places where our sellers were selling in person and really letting them know that Etsy exists. And so that was very boots on the ground. Let's get out and try to acquire sellers into the marketplace.

38:31Some of that predates me to some degree. We were probably doing it on the tail end when I joined. And then we have a lot of great word of mouth through our sellers, right? A seller probably knows other people who are similarly inclined to be incredible crafts people who want to sell their items. And so we've seen some success with our, we have a team's platform where sellers can come together, ask each other questions and kind of the word of mouth, type of growth through that. On the buyer side, we really leverage the fact that we have a ton of inventory. And to some degree, it ends up being quite a long tail of inventory where we can meet really niche and specific needs.

39:08And so that lends itself really well to thinking about SEO. Lends itself really well to thinking about Google Shopping where someone is not on Etsy but is often looking for something either somewhat or very specific. And we can really meet their needs in a really meaningful way by showing them not only just a single item, but maybe that and then other options that they might find that are of a similar vein in a similar sub, sub, sub categories in some cases. And so those have been long tried and true areas that we've invested in and we've seen really great success in driving new buyers to Etsy.

39:44I've researched and written about that story of how Etsy started with sellers and craft fairs and so that's a really classic story. And I think there's also an element of the early sellers drove the early buyers because they're just like advertising their listing page here is where you could go buying which is a really unfair, rare opportunity thing kind of grow the marketplace by just focusing on sellers. I mean, yes, and a seller is a buyer, right? And so if they're making something that they've poured their heart into, chances are they will value that exact same behavior in someone else and so if they're selling an item, they're looking for other things in maybe not their exact category but in adjacent categories and they become buyers.

40:25So it is a nice dynamic when that starts to work. Yeah, so many natural advantages to getting this marketplace off the ground. How cool is that? You mentioned word of mouth is a big part of how Etsy started spreading and imagine even today there's a lot of just hage check out Etsy. Is there anything you've done that accelerate word of mouth or build on word of mouth or furls comes to mind? Is there anything along those lines? Yeah, we've dabbled with referral programs a while ago. It probably ate some years ago. What we saw, it was a different time. And so I think we maybe didn't value a new buyer, for example, in the way we do today because to some degree, right, you're unlocking future value.

41:04They make a single purchase and then the bet is over time. They'll go on to make subsequent purchases. We didn't necessarily have that as deep and understanding then as we do now. So our buyer referral program ultimately wasn't a huge success, but on the seller side, this was back in the days of Dropbox referral program being a huge, huge driver of their growth and they'll give get a concept that was really prevalent back then. And on the seller side, one of the things that we really leaned into was on Etsy, for those who aren't familiar, it costs 20 cents to list an item. And that may seem like a very small financial outlay to get started, but it's a little bit of a barrier.

41:41And the more we can do to remove those, the higher chance that someone will either become a seller or list more items. So we really leaned into that as the currency for the seller referral program and coming back to what I said around Teams, that was a really great way to supercharge some of that activity that was either happening, but could be, more of it could happen or really helping a seller understand like, oh yeah, there is a hook here. If I offer this person, I refer them, they'll get some listing credits, it'll be easier for them to open their shop. And then when I need to list more items, I also have credits that I can apply.

42:19So that was one small area. I wouldn't say it was a huge driver of growth, but in certain markets, in certain pockets, we saw it work pretty well. Awesome. That also helps with fraud, which is a huge problem with referral programs where the money isn't, like the credit is just you can list on Etsy, it's not like you can steal a lot of money away from the business. So that's clever. Yeah. Okay, I want to talk about one other part of the funnel retention. Is there anything you've learned that has been really effective to help with the retention? We have long had features that are kind of retentive in their nature, things like we want to, Etsy we call them favorites, that might be liking or a similar action on other places, but how do we think about the habit loop of if you take an action, what's the trigger and then what's the reward?

43:06And so using a favorite as an example, you favorite an item, that's a pretty strong ish, of course, adding it to your cart or maybe, and purchasing it, that's the strongest of signals, but you've shown intent. So what can we do with that information? We can then say the seller put it on sale, you should come back and check it out. This is selling out, there's only one of this item left. You showed some intent, you might want to come back and get it. And that's just one example of trying to like close those loops, and that's where we've worked on things like, we call it the updates feed, essentially a feed of activity that you've taken, that we're demonstrating how it's changed, what's new, and then pulling in, the tried and true tactic of push notifications to make you aware of that, such that you're using your phone all the time, you see that show up, that's a pretty great notification to get, right?

