Creating great products isn't just about features or roadmaps.
It's about how organizations think, decide, and operate around products.
Product thinking explores the systems, leadership and culture behind successful product organizations.
We're bringing together insights from multiple product leaders pulled from past conversations to explore one shared topic, offering different perspectives and lessons from real-world experience.
I'm Melissa Perry, and you're listening to the Product Thinking Podcast by Product Institute.
Today we're looking at what it takes to create focus, alignment and clarity inside product organizations.
What it really means to decide what matters, how teams should work and how to make better decisions at scale.
We'll start with Kristen Dorsett, who was Chief Product Officer at Viator at the time.
She shares how her team balanced top-down priorities with bottom-up exploration and why narrowing down to just a few big bets helped them actually make progress.
Then we'll hear from Craig Saldanha, Chief Product Officer at Yelp, on how product principles help teams make better decisions and stay aligned.
And we'll wrap up with Mauricio Monaco, who reflects on lessons from eBay and Wish and why companies lose their way when they try to copy competitors instead of focusing on what makes them different.
Let's hear it from Kristen.
So when you have your teams who are out there experimenting as well and they're running these rapid iterations that you're talking about and improving checkout like this, what I found is that sometimes we need to have a strategy that helps point them in the right direction, around what to experiment, around.
How do you set that tone but also give them enough space to surface up problems that we might not have known about?
So some of it in our planning cycle.
We have two different ways that we prioritize what we're going to fund.
So one of them is what we call our big bets.
And that is where those are top down mandates of these are the three big problems.
Like we have three this year.
These are the three big problems we want to try to solve as a company.
And then there are certain pods that are pointed at those problem spaces.
And then they get to figure out like, how are they going to do it?
And then we have other problems where it's more.
It's not one of the big bets of our company, but there are areas that we know we want to fund.
And so we basically we fund a pod and we write a lightweight charter for that pod of you are here to make logins easier.
And then they go and figure out how to do it.
And they're driving their own roadmap.
So we're a mix of tops down and bottoms up.
I see that trap a lot where we try to do way too many big things and then nothing gets done.
How did you kind of come to agreement to focus on less?
I imagine it wasn't an easy discussion, but what type of... It's been a journey over several years.
It was where probably four or five years ago, we started doing OKRs at the company level, period.
It used to be very much bottoms up, like every function and team will come up with their own OKRs.
And they roughly laddered up to a higher level strategy, but it wasn't always fully aligned.
And so we moved to company level OKRs a few years ago, but we still then tried to satisfy everyone's bottoms up idea of what they wanted to do.
And so we would have 30 big bets in a year.
And because we were just trying to make everybody happy.
And I think we've had enough years and I think we went from 30 to 14 to I think six maybe.
And then now it was like we still didn't make enough progress across the six.
So we're going to do three.
And everyone had seen enough of that evolution to realize we can't keep trying to do as many things at once.
With that focus as well.
What I've seen is sometimes things that we would like to get done in other departments are just not prioritized.
We're not going to be able to do that.
How do you balance that too as an executive team and talking to other departments on what's the tone and the culture there to get people on board with that?
On the whole, we're very collaborative and very helpful.
And again, like sometimes, it's where we're too helpful and we have too much work in progress, because we're trying to be helpful and help everybody.
But I think it is where like these big bets, they're not just R&D, they're cross-functional.
And so it is where every single person in the company knows okay, we have these three big things that we're trying to do.
And so any resources that are needed to go after it.
That gets first in the pecking order of any project.
Yeah.
And the next would be anything that's what we call a team-driven project.
I mean, the prioritization is always hard.
But in a business like ours, marketplace, it's complicated.
There's a lot of high ROI opportunities.
But we found in the past, we've tried to do too many at once.
And we didn't have enough progress on any of them.
So this year, we really committed to doing fewer things.
And so far, so good.
We seem to be making a lot more progress because we pick fewer things to focus on.
So Kristen walked us through how to balance alignment and autonomy, using a mix of top-down direction and team-driven discovery.
And one of the biggest takeaways is that focus is a discipline.
Trying to do too many things at once slows everything down, but narrowing in on a few key problems creates the conditions for real progress.
