YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Holley

lines on the record: 80
first: 2023-09-03
most recent: 2023-09-03
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

“Yeah, yeah, find me on LinkedIn. That's probably, well, not probably is my most professional platform. Instagram, like I said, is a farce. And being useful, yeah, send me things that you're excited about in the Etsy product. Send me feedback. Always, always really, really keen to learn how folks are experiencing the things that we build.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I recently bought an engraved whiskey decanter for my wife and myself or for the home. Super beautiful, like so, so cool. Got it personalized with our names. Just such a cool, cool item that, yeah, I didn't, I wasn't expecting to find that kind of thing. Not even sure exactly how you engrave a whiskey decanter. But it was, really 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. I love giving out physical greetings cards to folks. So that's another always on Etsy favorite of mine.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, Gansodaganek, 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. And I think those are often helpful words to live by.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You, as a new parent, maybe resonates. So it's not new because our kids do, but when I was looking, you know, being in product, of course, you want to track data. And so I was looking for apps that would be good at doing that. 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. Super simple allows both parents to enter information, probably grandparents too. We only tested it with two people. Seamlessly syncs, really easy to use at 4 a.m. when you can't see and you just want to say like I fed the baby, you can do that really easily. Just really, really simple fit for purpose product. So that resonated with me.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big fan of. Tried to get at a growth mindset. I think Julia, who was on the podcast a while ago, said something similar, but you get a ton of insight into someone, ideally you 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one of those where the old world we cut all our cords and we only needed Netflix. Suddenly you need all these really random providers of content that you're like, I have to subscribe to that now to watch this show.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my wife and I talk about this a lot. I think we're Western files, if that's a 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, their prequels. They've been, yeah, just really, really fun, fun to watch for people who are like curious about that culture and that world.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, 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 Evan Chuenard, 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, you know, really successful. So the business side, but also just how they think about treating their employees and the culture that they've built, I think 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 is really, really fulfilling. So that's another favorite. And then in a super different direction, Power Broker by Robert Caro, that is an absolute tome. 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple that come to mind, team of teams by Stanley McCrystal has been, I think is just, A, a really fascinating read and B, it helped me think a lot about how you trust teams and how you think about kind of 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, shows that there's a different way to approach problems.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 helpful.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like in our buyer experience product channel on Mondays, everyone's kind of sharing what they're focused on, how last week panned out. Was it done? Is it still in progress? Things like that. It's very, very lo-fi, but it worked pretty well.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I 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 is 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. I 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crop up, and that means there's a lot of opportunity for the right folks. If 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 forevermore, that might be a little more challenging because you might be asked to work on something net new. And 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 either a slightly different flavor or we need it in a slightly different way here at Etsy.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The three things 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 everyone's bag. 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. Or we're using a new input, maybe back to the point mentioned earlier of looking at competitive insights. 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, if only we had more people, but we are quite small. And so there is a lot of change. There's a lot of new priorities that...”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capture payment from a buyer to remit funds to a seller, so they're really on the front lines with the customer. They also have other constraints, working with 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 developing just that little bit easier, a little bit faster, a little bit more standardized in some cases. And then the kind of the foundation of it all sits with infrastructure and the teams that you might expect that are much more technical in nature that really without that, we wouldn't have a website.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For people to get, yeah, and the way that we think about the structure right now and the org design should ideally follow strategy. And if your strategy is always evolving, then your org design is always evolving. We call it the product stack. And so we've got our core customer teams who are unsurprisingly thinking about buyers and sellers. And so they're the ones on the front lines with the customers. Then we have our, we call them our partner teams.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the fifth leg, if you will, of marketing, that might be product marketing in some cases, that might be brand marketing in others. And so there's kind of different flavors of marketing that we pull in based on the specific needs of the project. But that's generally speaking how we try to structure our teams from kind of the group level all the way down to the individual squad. We can't always have a dedicated research and a dedicated analyst and a dedicated product marketer to every single team. So it's certainly not perfect, but that's where we aspire to having at least coverage on those roles.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And given we're so, and many places are, but we're so heavily led by the insights, either qual or quant, the decision in many instances is clear. When it's not, that's when 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're always looking to clarify or reclarify or restate who ultimately is accountable. And in many cases, it is the PM, right? You are the one who, Nick, our CPO likes to say, you don't have to have the best ideas, but you 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 that 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 fall to the PM. It 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to build that feature, and we're going to do that. And that's just not the type of culture that we have. And generally speaking, from what I've seen doesn't lead to 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You probably need a really flat surface. Regardless, is of course you'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. So 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”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 ROI 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, you know, this no longer makes sense given the new constraints that we're operating in, given the new goals that we have.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? You've got all these great inspiring items or projects on Pinterest. And then you have people who have no idea how to make them. And they get so frustrated. And then on the other hand, you've got a marketplace like Michaels 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 to 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. The launch happened to coincide with the kind of pivot in 2017 to really focusing on the core marketplace or refocusing on the core marketplace.