43:56The thing that I really liked is now on sale. I want to check that out. And so those are examples where really leaning into that, that habit loop framework, as helped us understand, we've got a lot of this activity, how do we close the loop, how do we make it really valuable for our buyers? Zooming out a little bit, it's kind of wild that Etsy can exist in a world of eBay and Amazon. And I'm just curious what it is that you think the founders and the team did early on to carve out this space of like, I know you could buy things from people, you can buy things on Amazon really quickly, to create a world where Etsy builds as massive business that continues to thrive.

44:32What do you think was done so well to carve out the space? I think the, to some degree, resolves down to, and maybe that's a little too extreme, but a key component is the brand. The brand stands for something in people's minds. And that helps understand, you know, you're not gonna get the same inventory on Etsy. You shouldn't expect the same inventory on Etsy as you might be looking for on eBay. It just doesn't, it doesn't make sense to our buyers. They, they're, you know, the items of our seller sell are unique. And so I think that that is kind of the core nugget combined with, you know, how we think about policies and our way to, to some degree, maintain the integrity of the marketplace.

45:19Those two things combined do set us apart. And, you know, the, I think if you ask many people, certainly here in the US, what they think of Etsy, a very specific image will be conjured up. That may be one that we wanna evolve and build on, but it feels quite distinct. And it's not the same as eBay, and it's not the same as Amazon. And I think there's real deep value in that. And not, I think I wasn't here at the very beginning, but it's certainly, you know, something that was there at the very beginning of Etsy that is still kind of like a through line to where we are today. That makes absolute sense to me.

45:54On the other hand, I also don't know how that happens. Is there anything that you think about of how the team did that? And how they built that brand? Like, what are some of the important elements as a like a specific aesthetic? Is it a certain type of supply that you stuck to? What do you think was so important to building that brand? I think it is the supply. If you think about the marketplace, the vast majority of content is maybe what you, we might consider UGC. It's either the item is from the seller, or as mentioning before, buyer review is from the buyer. And so just being really clear about what's okay to sell and what's not okay, I think does really differentiate us.

46:37I also think over the years, you know, our brand and our aesthetic and how we position ourselves has evolved, we'll continue to evolve as it should. But to the point where we are now, are the statement we have is keep commerce human. And that feels really simple, super pithy, easy to remember, but has lineage when you go all the way back to kind of where we started in terms of really valuing, valuing the unique, valuing the handmade. And so that does permeate kind of decision making how we show up the type of features we work on, the things we would prioritize, you know, maybe never say never, but like, you know, an item getting dropped off by a drone and a person never touches it, like that doesn't feel very Etsy.

47:19That's not something that we might lean into. It's interesting how many parallels, Etsy has to air being be because air being be is the same. General ideas, it's people's homes, people making things. And then also I think the tagline for air being be early on was travel like a human. So it's actually a really similar concept, which touches on a question I wanted to talk about, which is many marketplaces as they grow, become supply constrained. And then there's this pressure to add different types of supply, like in air being these case, it was, we should add hotels, we should add property management, vacation rental companies on here, we should have everything people want to book is we're losing business, they could book anything here.

47:56They should be able to, but the tension is then we become like everyone else and then what is air being be anyway? What is air being be in that case? And I think at sea went through that experience where there's like a lot of cheap products from overseas and it was kind of being flooded. Is that true, I guess? And then just how do you think about that limit and where you draw that line? Yeah. I think it does come back to some degree to the brand and the policy point from just before. And we take, we take enforcing our policies really seriously. It's not an easy job at our scale. That means we need to continue to invest and continue to make sure that only the best items, the most relevant items are on Etsy.

48:38That job is never done. The team that does that works super, super hard and is always kind of looking for new signals to understand what maybe doesn't meet our criteria. Generally speaking, supply is something that we have in spades for the most part back to the point we talked about earlier. One of the things that we grappled with was around, how can we help sellers scale? Right, they sell great inventory but maybe they just don't have enough of it or they can't meet the demand because they're making everything by hand. And so one of the things that there wasn't evolution was leaning into what today we call production assistance.

49:16And the way I think about that is you still need to understand the provenance of your item. If you're saying, I have this design, I'm just gonna throw it over the fence to a manufacturer that I've never met that I don't know, I don't understand their processes, I may not agree with them, that doesn't meet our criteria. You need to understand how it's being made, who is making it, have a relationship with the person who's helping you scale your business. But that's something that we saw from people who maybe more would gravitate more towards being designers than being able to actually make the thing.