But setting priorities is only part of the equation.
Teams also need a shared way to make decisions as they execute.
Next let's hear from Craig on how product principles can help guide those decisions and keep teams aligned.
There were a couple of things that were very helpful.
Some that I was forced to do and then others were just a byproduct of being remote.
So the first was I got a chance to shadow our CEO and founder, Jeremy.
And so I basically shadowed him for a couple of weeks, attended all of the meetings he was in and even beyond product, just got a sense for the whole company and how it worked and what actually made it tick.
And I don't think that that would have been an option had we been in the office just walking into a meeting.
But then this was really helpful just to be a fly on the wall.
And I thought that was super, super interesting.
But what was even cooler for me was because we were a fully remote organization.
I knew that there would be folks coming in after me who would need the same kind of context that I was getting as I was wrapping up.
And so I decided that I had to codify what the product culture was and what the product ethos was.
And so I ended up writing five tenets that I think are just very core to how we think about Yelp product.
What was interesting was I remember taking them to Jeremy the first time and I said hey, from all of our conversations I've written down these five tenets and he kind of read them.
He said maybe one and two make a lot of sense three, I would modify four and five, I actually don't.
And so that set up three months of debates that me and Jeremy and other members of the exec team had.
And there were these really in-depth debates that we had just based on these five tenets that I had written.
And after three months, we rolled them out to the whole organization.
And that's the basis of what we use for our decision-making.
Solo ended up being a really positive experience, and I got a chance to really tap into what made the organization tick and then put it down in actual words and writing, which is very cool.
What are your five tenets?
I've got them on my desk.
Let me just pull them up and weigh them out to you.
So tenet number one is delighting a two-sided marketplace, which essentially means we acknowledge that we have two different constituencies that have different goals and needs.
And while we always look for a win-win, there's some instances where there's going to be conflict and we have to use extremely high judgment to resolve those.
Two is a decision-making.
We talk about one-way doors and two-way doors and we want to move very quickly to two-way doors and roll things out and experiment quickly.
But when there's a one-way door decision, like a pricing change which would be hard to roll back, We want to be very slow and thoughtful and deliberate.
Tenet three is we want to be consistent, scalable, and self-service.
And that just speaks to building an MVP is great, but we want to build at scale.
And we want to be thinking about that from the time you write down the requirements.
Our score is we want to be diverse and inclusive in our product thinking.
So we have a very diverse and inclusive set of consumers and a very diverse and inclusive team.
And we want to be very thoughtful and deliberate about making sure that every feature that we roll out has the broad appeal that we want.
And then the last one is think big and learn fast, which essentially means we want to take big swings, but we want to be honest and upfront about the risks and hypotheses.
And we don't want to be scared of failing.
When we fail, we want to learn fast and sunshine it so that other people don't make the same mistakes.
So when you're thinking about building two-sided marketplaces like this as well, we have the businesses on one side and the consumers here.
How do you think about that balance?
And we talked a lot about making the consumer happy.
How do you also think about what the businesses need?
Since they're usually the ones who are paying, right?
Whether they're advertised or the revenue.
And I know you do ads and stuff through that.
How do you balance the two?
So it's hard.
And I think the best advice I can give PMs is when you are...
Building a two-sided marketplace.
Have a clear mental model for how we're going to resolve the conflict.
So I've worked in three, two-sided marketplaces.
At Amazon, I launched an ebook subscription service where the two sides were authors and viewers.
I worked in Prime Video, where the two sides were consumers who were watching and then Movie houses were making movies.
And then now at Yelp, we had consumers and local businesses.
And I think as long as you have a clear framework, you'll be okay.
And at Yelp, we always look for the way, right?
So the metric that we optimize on is connections between local businesses and consumers.
At Amazon, we were very focused on consumers.
And so we focused on giving them the best experience, while being fair to the other side of the marketplace.
And so I think you can build a marketplace, as long as you have a clear framework and stay true to how you're going to resolve that conflict and goals and requirements.
How did you land on, or how did Yelp land on, the connections between the consumers and marketplaces, as that?
