The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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…”
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…”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
Tavel: Etsy distributed physical business cards to drive early seller loops
“Etsy literally gave them business cards. So Etsy gave their sellers business cards that, that made them feel like, oh, I'm a real, like made them feel professional, but the, and the link on it was to their Etsy store.”
Etsy structures its product teams across a four-layer product stack
“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 part…”
Glanceable scarcity signals and nudges significantly boost marketplace buyer conversion
“We've seen great success in, in elevating little snippets of information that, you know, really help a buyer understand, oh, there is actually only one of these. Well, that's good information to know. It's something that then, you know, fits into their decisio…”
Etsy shut down Etsy Studio due to its 2017 strategic pivot
“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, maybe I should say. And so it became clear that, you know, when we laid out what we're optimizing for, which is Dri…”
CDC mask guidance drove Etsy traffic to Black Friday levels overnight
“When the CDC mandated face masks in
I think it was early April, 20, 20.
That's when essentially we went to sleep one day with our typical April traffic, typical April sales, and then it was Black Friday overnight.”
Etsy drives buyer retention by closing habit loops on favorited items
“Using a favorite as an example, you favored 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 se…”
Etsy catalogs over 100 million unique items on its marketplace
“When you have, you know, over a hundred million items, all of which are unique, you've got a different challenge than when you have, you know, 10,000 SKUs that you could kind of find anywhere or on, on many retailers.”
Etsy's buyer referral program failed to become a major growth success
“Our buyer referral program ultimately wasn't a huge success”
Etsy issued an unprecedented call to sellers to manufacture face masks
“We did something that far as I know, we'd never done in Etsy's past, which is we put out a call to our sellers to say, now's the time.
Now's the time to make face masks if you can.”
Long-tail inventory gives Etsy strong acquisition leverage via Google Shopping
“On the buyer side, we really leveraged 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. And so that lends itself really well to thinking about SEO, le…”