49:47They have this excellent idea, they just can't see it come to life. And so they need some help. And not with something we leaned into to be able to help sellers that maybe weren't able to make a thing and sell it on Etsy or for sellers who were reaching the limits of what they could supply, really take it to the next level and make more items such that they could make more sales. So it sounds like there's essentially this just like evolving definition of what a supply is allowed on Etsy, a team that stays on top of that. Imagine there was just like a hard decision at one point of just, we will limit supply and here's what supply that we want on the platform, everything else we're gonna take off.

50:25We would limit the type of items, the supply, the number of those items that, as we know we talked about, this is a lot of them, but really having that clear definition. In some cases it's easy, right? Some things are just there, they violate legal definitions and those things are, or that's the easy stuff to think about. It's where it's a little more gray that it gets a little thicker. That reminds me, so my wife is actually a designer and she produces these hilarious charts about life stuff and people take her designs and just sell them on every platform on Zazzle and probably Etsy, but everywhere and she's always trying to hunt them down and get them to take them off, but it's such a pain for like a small designer and it's not a Etsy problem, it's just a general internet problem.

51:08Yeah, and back to the, you know, we have teams hard at work, we have teams hard at work thinking about IP and how to police it, how to enforce it. It's not a domain, I will suggest I'm an expert in really, really tricky stuff, but we've got to be on that. Another, I think problem that's sort of unique to Etsy, is something that I think people call the graduation problem, which is where you join Etsy, things start to grow, you become really successful, and then you're like, why am I paying Etsy all these fees? Why don't I just make my own website and just sell it directly and not pay any fees? And I think you guys went through that, and so if that's true, is there anything you've learned about just how to avoid getting people to want to leave?

51:47I think that the core thought there is, our fees are generally low and highly competitive. So from that perspective, there's reason to stay on Etsy. What we've seen and what we know, our sellers are really smart business people, and so if they can distribute their products through another channel, that might be their own website, another marketplace, in person, probably gonna try to do that, right? They want to make more sales, many of them, not all, but many of them are wired to wanna grow their business. And so really understanding the role that we play in that kind of construct of distribution channels to make it a little reductive, is really helpful to understand.

52:32And to some degree, we wanna be the place that not only they make sales on, but they love to sell on, because our tools are really catered to the needs that they have. So there is some degree of stickiness. I mentioned teams earlier, there are places where sellers go to kind of congregate, share ideas, share grievances in some cases, but ultimately support each other. And so there are reasons to kind of stick around. I'm sure there are certainly sellers who scale out of Etsy or realize I wanna build my own website to the example you cited. Reality is that's neither cheap nor fast. It's hard work, it's hard work to build, hard work to maintain, expensive to drive traffic to.

53:11And so that may be a part of their kind of, the way they wanna take their business, but oftentimes Etsy still does play a role in how they're thinking about where they make sales and ultimately where they're gonna see growth from. The cool thing that I saw online about you is that you built a marketplace essentially within Etsy, called Etsy Studio. And I'm not sure if that's around anymore, but I'm curious just what the story there was and what you learned from that experience and what now was your current status. Yeah, well researched because no, it is no longer around. The white space we saw with Studio was essentially saying, on the one hand, you've got Pinterest fails, right?

53:52You've got all these great inspiring items or projects on Pinterest, and then you have people who've no idea how to make them. And they get so frustrated. And then on the other hand, you've got a marketplace like my goals or these other places where you might go for craft supplies, they have stuff, but they don't necessarily have inspiration. And how can we play in that intersection of the idea and the items and the tutorials to see that idea come to life? So kind of the genesis of the idea felt from a brand perspective super aligned. We stand for creativity, we stand for makers. And so we saw it as a big opportunity.

54:30The launch happened to coincide with the pivot in 2017 to really focusing on the core marketplace or refocusing on the core marketplace, maybe I should say. And so it became clear that when we laid out what we're optimizing for, which is driving sales in the short term, marketing dollars being as or why positive as possible, having teams focused on the core marketplace it didn't check any of those boxes. And so really, really tough decision and hard to manage through, but that was ultimately the right call for the business to say, this no longer makes sense given the new constraints that we're operating in given the new goals that we have.