I guess you guys would you consider that your one metric that rules them all type thing, or the one that you really try to go after, the primary metric, or is there a system?
And how do you get to that?
That's been Yelp's mission to make quality connections seamlessly between consumers and local businesses.
The way it plays into this two-sided marketplace is local businesses come to Yelp because there's a lot of high-intent consumers looking to hire them.
Businesses and consumers come to Yelp because there's a lot of local businesses that are reviewed and the reviews are deep and broad.
We landed on connections because that's core to making our flywheel go.
And I think that's the other big insight that I got as a PM was you need to understand your flywheel before you design your product.
Because, like you're pointing out, if you focus on the wrong thing, then you'll basically design a product which might be successful in moving the metric that you think.
We could have easily focused on revenue or something else.
But we focus on connections, whether it's advertisers or non-advertisers, and whether it's a phone call or an email or request a quote or going to their website.
We want to know that we made a meaningful connection between a consumer and a local business, because we know that that's where it gets done.
By the way,
The flywheel concept I feel like is incredibly important in product management, but not super well understood.
Can you walk us through how you would if you were coming into an organization like you came into Yelp right?
How do you figure out or how should a product managers, right?
Figure out what their flywheel is.
How do they model it so that they can wrap their head around it?
Yeah.
So.
Product managers are always looking for product market fit.
That's the core thing that we're taught to look for.
And in a two-sided marketplace, a lot of times, The product market fit comes from growth.
You need to be big enough for one side of the marketplace to attract the other side of the marketplace.
And so I think of the flywheel, as what is the mechanism that's going to deliver sustainable growth over time?
And that's how we think about product initiatives to drive a flywheel.
So we think of a flywheel as self-sustaining growth and we think of the product levers that will help drive that growth.
And that's how we come up with a two-sided marketplace roadmap.
Okay.
So for Yelp you've got your growth metrics is trying to make those connections like more businesses, more consumers on the platform, the more you can do that.
Those connections is what people keep coming back to.
How do you think about the product levers connecting that?
Yeah.
So just to start, we think about both sides as the market.
And so for a consumer, we think about the needs that they have to satisfy to make a connection.
And If you boil it down to the very basics, I think most consumers when they're thinking about connecting with a local business, they have three basic needs.
The first is quality.
Whether it's the quality of food, the quality of the service, doesn't matter.
They think about quality first.
Two is price.
Everybody wants to know how much they're paying.
And three is timing.
If it's a restaurant, am I going to get a reservation?
Am I going to have to wait until I eat what I want to eat if it's a pro?
Is this an emergency job?
They have to get it done now.
So we think about how do we give them all of the information with the least amount of friction to address their questions on quality, price and time.
And on the pro side, or local businesses.
What they've told us, what they're looking for in a quality lead, is high intent.
So is this person really interested in connecting with a local business and service area?
Are they in my service area?
Am I in the same city?
Do I provide the type of service that they want?
And so our product is really focused on taking both sides of that marketplace, taking the consumer's needs, taking the business needs and essentially matching them.
And I think that's what we do recently.
Part that I love about you explaining this is that it really all goes back down to deeply understanding your customers on both sides of this marketplace.
Craig just showed us how powerful it can be to make product thinking explicit.
When teams have a shared framework for how to make decisions and navigate trade-offs, they can move faster and stay aligned even in complex environments.
But even with strong principles and clear focus, organizations can still struggle if they lose sight of what makes them unique.
For our final perspective, let's hear from Mauricio on how that plays out in practice.
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EBay is a really good example because I think they were probably one of the first companies to start to feel that pressure of the competition coming out there.
And you and I were talking a little bit about how, when you were there, they were going through a turnaround.
Can you talk us a little bit through what was happening at eBay at the time?
Why were they turning around?
What were the pressures there?
Yeah, of course.
So there were a few things happening at that time.
EBay was like the darling of most streets around 2004 or so.
Around the time I joined, stocks were growing like crazy.
The company was growing like crazy.
And there was a little bit more pressure.
I'll grow even a little bit more.
And Well, we're seeing Amazon on the side and kind of seeing them as like this bookstore that's unprofitable day in and day out and really ignoring them, right?
