Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day -to -day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole.
The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
With the help of some boundary -pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
This is the Product Thinking Podcast.
Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast.
Joining us today is Shawn Solmeakim, a seasoned product leader with a remarkable track record in tech and marketing.
Shawn's career spans pivotal roles as some of the industry's giants, including Amazon and TikTok.
At Amazon, he was instrumental in driving global retention strategies for Prime, and at TikTok he played a key role in the development of the popular Stitch feature.
Currently, Shawn serves as an advisor and investor for several successful startups, and he's about to tell us some really interesting stories about how he did increase that retention at Prime and also about how he implemented the Stitch feature at TikTok.
But before we talk to Shawn, it's time for dear Melissa.
So this is the part of the show where you can ask me any of your questions about product management.
Go to dearmelissa .com and let me know what they are.
P .S., if you leave me a voicemail, I do answer them earlier.
Let's see what this week's question is.
Dear Melissa, managing stakeholders is a pain point that spans industries, businesses, and roles.
Do you have any tips or tricks that you have found useful in managing stakeholders?
I have been through it when it comes to stakeholders, and a lot of this is trial and error.
So I'll tell you what I have learned along the way.
A lot of people think stakeholders are the ones that say no or shut down all their ideas.
But that's not necessarily what a stakeholder is.
They have a stake in what you're building, but they're there to inform.
They're not there to make the decision for you.
The biggest issue a lot of people have in product management when they get started is listening to everything the stakeholders say and thinking that they have to build everything that comes out of their mouth.
That's not the role of a product manager.
So think about it this way.
Stakeholders can inform, but they should not be deciding.
So how do we manage that, and how do we manage expectations?
The first thing you can do to work better with any stakeholder is to empathize.
So you want to put yourself in their shoes and think through, how are they being judged for success?
What is their job? What do they deal with every day?
And why are they so passionate about certain things?
If you have a founder that's really into the product and you cannot get them out of the product.
The company scaled.
It's huge now, and they're just meddling.
It's because they built that product.
It's their baby. Empathize with that.
I know this is your baby.
I want to take good care of it.
I have the same goals for you.
You have great ideas.
Let's work together.
Use it in how you're communicating with them and how you're working with them.
If you have a sales leader that it's going nuts and requesting a bunch of stuff, remember, sales gets paid on commission.
If they have nothing to sell, a lot of times they're not making money.
Now, that's not to say that the sales team doesn't have other things wrong with it, and it's all your fault.
It's just that that's what their mindset is.
So how do you empathize with that?
How do you think about what you're doing is helping them make more money?
Now we use all of this to tailor our communication.
So when we're tailing our communication and working with them, we're remembering what their goals are, we're remembering what their pain points are, and we're using that and helping to get the right information and the right asks out of them.
This is where we want to make sure that we're keeping our questions and our asks of a stakeholder is tailored to their expertise.
So, for instance, if I'm going to work with a stakeholder in sales, I'm going to keep our conversations about what are they hearing from these types of customers in this type of market.
And if they're just giving me solutions, I'm like, okay, but why do they need those solutions?
Tell me about your pitch to them.
Can you walk me through how you pitch it to them?
When does this come up in the conversations?
What else are they using now?
I'm digging in and I am asking a lot of questions, and I'm getting ahead of them just spitting ideas at me.
So I'm keeping these communication lines open, and I'm keeping everything tailored to their expertise.
So this is important.
You should tailor your communication to different people all over the organization in the way that's going to make them think and the way that they're going to relate to.
So you want to pull information out of them.
You don't want to just wait for them to come over and start yelling and asking for things.
So be proactive, get in front of them, work with them so they know what you're working on, but keep your questions and ask tailored.
I'm not going to go to a developer and ask them about sales.
I'm not going to go to a sales leader and just be like, I don't know, what do you think we should build?
That's too broad. So instead, you put your hypotheses down.
You try to figure out what you need from people to garner their buy -in.
The other part of this is knowing when to bring them in on the process.
So I've had a lot of success with people who want to ideate or might be frustrated with product management and knowing what to build.
I'm bringing them in super early in the ideation process, and I will tailor it.
I'll let them brainstorm.
I'll let them give us ideas.
I prompt them with the problems we're trying to solve.
I prompt them with something that's discrete, and then I let them ideate with the team, and then I take all of those ideas and then I go away and synthesize it.