55:10Makes sense. Also something that happened to be a lot trying new things that they didn't have to go to. And to move on. Yep, that's how it goes. Yep. Shifting a little bit to just product leadership and breading the product team and just a few more questions. What's something that you've found to be really important to having a productive, well run, well executing product team? Yeah, one of the things that's certainly not completely novel, but I think we have a pretty unique interpretation of is how we collaborate between functions. You'll often hear the three legs of the stool where you've got product and engine design.

55:46And we've evolved that to five legs of the stool. And I fully recognize that a five -legged stool probably is not a very stable thing, but like go with the analogy for a second. I think even more stable, right? Is that the most stable stool? Or is it less stable with five legs? That's, you know, you probably need to really fly surface. Yes, that's me. So regardless is, you know, of course, we've got product, engine design. And we've got our insights partners. So research and analytics and we've got our marketing partners really working in a tight team to build the best products possible. And so I think that, you know, we can continue to get better absolutely at how we make decisions and how we bring the various viewpoints together.

56:28So to some degree, it's not like, it's not the easiest path, but it's the best path, I think, where you're really incorporating different viewpoints, different constraints, different considerations into the features and the products that we're building. And treating that as kind of the core leadership team, I think is really valuable. And maybe that's partly because generally, we don't subscribe to this idea of PM as the mini CEO. You know, you're up there directing from on high that we're going to build that feature and we're going to do that. And that's just not not the type of culture that we have.

56:59And generally speaking, from what I've seen doesn't lead to good, good decisions or the best features or product being built. And so collaboration is something we really value and that we try to live through how we structure our teams, how we make our decisions. Is it perfect? Like I said, absolutely not. I think it's the way that we've found being really successful building product. Do you give the PM just a little more say in decision making and ask because with five people in a leadership team, you talked about how back in the day, it was like too consensus driven maybe and I wonder how you navigate that with five decision makers.

57:35Yeah, we're always looking to clarify or recliify or restate who ultimately is accountable. And in many cases, it is the PM. You are the one who is, who Nick or our CPO likes to say, you don't have to have the best ideas, we have to choose the best ideas. And so really figuring out how you're selecting what you're going to build and then living with the consequences. Of course, ideally successful. In many cases back to your 80 % stat, the experiments, 80 % of experiments don't work. Owning what's next, right? Okay, did we learn from that? If we did, what are we going to do about it? That definitely does fault with a PM.

58:12It doesn't give you the permission to ignore other viewpoints or make decisions in a vacuum. It's certainly not that. But ultimately when we need to move forward, it is the PM that is on the hook for those things. Awesome. So essentially the PM can make the call if there's like a unclear consensus. And given we're so many places, our but we're so heavily led by the insights, like the caller quant, the decision in many instances is clear. When it's not, that's when, you know, we need the product person to step forward and say, we're going in this direction. Don't know if it's going to work out, but we'll certainly learn and we'll move forward.

58:50Awesome. And then just to go on this topic a little bit more, your teams are cross -functional, dedicated teams, I imagine. It sounds like there's these five leads, breach team. Is that roughly how you organize? Yeah, and I, the fifth leg, if you will, of marketing, that might be product marketing in some cases, that might be brand marketing and others. And so there's kind of different flavors that we, of marketing that we pull in based on, on the specific needs of the project. But that's generally speaking, how we try to, try to structure our teams from kind of the, the group level all the way down to the, to the individual squad.

59:24We can't always have, you know, a dedicated research and a dedicated analyst and a dedicated product marketer to every single team. So, you know, it's certainly not perfect, but that's what we aspire to having at least coverage on those roles. Got it. So most teams have dedicated marketing person or a product marketing person. That's crazy. That's really rare. But in some, some teams, some teams that, I imagine are most in need of marketing support. Got it. Are you able to just paint a rough picture, kind of the way the teams are laid out at Etsy? Just like a bedroom, there's a buyer side and a seller side.

59:55How does that look for people to do that? Yeah, the way that we, we think about the structure right now. And, you know, the, the, or design should ideally follow strategy. And if your strategy is always evolving, then your design is always evolving. We call it the product stack. And so, at the, we've got our core customer teams who are unsurprisingly thinking about buyers and sellers. And so they're, they're the ones on the front lines with, with the seller, with the, the customers. Then we have our, we call them our partner teams. And so they are working directly with the end customer. So think an organization like payments where they have clearly a way to capture payment from a buyer to remit funds to a seller.