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 who realize”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think 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 are 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 going to try to do that, right? They want to make more sales, many, many of them, not all, but many of them are wired to want to 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. And to some degree, we want to 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and back to the teams hard at work, we have Teams hard at work thinking about IP and how to police it, how to enforce it. It's tough. Not a domain. I will suggest I'm an expert in really, really tricky stuff, but we've got to be beyond that.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We would limit the type of items, the supply, the number of those items that, as we talked about, there's a lot of them, but really having that clear definition. In some cases, it's easy, right? Some things are just there. They violate. Definitions. Those things are the easy stuff to think about. It's where it's a little more gray, it gets a little trickier.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't evolution, was leaning into what today we call production assistance. And the way I think about that is you still need to understand the provenance of your item, right? If you're saying, I have this design, I'm just going to 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 gravitate more towards being designers than being able to actually make the thing. They have this excellent idea. They just can't see it come to life. And so they need some help. And that was something we leaned into to be able to, like I said, help sellers that maybe weren't able to make a thing, make a thing and sell it on Etsy or for sellers who were reaching the limits of what they could supply, really, really take it to the next level.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think it does come back to some degree to the brand and the policy point from just before. And we take enforcing our policies really seriously. It's not an easy job at our scale. And 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. That 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 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 the”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, that doesn't feel very Etsy. That's not something that we might lean into.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it is the supply. If you think about the marketplace, the vast majority of content is maybe what we might consider UGC. It's either the item is from the seller or as mentioned before the 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. I also think over the years our brand and our aesthetic and how we position ourselves has evolved, will 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 the unique, valuing the hamma-made. And so that does permeate kind of.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think 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're not going to 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. The items that our sellers sell are unique. And so I think that is kind of the core nugget combined with how we think about policies and our way to some degree maintain the integrity of the marketplace. Those two things combine do set us apart. And I think if you ask many people, certainly here in the US, what they think of Etsy, a very specific”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? The 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 habit loop framework has 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?”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have long had features that are kind of retentive in their nature. Things like 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? And 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 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”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Barrier. And 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, really leaned into that as the current C4, the seller referral program. And coming back to what I said around Teams, that was a really great way to kind of supercharge some of that activity that was either happening but could be more of it could happen or really like helping a seller understand like, oh yeah, there is a hook here. You know, 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. So 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we dabble with referral programs a while ago, probably eight 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. They 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 an understanding then as we do now. So our buy 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 the whole like give get concept that was really prevalent back then and on the seller side, one of the things that we really, 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”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, yes, and a seller is a buyer Right. And so if they're making something that they 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. So it is a nice dynamic when that starts to work.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some degree, it ends up being quite a long tail of inventory where we can meet really niche and specific needs. And so that lends itself really well to thinking about SEO. Lends itself really well to thinking about Google Shopping, where someone, you know, 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 subcategory 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two sides to Etsy, right? There's the seller and the buyer getting in the wayback machine. We would on the seller side, we would be at craft fairs like and other places where our sellers were selling in person and really letting them know that Etsy exists. And so that was very, you know, boots on the ground. Let's get out and try to acquire sellers into the marketplace. Some 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 craftspeople who want to sell their items. And so we've seen some success with our, we have a teams 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we're collecting inputs from sellers, we just simply don't feel it's appropriate to not either show or honor, right? Like 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 buyer 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 err 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 necessitates a different type of test. When we look at our SEO work, 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 want to try to understand. A-B testing is a great way to do that. There are others, some of which we're starting to employ, others that will continue to investigate and think about how we can leverage.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 want to move. I think that that is, it maybe 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 A-B testing driven organization, not least because Etsy's kind of background in history.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've long and continue to invest in sustainability. And the text change was in our cart where we call out Etsy offsets 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 drove conversion.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we have similar learnings around that exact example. Oftentimes, I think about kind of effort and reward. So it might be a small-ish 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. You know, 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. We've got examples where it's a one-line copy change and it's quite shocking the impact that that can have.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a great, I believe it was introduced, I don't believe, I 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 and a horse showing up for some of our review ratings. And that spawned a huge amount of internal fun. And then back to your point around Halloween. We had a few teams being poor stars and a horse. Pretty interesting”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the other side is really leaning into maybe more the quote unquote behavioral economic tactics of just helping buyers make decisions, you know, signals and nudges is how you'll see it. Well, that's good information to know. It's something that then fits into their decision making process that might have otherwise been buried. And so really 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 hundred million items or the results for this search query, this is the one that I feel best about buying. We've seen lots of success on that track as well.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather, no, collecting from buyers. So a seller will give us the photos that they're going to 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to 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 have long been really important. And 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 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 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.”
2023-09-03 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source