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Nickey Skarstad

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68
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2022-07-18
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2022-07-18
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  1. “They had physical co working spaces and they were trying to take some of the magic that was happening in their spaces. So people meeting each other, networking, people getting funding for their startups, et cetera. And they wanted to bring it online and they wanted to try to scale it. So it wasn't constrained inside of their four walls. So I helped them basically come up with a longer-term strategy, start to figure out how to unpack that and get product market fit, and then also just build a technology team around trying to solve that. And so that was in, started like late 2019. And then I was out for a bit, had a baby, and came back and then COVID happened. And they were a physical co-working business. That was where their majority revenue came.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, so I went to a startup, and for lack of a better way to describe this, like they were basically kind of building a marketplace as well. But it was more of like a marketplace of ideas. And I hate when people say that because I think it's cheesy, but it's true.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, it was a long slide general growth. It wasn't like our top OKR, but it mattered because, again, it's sort of like you think about these things a bit like as a seesaw, right? We basically were balancing our growth with making sure people were successful. And the more equilibrium you had there, the better it was for their overarching marketplace. And it's similar if you think about experiences too, right? Where, all right, you could just be growing, but people are having a terrible experience. So how do you sort of balance those two things? And if you can get those two things in balance, you're going to cruise and you're going to be more successful longer term.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “You start to be like, oh no, I'm not good enough. I'm terrible at this. 10 days, you know, into 30 days, like it really impacts people. And so we actually put more friction in the onboarding flow to help to start to solve for that. So we actually slowed you down. We made you be more thoughtful about what you were listing. And by doing that, we actually helped you get to a first sale faster. And so that was another good example of a quality metric that we use, which was, I think it was first sale in seven days, I might be wrong, but something along those lines. And it actually conflated with a high level growth metrics, but it was a huge quality predictor and was really important for long-term seller success.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, so another one that we used at Etsy, which was an interesting one, is we realized that one of the pieces of the product that I owned was the onboarding flow. So it was onboarding new sellers specifically. And you can imagine if you're owning that flow, you're just going to be like, all right, we just need a ton of sellers and we need them to open their shops right away. So we started and we went down that path. And then we realized we actually tanked a couple of sort of like downstream metrics that we didn't really understand at first. And those metrics were basically getting sellers to a first sale. So we opened up a lot of shops, but they actually weren't successful when they were on the platform. And they weren't successful in a certain amount of time. So we did a lot of unpacking of like what happened there, why did we do that? And actually does that matter? And the end answer was yes, it matters greatly. When Etsy sellers are opening their shop, it's really important that you get them a sale right away because it's a huge motivator, right? If you make a sale in your first day, you're like, oh, wow, okay, this is a thing. I could make money doing this. This is exciting. I get to ship something to my buyer. You know, if it takes you seven days.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I mean, I think sometimes that can be a healthy stress if you do it in the right way. The nice thing, I think, is just making autonomous teams that feel like it is their goal to bring that quality experience to life can help you avoid some of that. But I do think that like pushing teams to use the product so they firsthand experience when it is not great is a really good way to give teams sort of the motivation to act on fixing things like that. But I don't know that I text people, but I'm on Slack all the time. So if anything, I'm going to slack you.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Or if it was not going to be right, and that really helped us too, because then we would go back to the teams and be like, all right, we were just in San Francisco, we run an experience last night, and it did not go well. What do we do about it? So there's lots of ways to do it, but dog fooding is a good one.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, a big part of that was actually operational, which was just making sure that hosts who weren't meeting those specific rigorous standards, like there was a lot of coaching and education that was happening. Some of that was in the product and some of it wasn't. It was something that was discussed at all of the meetings that we had across everyone's teams, right? It was very, everyone understood that it was important. And so I think that really impacted both the ops team as well as product team who were literally building the product that would bring that to life. And I think just thinking from, you know, how you, especially if you're like a founder and you're thinking about building your sort of early metrics, there's a lot of ways to really make sure your team really understands what that means. Another thing we did a lot on the experiences team is we just dogfooded all the time. And so we were lucky in that it was a really fun product to dog food, right? We were like taking experiences all over the world all the time. But it really helped because you would know right away when you showed up to an event if you were going to have a five star experience.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Other places too, but that really was experiences top line goal our review rate and quality, and it trickled down for sure.