YouSaid · the spoken record

Sarah Tavel

lines on the record: 118
first: 2023-12-27
most recent: 2023-12-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Interest doesn't have to do anything. They're intentional. The user is creating the action that drives the outcome that Pinterest wants in that example. Now, as much as I love Evernote, this is a place where Evernote obviously falls down, right? There's no loops that they can take advantage of that when I use the product, I make it better for you. There's no loop where when I use a product, I want to pull you into the product. They tried at some point to do collaborative journals. It doesn't work. And so that's a place where, you know, because of that Evernote had to spend money to acquire users, they tapped out. So they kind of missed that level three. There's other examples I could speak to of companies that weren't able to transcend to level three that you wouldn't otherwise think. You know, I think of”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so these are kind of classic loops. You talk about these a lot. They exist in marketplaces and social products. How do you get it so that as your users use the product, they want to share it with other people? They create metadata that you can then use for SEO. You have collaborative experiences that pull other people in. There's all different things you can do here. And then there's also things that you can do to re-engage a user. As an example, in the early days of Pinterest, if you pinned something, you're pinning something that you found on Pinterest at somebody else pinned. And so we would send a push notification, hey, Lenny, Sarah just pinned your pin to her artboard. Now, that, if you were a dormant user at that point, it's been a couple weeks since you'd use Pinterest, that notification might pull you back into Pinterest and be like, hey, I wonder what Sarah, what other pins Sarah has on her artboard? And so it's a great re-engagement loop where pin”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, the biggest thing that you can do is a network fact, right? If the more I pin something on Pinterest, the better the experience gets for every user on Pinterest, right? Like every time I add a pin to a board, I'm creating a new edge in Pinterest graph that Pinterest then uses to create recommendations and enrich their understanding of all those objects on Pinterest. So the network effect is the strongest thing that you can do. And obviously if you have that, which all social products have to in some way, you have to spend time as much as possible because maximizing where that shows up, fine-tuning it, removing friction so it becomes, it's a flywheel that spins faster and faster. But there's other loops too that you have to identify and then maximize. And these are the kind of growth and re-engagement loops.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yeah, it's very true. So let's say now you actually have a product, it's growing, more people are completing the core action. When they complete that core action, the product gets more retentive for them. It gets better the more they use it. They have more to lose by leaving it. Then your tall task, and this is a very difficult, this is like the hardest thing to overcome is how do you make the product self-perpetuating? And this is where I really love to think of every time a user uses your product, let's say they're clicking on the mouse or they're tapping on their phone. I love to think of it as like this kinetic energy that they're putting into your product. You're taking that energy and your job with a great product is to take that energy as much as possible, convert it back to the experience that they're having with your product.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know. Well, that's people keep telling me I need to move on to notion or something else, but not yet. I will remain a dinosaur here.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People still laugh at me for being a NeverNote user. I am just. I'm a lifetime user. And it's one of those things that the more I take all my notes in Evernote, I dump documents in Evernote. And what it means is that the more I use it, so like now I know that I can do a search in my Evernote and I'm going to find the document I'm looking for. And now I can never leave Evernote, right? Like it has everything. I have thousands and thousands of documents in Evernote. And so that's a product that's incredibly retentive.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You had all your favorite books, articles you want to remember, the recipes that you are planning on cooking one day, you know, the holiday planning that you were doing. And so you wouldn't abandon Pinterest because Pinterest was this repository for these different expressions of your identity or these different bookmarks that you want to go back to. So that was kind of this idea. It's very important that the core action is the thing that you use as a product to make the experience better over time. Evernote, another example where I don't know if you're an Evernote user, I tried it.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the features that I worked on when I was at Pinterest and we shipped was this idea of a Picked for You feed. And so the idea was every time you pin something to a board, we would take that information that the user gave us and use it to create recommendations in their home feed. It was actually, it may have been the first algorithmic feed that was in a social product because suddenly your home feed wasn't just things people that you followed and the truth is people weren't really following other people on Pinterest. So we needed a way to make the experience get better the more you used it. So we started to do these recommendations in your home feed. And so it was this experience that the more you pinned, the more personalized your home feed got for you. And then the more you pinned, you also had more to lose by leaving Pinterest because all of a sudden”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perfect. So then you go to you're building your product and you're starting to see that you have users completing the core action, then the thing that you have, the next challenge you have, and I've seen this many times before, is that then you have to figure out how to get those users to stick around. You want to retain those users. Obviously, even if they do the core action once or twice and then they run out of Steam, you're going to be in a really challenged position to build something that endures. And so the test for me of whether you're building a product that has the ingredients to create a retentive product on a micro level, just at the user level, is that the product should get better the more you use it and you'll have more to lose by leading it. And so I'll give you just a couple examples there, a couple of my favorite products. You know, obviously Pinterest.