Now, I'm not building everybody's ideas, but it helps me get the information I need.
It also makes them feel like they participated.
So then I might go back to them and be like, hey, during that session where all of you participated, we came up with this idea from it.
I'm pulling it back to that moment where they participated.
Maybe I went in a different direction, but they're going to still feel like they had some input into it.
They're going to feel like they participated and that that was part of what they wanted to do.
So that helps get by and it helps garner goodwill with people too.
And I'm not just like, hey, go away.
You're not allowed to be in this discussion.
You're not allowed to do this.
I'm tailoring it so that they feel like they gave their input.
They had their say, but I'm also giving them credit for having their say.
I'm just going to go do what's the right thing to do.
This is usually how you get people on your side.
Speak their language as well.
If you're working with leadership or executives, they do not want to know the feature list that you're building.
And if they're asking for it, it's because they either don't trust you or they don't know what's going on.
So if you're going to give them a feature list, connect it back to what it's going to do for the business or they'll just keep asking.
So what's it going to do for the business?
What's that? Now with leaders like that, I tailor my questions as well.
They want a feature list.
I go, okay, what are the goals this quarter?
What's more important retention or acquisition?
I might have them do tradeoffs.
Would you rather me do this or would you rather me do this?
This one's prioritizing churn.
This one's prioritizing engagement, something like that.
Let them have a say in certain parts, but keep it tailored.
Don't let it just be completely open -ended.
When they ask you for things, ask for things back.
Information, that's what you can use stakeholders for.
So I hope that helps.
This is a lot of trial and error.
It's a lot of reading people too.
You have to get to know people.
You have to read people and you have to understand their backgrounds and what makes them tick so that you can work better with them.
So I hope that helps.
And again, if you have questions for me about product management out there, go to DearMelissa .com and let me know what they are.
Now let's go talk to Sean.
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Find the link in our show notes.
Hey Sean, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me.
It is great to have you here.
I'm so excited to hear about your stories because you have a lot of them.
You've worked at some really amazing companies in product management, Amazon, TikTok.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into product management and what your career journey has been so far?
My career started first in sales.
This was back when I was living in New York City.
And my job was essentially to sell restaurants' websites.
I would do 100 calls a day.
And what was really great about that experience is that what I learned about sales was it wasn't about coming with solutions, it was a lot of asking questions and finding out exactly what the problems are that we could potentially solve.
And everyone had different kind of problems.
Some restaurants just opened up and they had no way of letting people know what they were about.
Some restaurants hire a new chef or they have a new menu.
So everyone had different kinds of problems and it was really about understanding what those challenges were and figuring out how you can solve those problems for them.
And so I think the sales component was a really interesting opportunity to learn about business as well as how we're able to solve those problems for those customers.
Along that path, I learned a lot about marketing as well.
So I self -taught, learned how digital marketing works, learned about email and worked at companies like Experian sheet of mail on providing email marketing solutions.
You know, sales marketing are kind of related from that perspective, right?
How do you help businesses thrive through marketing and you're selling them products and services and so on?
In that timeframe, I also happen to work at a company called Direct TV and I had a really amazing mentor named Karen Lever.
She was an SVP there, really took me under her wing.
And while I was really good at sales and marketing, I think she helped me realize that you're actually really good at problem -solving and you're really good at thinking of interesting solutions and they're not all marketing or sales related.
And I think you'd be really good at this potential role in product.
And that's when I kind of did that transition from sales and marketing to product.
She had helped me provide me some opportunities to problem -solve in the customer service space, like building out the chat experience or the help center or the new website experience.
And that's essentially how I started transitioning to this new type of role.
And I think it was a really good call for her part.
All in all, I think sales and marketing really helps out as a product manager as well.
I know really amazing product managers that have that kind of background and you can understand how customers think and how you sell product, go to market, but also know the technical components and what the best user experience should be and how to really dig into a customer's problem or a business's
problem. So that's essentially how I got into product.
And then from there, all of my positions have been related to that field.
So whether it was at DirecTV or at Amazon, TikTok and so on.
I think you made the right move.
I think the experience speaks for itself.
What's interesting about your background too is in a lot of companies, sales and marketing are at odds with product.
The product managers look at sales and they're like, oh, they're just telling us what to do.
You know, they're dictating the roadmap, they're taking over the roadmap.
What you just said I thought was really interesting that good sales people are problem solvers.
