Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Etsy structures its product teams across a four-layer product stack

Tim Holley · Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product) · Sep 3, 2023 · at 1:00:10

Tim Holley, VP of Product at Etsy, outlines the four tiers comprising Etsy's product and engineering organizational structure.

0:00 / 1:06exact quote · 66.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We call it the product stack. And so at the, we, 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 seller, with 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. 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. So 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 kind of the foundation of it all sits with infrastructure and the teams that you might expect that are much more technical in nature”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Tim Holley

Insight
A/B testing can miss the point for larger strategic product bets
“Cause 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. But I think that that is, it…”
Tim Holley Sep 3, 2023 ▶ 35:44 Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)
Insight
Treating PMs as mini-CEOs leads to inferior product decisions
“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 gonna build that feature and we're gonna do that. And that's just not, not the type of culture that we have. And generally speaking fro…”
Tim Holley Sep 3, 2023 ▶ 56:45 Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Etsy lacked a North Star metric before Josh Silverman became CEO
“Having that, being absolutely front and center, being the drumbeat that we talk about in every meeting, the measuring stick that we measure the success of launches against. And it, you know, maybe it's a bit surprising, but we didn't have that type of clarity …”
Tim Holley Sep 3, 2023 ▶ 9:30 Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adding carbon offset copy in checkout cart boosted Etsy buyer conversion
“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 real…”
Tim Holley Sep 3, 2023 ▶ 34:43 Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)
Disclosure
Etsy refuses to withhold seller sales from buyers for A/B testing
“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.”
Tim Holley Sep 3, 2023 ▶ 37:13 Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)
Insight
Product managers do not need the best ideas, just to choose them
“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.”
Tim Holley Sep 3, 2023 ▶ 57:48 Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.