1:00:42So they're really on the front lines with the customer. They also have other constraints working with the, the payment networks and card providers and things like that. So they just have a slightly different model. So core customer partner teams, enablement teams that are really in service of helping deliver the best possible experience. That might be through our recommender systems or through our design system in order to make, you know, developing just that little bit easier, a little bit faster, a little bit more standardized in some cases. And then the, the kind of the foundation of it all sits with infrastructure and, and the teams that you might expect that are much more technical in nature that really without that, you know, we wouldn't have a website.

1:01:20When you're hiring product managers, or anything that you've found to be really important or interesting or maybe like a unique insight into hiring teams, the three things that, that I come back to time and again is one, the collaboration piece that we talked about earlier, not only a willingness but a real excitement to do that. It's not, it's not everyone's back. I get that. Some people just want to be in a, you know, make fast decisions and move forward place. We aim to make fast decisions, but you need to consult. That's one, two, is being decisive. We have tons of data, but it's not always clear exactly what to do with that.

1:01:55Or we're using a new input, maybe back to the point mentioned earlier, looking at competitive insights, you know, let's make a decision, let's move forward, let's ideally learn, even if we're not making progress against our goals, we're at a minimum learning. And then the third point is just curiosity because we're a relatively small organization with, and everyone says, oh, we only had more people, but we are quite small. And so there is a lot of change. There's a lot of new priorities that crop up. And that means there's a lot of opportunity for the right folks. Right, if there, I want to be in this space and only this space, and this is my specific domain, and I just want to be in it forever and more, that might be a little more challenging because you might be asked to work on something net new.

1:02:38And so just having that curiosity mindset of saying, or maybe said differently, growth mindset, of, okay, there's something to learn from the thing I'm being asked to do. Let me really like lean into that. And to some degree, I'm not describing anything that's atypical of great product people overall, but I think we have, we have either a slightly different flavor or we need it in a slightly different way here in Etsy. Awesome. Last question before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there a framework or a process that you find really useful? That you find yourself coming back to that you think listeners would potentially find really valuable?

1:03:11I won't pretend to know whether listeners find it valuable, but the thing that I do a lot that we do as my team that others do to some degree is a simple exercise of weekly focus. What are you focused on this week? And then reflecting on, did you get done the things you were focused on last week? Seems super simple, but just the exercise of thinking about what matters, writing it down and having a little bit of social proof or like articulating it out to others, creates some degree of accountability. It's something that is very, very easy and simple to do. And if you do it consistently, you start to see some really great patterns of like those types of focus areas take me longer than I think.

1:03:55I should budget more time. Or these are the type of things that crop up at this time of year, I might need to start thinking about making some space for them. So I've just found that to be really, really, really helpful in the day to day. I love that. How do you operationalize that? Is there like a Slack channel people post these in? Is it a doc? Yeah, like in our, in our bio experience product channel on Mondays, we, everyone's kind of sharing what they're focused on, how last week, PANED OUT, you know, was it done? Is it still in progress? Things like that, it's very, very low -fi. But it worked pretty well.

1:04:25It's kind of like a standup that happens once a week and it's a higher level, essentially, is what it's done. Exactly, exactly. Trying to think about the priorities and not tasks. And that is a blurry line, I fully recognize that. But anchoring in those, I think is, certainly for me personally, more help. And is the comedian person in these and sharing funny things in the standup? No, unfortunately, well, or fortunately, he is now actually a comedian. He's doing his thing full -time comedian. That's amazing. And with that, we've reached our very exciting lighting round. Are you ready? Hit me. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

1:05:03Couple to come to mind. Team of Teams by Stanley McRistle has been, I think, is just a really fascinating read and be, help me think a lot about how you trust teams and how you think about disseminating decision -making to the right folks, tech language, push decisions to the edges. But thinking about it in the context that he describes there is really fascinating. And he just shows that it can work even in the most kind of egregious world of military, which you think is top -down command and control. Show is that there's a different way to approach problems. There's actually a fan favorite at Airbnb, also.

1:05:45Oh, cool. Other is back all the way to the top. So what I love to do, surfing and being outdoors, let my people go surfing by Ivanshu and Art, the Patagonia founder, incredibly fascinating read of someone who just had a deep, deep passion, turned it into a business, struggled, iterated, came out the other side, really successful. So the business side, but also just how they think about treating their employees and the culture that they built, is to me personally really inspiring. There's a theme here around trust and kind of how you engage with people to make their day -to -day work lives just really, really fulfilling.