What kind of attributes do you feel like you took from sales as well that helped you with your product career?
It's really a lot of listening and empathizing with the customer.
With sales, it was, you know, when I realized what people typically think when they hear sales is like, you had the sleazy salesperson come in and say, hey, here's what you need and here's the discount and let me just tell you why this is the best company, this is the best product, here's the features
that you're going to love and on and on and on.
I actually did that when I first got into sales roles.
Back then, websites were built with flash and we had the best photographer going to come in and take the pictures this way and that way and all that stuff.
What I realized is that that strategy did not work.
It did not work to help me understand or sell a product or a service or a business or whatever it might be.
It was really coming in to understand and empathize with the customer and saying, hey, tell me about your business.
What are some of the challenges you're having and letting them speak and letting them tell you, oh, here's what we're going through, here's the key thing that we're struggling with.
And really understanding what those are and then coming up with a solution and coming up with a solution together even.
I think that's the component of sales that has really worked and the customer really believes, as well as you do, that you can help them truly solve their problem.
That's essentially what product is doing as well.
It's like we're here to help you solve a problem.
And so I think that mentality is actually very similar from sales as well as marketing, as well as product.
I think that's a really good thing for product managers to understand too when they're working with sales people is that they should really be pulling problems out of them.
What are the customers wanting?
What are they asking for?
And that could be really good generation of ideas there too, not just solutions.
So you've solved a lot of problems for customers in your career.
One of them too was around Amazon Prime.
So you were pivotal in increasing your retention of Amazon Prime.
Can you tell us a little bit about what that looked like when you came in and what was your mandate?
What did you do to actually turn that around?
Yeah, with Amazon Prime it's obviously a really successful subscription business, one of the biggest in the world.
And the goal was to provide people the best value possible.
And we had a really amazing growth at Amazon Prime.
We launched this business across multiple countries globally.
And our mandate was to help ensure that customers understood what the values were.
Even though I worked at Amazon Prime, it was interesting that even people there didn't realize how many value, how many benefits people received as a Prime member.
At the time, I think we were counting 53 different Prime benefits.
People know of shipping and music potentially and video, but there's benefits for students, there's benefits for reading, there's audible, there's just a plethora of different types of benefits that Prime offers.
And I think what we wanted to do is make sure that people understood what all these benefits were.
And that was essentially the way to help them understand that this one very affordable price gives them access to so many different benefits.
And that was essentially our job, is to help customers understand the benefits they're receiving as a Prime member.
And it cuts across many different aspects of their lives.
If your mom, for instance, we have exclusive discounts and services for them, right, and students as well, and so on, so I think that's the component that was essentially our mandate, to help ensure that everyone understood what these benefits were.
And what's interesting is that, again, people don't understand that it's not just today for shipping.
There's so much that comes with Prime membership.
So was that the case when you were looking into this?
Did you go out and talk to customers and figure out they only thought it was shipping, they had a lack of awareness, or was it more valuable realization in the benefits?
Like, was it tweaking benefits or was it more just lack of awareness?
Yeah, it's interesting.
You assume that because Prime is, or Amazon in general, is such a well -known brand, that people would just know what they're signing up for, people would know what the benefits are, and we just had this assumption that, of course, you know what you're signing up for, of course, you know what all the benefits
are, the 52 different benefits you received as a member, and when we started talking to customers, we were doing surveys and talking with them, like people that live in my house, for instance, or people, friends and family, and said, did you know you get XYZ with Prime?
They're like, no, I kid you not.
And if you were to ask 10 people, nine of them would say, I had no idea you offered these other 50 three benefits.
I know about shipping.
I didn't even know videos included, right?
A lot of times, right?
So it's quite fascinating, like, well, you have such a great brand, and you have, and everyone knows Prime, and they sign up for it, but they, what you do that research, you realize a lot of people know about all these different benefits.
And that was essentially an eye -opener for us, and we had to make sure that people understood what those benefits were, and only through that knowledge, as well as experiencing those benefits, is when people are able to really understand the value, and they stay retained.
So what were the types of things that you did to make them more aware, but also to get them to start using their benefits?
The way that we can really achieve this is, where are people entering a subscription business and then offering the value of those benefits in context when they're taking certain actions, and then when people are trying to cancel, right?
So those are the three kind of key areas.