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah. So I don't think that's easy for sure. One of the things Airbnb did for experiences is we had this balancing metric, which was basically using the review rate as sort of our end all be all top line goal. So you can imagine a business like that. Obviously, we needed to, you know, have revenue kind of moving through the platform and we cared about high-level bookings. But really at the end of the day, in the beginning, we were obsessed with making sure every person who booked actually had a good experience when they showed up to experiences. And so as you, especially if you are building early product, really thinking about how can you pick some good quality metrics that might actually balance or conflate with growth metrics and use that as sort of your North Star because it really helped the whole team make sure to understand what they were actually trying to do at the end of the day, growth was important, sure, obviously. We needed to grow for a lot of reasons. But the most important thing was that the actual customer experience was great. And I know Airbnb does that in”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Learned so much from that line of thinking because just if it shipped, it was really high quality. All the edge cases had been thought through. And, you know, the experience I had before that was definitely we were shipping things more quickly. Things weren't always perfect. And it's not to say that everything Airbnb ships is perfect, but I think that obsession with the end consumer experience really influences the quality of their product suite. And is something I try to bring to my job today because no one does it better in my personal opinion.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So, part of it is more just like the way Airbnb works is something that I think I use every day in my job, which is just truly thinking about product quality and the end consumer experience. And Airbnb does not ship product if it is not good. And even if they're trying new things, they are obsessed with the end consumer experience.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Ground, and that is another layer of complexity. And so that was super fun. I was there for about, I think, a little over two and a half years. Started as a PM. I think I got promoted a couple times, left as a senior product lead, I believe was my title. Yeah, am forever grateful for that experience because I learned a ton about product market fit and also product quality.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And I joined that team when the product had just launched. So they had done sort of their early thinking, the existential thinking, had a brand new product in market, and then I joined the team. And so I was the first boots on the ground product manager and really helped that team figure out, you know, how do we get product market fit and then how do we start to think about how to scale it, which you can imagine experiences is interesting because it is a very nuanced product in that, and it's similar to Airbnb, you know, if you work on homes as well, but part of it is building the digital experience that someone will interact with when they're booking an Airbnb experience. And the other part is actually influencing the live event experience that you will, you know, experience when you actually join an event or an experience. And I think that actual layer of abstraction for me was really fascinating and something I've learned a ton about is it's not just influencing the digital product, but it's actually the consumer experience when their boots are around the”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So after seven years at Etsy, I was kind of getting the itch to try something new when I took a step back and was like, all right, what do I want to do next? I really loved the marketplace component at Etsy. And I don't know if this just says something about my personality or actually probably your personality too is marketplace product is really hard, right? You have this constant balancing of both buyer and seller sides or both sides of the marketplace. And I really liked that. And it was something that I was good at. And so I was like, all right, where else could I go? That's interesting or having a moment. And I was like Airbnb. It has to be Airbnb. I was a huge fan of their product. They were also post-product market fit, but sniffed around, ended up basically getting an opportunity to join the experiences team.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Wild ride. But that was my first role in product. And then I went on after that into several other product roles as well.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, I've spent a couple years doing that. And then through that process became sort of like one of the internal voices that had a really good understanding of how their customer, one of their core customers, their sellers, were actually using their product. And the VPA product at the time, his name's Mark Hedland. Hey, Mark, if you're listening, was like, hey, Nikki, you're in all these product meetings. Have you thought about being a product manager? And at the time, I was like, oh God, no, never. I was like, no, technology, what? Engineering? I'd have to work with engineers. I know nothing about engineering. And so I was very imposter syndrome-y about it. And he gave me a little nudge and was like, I think he'd be really good at it. And so I tried it and I started as an APM. And I was at Etsy for around, I think it was seven years total. And I spent the majority of time actually in PM product roles. So I left as a director of product. And for the most of my time there, I worked on the seller side. So it was all seller tooling, working with sellers to figure out how they could grow and scale their businesses. And it was an awesome.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, so it's been a long meandering journey, which is fun. So I've been in technology roles now for 12 years. I've been in PM roles, actually product roles for 10. I'm starting to be the person with experience in the room, which is really fun and kind of daunting at times. But how I got my first role in product was I was at Etsy in 2010 is when I joined. And I joined them, it was like post-product market fit, but before they truly started to like really grow and scale. And I actually joined them on their community team. So I worked as a forms moderator and then as a seller education specialist.”

    2022-07-18 · Lenny's Podcast · Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source