1:06:25So that's another favorite. And then in a super different direction, Power Broker by Robert Caro, that is an absolute tone. It is huge. It took me probably an entire year to read, because I'm an extremely slow reader, and or I fell asleep a lot. But it is so fascinating, especially living in New York of how one human had such an incredibly outsized and probably terrible impact on the city, access to waterfronts, really thinking about communities and tearing them apart, just such a fascinating read. I have that book and I've never read it. It's very long and intimidating. I think it might be back there.

1:07:01Maybe different. I would chunk it out. Do a couple of chapters at a time, otherwise it feels insurmountable. It's like infinite gests, Regist, you're never intimidated. Amazing. Okay, next question, favorite recent movie or TV show. So my wife and I talk about this a lot. I think we're Western files. If that's the thing, I'm from Europe. And so it's a whole new world, different world for me. We've loved Yellowstone and all of the, I guess they're prequels. They've been, yeah, just really, really fun to watch for some people who are curious about that culture in that world. Awesome. Yellowstone has been hard to find where to even watch it.

1:07:38It's like on the weirdest channels. You have to, it's one of those where, you know, the old world of, we cut all our cords and we only needed Netflix. Suddenly you need all these really random, you know, providers of content that you're like, I have to subscribe to that now to watch this show. I don't understand where this even is. Just take my money on. Favorite interview question you'd like to ask candidates. I'm a big fan of case studies, live case studies. I think you learn a whole boat load about how someone thinks on the fly, how they react to constraints. So we use those. I've used those a ton.

1:08:10We've, we use them pretty heavily in, in product interviews. So I love those modulated for the type of business you're in, you know, what you're actually trying to, trying to understand. The other one I like to ask is, is around something that people have taught themselves, tried to get at a growth mindset. I think Julia, who was on the podcast a while ago said something similar, but you, you get a ton of insight into someone, ideally get a bit of passion and you often get something to go research. He's like, I don't know anything about that topic. I want to learn a little more. What is the favorite product that you've recently discovered that you love?

1:08:44You as a, as a, as a new parent, maybe resonates when, so it's not new because our kids too, but when I was looking, you know, being, being in product, of course, you want to attract data. And so I was looking for apps that would be good at doing that. And they nearly all look like hideous medical charts where I just don't want to engage with that. I found this one app called, I think it's called Nara Baby or Nara Something. Two or a simple allows both parents to enter information, probably grandparents too. We only tested it with two people seamlessly syncs. Really easy to use. So at 4 a .m., when you can't see, when you just want to say like, I fed the baby, you can do that really easily.

1:09:26Just really, really simple, like, fit for purpose product. So that resonated with me. I'm going to be downloading that right now. I've been using Huckleberry, which is both awesome and not awesome. And so awesome tip, great. What is a favorite life motto that you like to repeat often or share with other people either in work or in life? One of the things I talk about, maybe internally more than anything else, but all or nothing. Like go all in, go do the thing in German, Gansol -Degannik, I grew up in Germany. So that's something I say to myself a lot is, like, if you're going to do it, do it properly.

1:10:00And I think those are often helpful words to live by. I love that. Final question. What's a favorite item you recently discovered on Etsy? I recently bought an engraved whiskey decanter for my wife and myself or for the home. Do it for beautiful. Oh, so cool. Got it personalized with our names. Just such a cool, cool item that, yeah, I wasn't expecting to find that kind of thing, not even sure exactly how you engrave a whiskey decanter, but it was very good. Very cool. Yeah. And the other thing, I'm always on the lookout for greeting cards. If anyone has great greeting card seller recommendations, I'm all ears.

1:10:45I love giving out physical greetings cards to folks. So that's another always on Etsy favorite of mine. Tim, we've talked about growth, culture, surfing, cabins, leadership. Thank you so much for being here. I'm downloading the NAR app right now as we speak. Two final questions. Working folks finding out line if they want to reach out and maybe learn more and how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, yeah. Find me on LinkedIn. That's probably, well, not probably, is my most professional platform. Instagram, like I said, is a, is a, is a farce and being useful, yeah, send me, send me things that you're excited about on in the Etsy product, send me feedback.

1:11:21Always, always really, really keen to learn how folks are experiencing the things that we built. Amazing. Tim, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, Lenny. Appreciate it. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'spodcast .com. See you in the next episode.