It's like when they're signing up, when they're potentially going to take some type of actions where the benefits would be valuable, and then when they're trying to cancel.
So everyone goes to the same kind of scenarios and actions, and that's where a lot of the eyeballs are, essentially, right?
So when they're signing up for Prime, we want to make sure that we help them understand, congratulations, you joined Prime.
Here's why this is an amazing benefit service membership, and here's the number of benefits you receive.
And then we want to make sure that people are able to take advantage of those benefits very quickly.
So we did some analysis to say, what are the most key high -value actions people can take?
What are the benefits associated to those that we would offer as a Prime member?
And then timing -wise, let's make sure that people are taking advantage of it as soon as possible.
So the sooner they take advantage of a benefit or service, the more likely they're going to be retained long -term.
And then also when people are shopping or they're planning to buy a certain type of product, then we say, hey, this product comes with two days for shipping, and this one's potentially delivered even faster.
There's a discount on this.
If you're buying diapers, you're a parent, here's exclusive discounts because you're a Prime member.
If you're shopping at Whole Foods, here are our discounts, right?
So in context, we provide the benefits associated with the membership.
And then we're trying to cancel as well.
When people are trying to cancel a membership, everyone goes to the exact same place and we offer the exact same messaging and saying, hey, did you know you have these benefits?
Did you know you're going to lose these benefits?
Did you know you saved this much money since you were a Prime member because you shopped at Whole Foods and you bought these items and XYZ and you saved $30 in the last seven days?
So you, for sure, made up for the membership price.
And so those kind of key areas during the membership experience is when we messaged the benefits and it worked out very well.
This brings me back to, I think, a common debate in product management that I see where when we look at usage numbers, sometimes we'll see that people aren't using features, they're not using these different things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And a lot of times we'll go, oh, that's not valuable to them.
But in many cases, I've seen it where the users didn't even know that was possible or they could do it or they could message into it.
It sounded like you played around with that user experience and not just the messaging, but like prompting people at the right time to dig into their benefits.
Did you weave it in to their experience more in certain places as well?
Besides just like the cancel flow or the sign -up flow, did you try to figure out how to get people to leverage those things earlier?
We tested everywhere, every single place that we had eyeballs who would test some type of benefit messaging, whether it's in emails or on the detail pages, on the homepage, mobile app.
And we had some really cool machine learning tech that would test hundreds of different combinations of messaging and images and call to actions and location of the call to actions.
And so we were constantly testing.
There were thousands of tests running all the time to ensure that we're optimizing for ensuring people knew what the benefits were and to help them understand what those benefits were as well as keeping them retained on the membership.
Did any of those test results or things that you tried surprise you?
Yes. So the things that surprised me were very simple messaging worked better than offering them some type of discount.
So we would assume, like, hey, if you were to test and offer them a discount on the membership or the discount on different types of plans, you would think that that would work better because people are saving money.
And people say, hey, it's expensive.
The membership is expensive.
So we say, well, naturally, they don't need discount on it.
Or naturally, let's give them a way to pay the membership over time because they said it's too expensive.
What ended up working better is if people actually understood the value of the benefits worth or losing.
So if you really value something, it doesn't really matter what the price is.
You would pay thousands of dollars because you cannot live without this product or service.
So what ended up working better was by helping people get educated on what they were losing, what benefits were offering, and how it was improving their quality of life.
And contextual, right?
Like, if they're buying diapers and saying, hey, this is offered with a two -day for shipping, you can get it to you in one day, and so on.
So I think that type of contextual awareness of the benefits and what the benefits were and helping them use these benefits were actually much more effective than just giving them discounts on a service that they didn't understand what they were paying for.
I think that's a good lesson learned.
I had a similar experience at a company I was working with, and we had put a feedback pop up on the screen and asked people why they weren't buying it.
A lot of people wrote, it's too expensive.
But when they wrote in the comments, like the open text field, why it was, I don't understand why you're different than your competitors.
I don't understand why I'm getting with this.
Like, are you giving me all of these things, or is it just a portion of it?
And I thought it was really interesting.
Originally, I wanted to put just a multiple choice button on too expensive, you know, to this, whatever.
And then by putting that open text box, we got all this qualitative feedback that gave more context to it.
And when we repositioned everything to explain the benefits, we saw, like, sales go up and we never had to discount it.
But before, we had been talking about discounting too.
That's right. Yeah, discounting isn't always the solution for sure.