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way, you have to think holistically when you're building these consumer products, when you're designing it. But I think it's very important as once you get the product out and you're starting to optimize to start thinking through each of the levels. And that just very focusing to help a founder understand where one of the levers that I really have to be focusing on to improve.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And part of it is like how do you measure the success of your NUX, of the activation To me, it is are you taking those new users and getting them into, you know, helping them understand the mental model of your product well enough that they start completing the core action. There was a Nux once that we played with at Pinterest where we didn't even teach people what pinning was. It was like their feed magically appeared and it was a real, you know, that was an example of like, okay, we have to help people understand that they are here to discover something and save it to their board.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we had all these things we were measuring. We were measuring follows. We were measuring clicking through, liking something, pinning obviously, time on site. And so we would do these experiments and you would get all this different data where some things would go up, some things would go down. What were we optimizing for? And so there's something that's really, really important about having that clarity of this is the action that is most important for our product. All things are NUX has to lead to this. If a user isn't doing this, then there's something missing from their experience of the product. And so it's super, super important to get real clarity and know exactly the one that you're going to be picking to go forward.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. And by the way, this action, it's very important to pick the right action. You want to make sure it's an action that scales to enough users. You want to think about if I optimize for this action, like if I think about my product roadmap and optimize for it, what do we end up doing? And just to give you a kind of more concrete example, actually in the early days of”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if you're an Evernote user for Evernote. It's writing a note. And when you perform that action, that means you're an engaged user. And of course, there's a lot of other actions that you have to do. You can follow people on Pinterest. You comment on Facebook. But at the end of the day, if you're not doing that action, you're not really a user to the product. And that's why the MAU thing doesn't really mean anything. It's really looking at, I think, of users completing the core action. You can look at this as a cohort, weekly, daily, whatever, the right kind of cadence is. But that's the foundation. That's level one.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engagement. And so I just started to feel this, and it became like a pebble in my shoe. And I started, you know, just to kind of go through that process that you've gone through many times before of writing and distilling it. And that's where I came up with this hierarchy. And what you realize when you look at social products is that there are almost always is this action, which I call the core action of that product that forms the foundation of the product. When a user completes this action, it's clear that they both understand the utility of the product. They understand what that product is all about. And it's an action that if they perform the action, they're very likely to come back. So for Facebook, the obvious action is friending in the beginning days. For Pinterest, it's pinning.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I started to meet with all these really talented consumer founders, building consumer social products, this was during a time when everybody was getting excited about a growth hacking. And what you would see is that you would see all these founders coming in and they all had these up into the right graphs where whether it was signups or downloads or MAUs. It felt to me like it wasn't obvious that those metrics that they were all getting very attached to and focused on and showing in these presentations was the wrong thing to focus on. It didn't get to the heart of whether they were on the path to building and enduring consumer social product. And they were missing at the core the criticality of”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think one thing you'll notice about me is that I have an allergic reaction to vanity metrics, what people talk about as vanity metrics. And when I made the transition from Pinterest where I was leading product for the discovery team, so I was responsible for all the discovery surfaces on Pinterest, the home feed, the search, the recommendations, a couple other teams. And ultimately what those teams were about was about kind of engagement, increasing engagement of Pinterest. It was helping people when they were on Pinterest find something that they loved enough that they wanted to pin it to one of their boards.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of people think about markets almost like these bodies of water. It's like, oh, it's this big body of water that we're going after. And I actually think that the most interesting markets, you have to think of them like currents, where you're just trying to, there's something happening in the market that's creating this current where you can have like a plank of wood that you put on the river and it's going to pull you forward versus a market that doesn't really have that momentum to it. You're going to have to build like something really big and fancy to make any progress. And that's why we care less about market size because really what you're looking for when you're looking at a market or what are the dynamics of change, what's the current and momentum that's going to pull the company and make the job easier for the founders to actually build something that endures?”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source