I think it's really helping people understand the value.
Like, when people say it's too expensive, it just means they don't understand the value of it, right?
If people really understand the value, they will pay whatever is necessary, and that value system is different for everyone.
So, with the subscription business that you're running and increasing retention on Amazon Prime, what kind of success metrics did you put in place?
Because when we talk about retention, I think a common thing in product management is, oh, it's such a long tail, right?
So, it takes forever to measure retention.
Let's say you're retained after a year or you're retained after two years.
I guess with Amazon, you have a lot of people, so you can see cancellations day by day.
But what did you do to show, like, leading indicators that people would be retained with the stuff you were trying?
Yeah, so the leading indicators for us were the benefits that they used within the first, second, third, fourth, fifth day, right?
So, as soon as you come to the website, are you using some of these key benefits that we offer?
And we had direct correlation.
We call them high -value actions, essentially.
So, high -value action would be like, I made a purchase and used the shipping benefit, or I listened to music, or watch the video.
So, we want to ensure that people are taking advantage of these benefits early in their membership, as well as higher frequency of these benefits being used.
So, if they did shipping, you take advantage of shipping plus to watch the movie that day, really high retention rates, right?
So, that's essentially how we were able to measure the downstream effect of these taking of energy benefits and how it correlates to retention.
And then we also looked at, you know, essentially the churn rates of customers that are coming in from certain channels by 10 -year, and then, you know, of course correlated that to all the different actions or activity that was happening on the website.
Sounds like a lot of cohort analysis, too.
Oh, yeah. Lots of analysis.
Okay. So, digging a lot into the data, I see people struggle with trying to get to those calculations or figure out what is a high -value action, right?
How did you come up with they have to do X, Y, and Z, and that's what we should push them into?
Yeah. So, it does take some working with our data teams, but we would have some essential, initially, we would have some assumptions on here.
Here, the actions we believe are the most valuable and we believe are the easiest to do.
And we would make a list of these actions and what the benefits were, and, you know, obviously there's components on like how much it's going to cost our business, people take these type of actions, and which ones you want to encourage, and so on.
So, there's a formula we have to kind of create and say these actions that we believe are most valuable, this is what it costs to our business, this is how easy it is for our customers to do, and this is how easy or hard it is for us to encourage that action to take place.
And then we would look at, okay, if customers did this action, what is the retention rate or turn rate?
And we would basically look at this over time across, you know, different locations of our website as well as different locales, different countries, age, type of plans that we're on, and then we had like a lot of demographic data, like type of customers they were and so on.
So, a lot of data got crunched to then say, okay, these are the actions that this group should take, versus this is the actions that this other group should take, and when we should be encouraging these type of actions.
So, it's all to say like, I mean, it isn't something you can just kind of do overnight, it will take some time to kind of build that process out.
It does help to have machine learning engineers that are able to kind of test very rapidly, especially if you have scale, if you have a lot of traffic, a lot of eyeballs, it's much easier, because you're able to make some assumptions, you run these different assumptions out and test out different hypotheses
in terms of like what actions you want to promote on what locations, to who, and run hundreds of these and say, okay, and then machine decides, okay, here's what I'm going to promote to this person, to who, when, and what countries, and then it's a bit different for every cohort and different for every
country, you know, we automate the whole thing, right?
So, that's how we got really, really good at it, is we had some really good machine learning engineers and ways to automate a lot of the assumptions we're making.
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So, with these metrics, it sounds like you adopted them, put them into place for Amazon Prime.
What happened after?
You increased the subscription rate of Prime.
What kind of changes did you see across Amazon?
What are types of things that you continued doing to make sure that retention was stickier or we kept explaining these benefits?
We got really good at saving customers.
We got very, very good at understanding what it will take to help customers understand the value of benefits, when we should be targeting them, how many emails we send to customers, where we message on the website, what benefits to promote, and all that was completely, essentially, automated.
And we maintained this by continually optimizing the creative, testing out the new types of locations.
And any time we get new benefits, we obviously promote those as well.
So it was an ongoing experience for us.
And basically, this is where we start working with our product marketing teams, and they would come in and just continually optimize the entire experience.
And then we share our tests globally with all the teams.
So yeah, I think it was really, really amazing.
I guess a case study on how to optimize a subscription program globally.
So you eventually made your way to TikTok, and you were instrumental in creating the Stitch feature there, which I want to hear all about.
What types of lessons did you take from Amazon to TikTok?
And how was it maybe a different scenario than Amazon when you entered?
What kind of surprised you, or what challenges were you working on?
You know, so interesting is that TikTok and Amazon are actually very similar in how they operate, how they think, beliefs and principles.
You know, it was a lot of bottoms -up thinking, and a lot of ownership put on to the product managers and the teams.
And we were really empowered to come up with the problems that we want to solve for and the solutions that we want to execute.
It's actually really similar to how the two companies operated.
And what I did was basically take a lot of the ideas that we had at Amazon, how we operated there, for instance, like how we come up with like the six -pager docs and the formatting for the docs, and how we think about where we want to invest in the big bets and so on.
So I took a lot of that and brought it over to TikTok.
And that was very well adopted and accepted there.
But, you know, overall, I think it's very similar cultures, very fast -paced.
We had some very clear core metrics we want to improve, and basically, what can we do to improve those, and we're able to rapidly test and move quickly.
So one thing that you just said kind of stuck out to me, the empowerment that the leaders had at TikTok and Amazon too, make the product managers feel ownership.
I have a ton of CPOs, ton of product leaders, ton of CEOs, right, saying, I want my product managers to step up and be owners.
Like, that's the desire.
They're like, I want them to think of this like their business, manage it, take initiative, be forward -thinking, and go after it.
And yet, there's some kind of friction in the organization that's preventing that.
Sometimes, I do think it might just be, like, an inherent helplessness sometimes in the product managers where they're looking for somebody to tell them what to do.
But other times, I hear the same thing from product managers who say, I want to be owners, but I'm not allowed to.
What did you observe in both of these companies that leadership did well to make you feel empowered to go out there and choose those problems and go after them?
It was essentially our jobs as PMs to come up with the problem -set and solutions.
We knew what the business objectives were for the company.
It's like, hey, we've got to improve retention.
Here's the retention metric we've got to improve.
Here's how it's going to translate to dollars for the business.
Here's the locations that you own.
What do you need to make this happen?
That's essentially the directive.
And then as a PM, you have to come up with the problems that you want to solve to help ensure that we're improving retention for customers.
No one's there telling you what to do.
I haven't had a single person at Amazon tell me exactly what to do.
They were like, hey, here's the metric.
Move it. Go figure it out.
And then our job was essentially to come up with a plan, negotiate on what resources we needed to make that plan happen.
Oh, I need three more PMs and 30 more engineers.
And then the executive team were like, do you really need 30?
What can you do with 15?
And then that's kind of the dance you're doing.
It's like, OK, here's the resources I need to make this happen.
And the executive team is saying, well, I can give you half that.
How much can you do with half?
And then also negotiating on timelines.
Like, OK, this can get done three months, and they're always going to be asking you to do it in two months.
So you're like, well, it's pretty hard to do in two months.
How about 20 engineers and we do it in one and a half or whatever.
There's like negotiating happening from that perspective.
So you kind of want to buffer in what you can and can't do.
But ultimately, no one is ever telling you, they're like, hey, come with a plan, you tell me what you need.
And then we come with a plan, they look at it, they might poke some holes at it and make sure you have a very good foundation on what and why you're building what you're building.
And then they make my question on the resources as well.
But ultimately, that's the job.
And then you come in and you actually execute.
They give you the resources, you hire the people, and then you build it, and then you report on it and say, hey, it worked or it didn't work.
And then you never get penalized if it didn't work either.
That's just an expectation.
Of course not everything is going to work.
If everything works, the assumption is you're probably not thinking big.
You're probably just trying to optimize little things here and there.
So it's really what the leadership team did at Amazon was challenge you to think bigger, like bigger, bigger, think bigger, think bigger, take bigger risks.
What do you need for this to happen and report back on the results?
So that's how you feel really empowered.
It's like I'm running a business at that point.
You're just negotiating on resources and timelines.
And it's also very similar in TikTok.
There's better improved intention, DAU, publish rates, meaning like number of people that actually publish videos every single day.
The number of times people open the app within a 30 -day period.
And then obviously now with e -commerce, how many people are actually purchasing products?
So those are the metrics you got to move.
And they come in and say, what are you going to do about it?
And then we say, well, I'm going to build these features and we believe this is going to help improve publish rates or this is going to improve retention, it's going to improve e -commerce purchasing and so on.
And then this is what I need.
I need like this many engineers, I need this many designers and this is when I can get it done.
And then same thing, like, can you get it done faster?
It's always like, obviously, faster, faster, faster, faster, right?
So that's essentially the job.
And I think like as a PM, you have to ensure that your balancing act essentially, like, okay, well, I want to make sure I got to have the right number of resources from all this perspective, is making sure all the teams work well together and then obviously delivering on what you promised.
So as head of product at TikTok, I think one of the balances there too, that a lot of new leaders might struggle with is, how do I empower people to go out and pick what problems to solve, right?
But how do I make sure that during a period of hyper growth, like you went through, we're all kind of swimming in the same direction, right?
It's not like we're just cherry picking ideas all over the place.
What did you do to help direct and make sure that you were going after the most valuable things, but not like stifle the creativity from your teams?
As long as we're very clear on the vision, mission, and what metrics we got to move, that's really, it's really simple.
It's like, hey, here's what we're about, here's what we're not about as a company.
And here's the metric we got to move, and you set some crazy goal, and then we tell the teams go move it, right?
Say, hey, go move this number.
And then what do you need?
So I think as a head of practice also, we've got to ensure that people in the different departments are working cohesively together to ensure that we're moving in the right direction.
And then there's also ensuring there's some healthy debates and challenges happening, right?
It's not a good place when everyone's come up with an idea and everyone just agrees on it, right?
Or I come up with an idea and everyone's like, yeah, yeah, that's great, let's go do it, right?
I expect people to push back and say, actually, that's not a good idea, Sean, I know this topic or this area that I have better than you do, and here's what we should be doing.
Here's the bet I want to make.
And sometimes I'm wrong.
I'm like, hey, it sounds like you have a better idea than I do, let's just do that instead, right?
So I think it's important that, you know, as long as the vision mission and metrics are incredibly clear and crisp, and those metrics may be different for the different teams, right?
The growth team's going to be different for the monetization team versus the core team.
But they all work together, and they all understand how the flywheel works and where they're contributing and how this all works to help grow the business.
So the Stitch functionality in TikTok was something that you introduced.
Tell me a little bit about how that came about.
I understand that you didn't set out to create that.
It was something that you discovered.
So basically, with Stitch, it wasn't something we thought of immediately.
We saw a certain behavior happening on the app.
We saw people taking one video, downloading it, using some other third party software, attaching another video to it.
Basically, it's a reaction video and their own ending to the video, and then re -uploading it.
So it was a behavior that was happening, but it was clunky, and they were using some third party software to make that happen.
What I realized was, hey, we should make this behavior easier.
How do you just reduce the friction so that people are able to do this much faster?
And that's essentially how we came up with Stitch.
And I won't describe the actual trending video that generated the Stitch feature idea because it's a little lewd.
But essentially, it was some lady that was walking in the city.
She was a giant, and she was walking in the city like Godzilla.
And then people took that video, downloaded it, and then they created a video of themselves in a car looking up.
Oh, I saw that one.
I've seen that. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.
And there were all sorts of kind of meme -y stuff that was built around that experience.
And people were watching someone's reaction to that and saying, I can do a better job.
They downloaded the video, and they stitched their reaction to her walking in the city looking like Godzilla.
And it was really funny.
It was hilarious. So basically, we wanted to make that happen faster and for every kind of video that's on the platform.
That's essentially how we thought of building that feature.
What's interesting is that once we launched the feature, though, how people started using it was to interact with each other, ask each other questions.
They were like, hey, this is cool.
Tell me how you're a Harry Potter fan without telling me you're a Harry Potter fan.
And then people would just immediately stitch and react.
So basically, it's interesting how you think people use a feature one way, but it kind of opened up a whole new way of how people create videos and interact and collaborate with one another on the app.
So that was quite fascinating.
And at that point, it kind of took off and created a whole new genre of content.
When you were looking at making this simpler, what metrics were you caring about?
What were you trying to increase?
So publish rates were one of them.
We wanted to make it really fun and interactive and give people a feature that will encourage people to publish videos.
People that maybe were on the fence and they were there just watching videos.
And now that they see how their friends creating some fun videos with Stitch, they'd want to create something as well.
So we are all about trying to get people to publish as much as possible on the platform.
That's why you have such a plethora of content on TikTok and you have many different subcultures of content and so on.
So that's one of the core metrics we're looking at.
We're also looking at ensuring that we don't want to mess with retention, people are continually retained, and they're opening the app more often on a 30 -day period and so on.
So like all the other core measures, we can't really mess with those.
But the one that we were looking at was publish rates.
With the Stitch feature too, you started with understanding people's behavior, saw that they were doing this, said, hey, let's make it simpler.
Did you do any more testing before you released it or how did you think about rolling it out to make sure that it was doing what you wanted it to do?
For that one, I think we essentially saw that.
So we saw that one kind of meme -y video that people kind of recreated for themselves.
But we saw that same behavior with other videos and we did a little research and said, hey, same behavior.
People were taking videos, downloading it, and using some other third -party software.
Can't remember the name of the third -party software, but we decided, hey, that should be our job.
And that's essentially how we decided to mess here.
It's like, hey, we see enough of this behavior.
If we were to build this feature internally, this is the cost to us to actually build it.
But this is how much time it would save people.
And because people don't have to go through this trouble of downloading using third -party software, uploading, and the time it saves them, we hypothesized that more people would create this type of videos.
And it would increase publish rates.
And that was basically a bet we took.
Yeah. And it sounds like it was known, right?
Like you already had the behavior there.
It wasn't like, oh, this problem is not understood.
We're like, it's something they're doing.
Let's just make it easier.
Exactly. That's a good way to kind of think through problem -solving, is like if there's a behavior happening and you're essentially saying, hey, how do I make this easier for you?
How do I remove off -school out of the way?
How do you make this happen for you much faster?
So with TikTok too, you were there during a period of extremely high growth.
And we talked a little bit about the product strategy and letting people go out and find problems that help with those metrics that are set.
What are some other challenges that you observed that companies like that going through that period of high growth actually exhibit?
So when it's a hyper -growth company like that, it's really less planning and more putting out fires.
It's adapting to the environment and figuring out how you can continually sustain that growth.
And if anyone says like, hey, we're planning for six months when you're ahead, you're like, nah, because things will change.
It will immediately change in a month or two months and so on.
And things happen all the time.
Like, oh, crazy stuff will happen, and you have to adapt and adopt to those situations.
Countries will try to ban you or some crazy challenge happen on the app or this or that.
And so, you know, whatever plans you have in place are going to go out the door within a matter of weeks or a month.
So I think that was the challenge itself, is how do you adapt quickly and evolve to ensure you can sustain that growth.
And I suspect the same for companies like OpenAI, right?
Like when they had this crazy growth for chat GBT, they're probably figuring out, how do I sustain this growth and how do I put out these fires and so on and so on.
But, you know, with TikTok, it's fascinating.
I don't think anyone ever expected the app to get so big so fast.
I think like that, it's hard to plan that.
Any company that grows that fast, that quickly, it wasn't planned.
I don't think that's something you can plan.
Yeah, I mean, because there are other companies out there that grew very fast, very quickly, and yeah, it's not something that you'd like, yeah, I'm going to grow this fast, this quickly, you know, at this rate.
Like, of course everyone wants that, but like it's very rare to see that, right?
So it's never planned.
And that's a really interesting viewpoint that you got one of those rare experiences to actually see something grow that fast, which is really cool.
So when you look back on your career so far and you're looking ahead, what gets you excited about product management?
I love product management because it's really this essence of a business.
It's like, how do I offer a product or service that people will love?
That's essentially what it is.
Like, how do I solve a big problem in your life by offering a product or service that you're going to really enjoy using and ultimately improve your quality of life?
I think like if you are able to do that, even at a small scale, that's success.
I think ideally it's like the whole world uses it, of course, right?
That's like a dream.
But when you're solving the problem for even the small niche of customers and they're really happy with what you've built and your offering.
And that I think is a success in this essence of product management.
I think that's great words for our product managers out there listening.
Thank you so much, Sean, for being on the podcast.
If people want to learn more about you and follow your journey, where can they go?
Yeah, they can follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram or email me at soulmay .kim at gmail .com.
Great and we will put all those links in our show notes at productthinkingpodcast .com.
Thanks so much for listening to the product thinking podcast.
We'll be back next Wednesday with an amazing guest.
And in the meantime, you can leave all of your questions for me around productmanagement at dearmelissa .com.
I answer them every episode.
Thanks, and we'll see you next time.
Thank you.