To the point that we couldn't anymore.
And what I saw was very much this, which is and again, I was a lonely PM at that point not very involved in the strategies of the company.
But the view that I had at that point is that, hey, we saw a strategy that works pretty well.
We need to figure out a way to literally copy what they're doing and do the same thing.
It took a while for eBay to understand, hey, like we have an actual different value proposition.
We're not Amazon.
We're not going to be Amazon.
If we try to be Amazon, we're just a few billion dollars behind all the infrastructure investments that they have done over time, right.
And we needed to kind of focus on what are the verticals that actually works for us?
Is it a mobile first or not environment?
By the way, mobile is a huge driver for eBay to kind of finish the turnaround.
And the focus on the right verticals, the right inventory and how you're buying the right inventory, rather than just trying to copy the warehouse ecosystem that Amazon had, was key to get eBay into the right path.
So when you were a product manager at eBay right, you're not making these choices, you're hearing about them.
You're observing, like what was your, what was your take on how things were happening?
What do you think they did well to communicate?
What do you think they may not have done so well to communicate?
And how did you kind of perceive it playing out?
Yeah, so it's interesting because we're only there just listening to like our strategies, our priorities, and here's what we're going to do.
I'm going to invest on this warehousing system that we're going to do some shipping coming from all products coming from China.
And on the end of the day, after all the investments, if you actually stop and think about it, like when you're listening to that story, you see okay, so we're going to do all that.
And then we're assuming that one, Amazon is going to stay as likely as they are right now.
And then two, when we finished this, we're going to be a little bit worse than Amazon, right?
So we're not actually competing and not bringing our value to it.
So a lot of the times we you've got that feeling that people, if they're not explaining themselves well because they probably they're much more senior than I was at that point.
They probably had their reasonings, but what it take away is, like you people that are like down to that level, they're looking at the basic, like they're basically looking from a consumer perspective right, and trying to understand how does that strategy make any sense, right?
And if you can't explain that, if you can't explain why the priorities for this year versus the priorities of last year and why we're investing in the consumer selling versus the business seller now, why this whole thing is connected to this turnaround, and why it's important to do this first and then the second, the next, People just assume that you don't know what you're talking about.
And there was that huge assumption, especially in the world of changing CEOs.
We went from MAG to, I think it was Daven at that point.
And you still try to kind of create some trust in that leadership.
And you just can't connect.
So it's very important to kind of think about like Without the knowledge that you have all the strategic meetings, you have all the advisors, you have received information from all the different competitive analysis that your team has done.
Why?
In a way that the lowest level PM can actually understand and therefore optimize to the same thing that you're optimizing.
So with Wish, when you came in there, what was the situation there and what type of turnaround did you have to do?
Yeah, so Wish is a very interesting place, because actually a long time ago I used Wish at one point.
Like, I'm not a demographics for Wish.
Like they're.
Basically, The best way to think about this is that we have very low prices on products that are usually about your passions, about your hobbies.
They're not products you need, they're products you like to have.
Right, there could be a bunch of gadgets for your kitchen.
They could be you like fishing.
There's a bunch of gadgets for fishing.
Or it's a baking and things like this.
Right so wish was in a situation that they had grown, especially through covid, but they grew in a little bit unsustainable way, which meant that With the growth, our time to door became very effective.
Like we're bringing those things from across the world and it takes a little while.
We didn't scale our logistics with the growth that we had.
We also did not scale our ability to grow our merchants, and our merchants grew uncontrollable, which then caused a meme.
I don't know if you ever saw the meme on the internet, which is the meme that what I bought on Wish and what I actually got from Wish, and it was usually a joke with something extremely different.
It was not quite that bad, but it was not great either, right?
Okay.
And also the perception that you're paying more for shipping and sometimes reality honestly, that you're paying more for shipping than you're paying for the product itself right.
So when you looked into that company over the growth that they have gone through, You look internally, look at the product, look at the customer feedback, look at your XR.
The problems are very obvious.
And also the thing that's interesting, as we talked about competitors at the time that I joined, the macroeconomics was actually not that bad.
Digital ads.
It was starting to kind of get expensive, which was a problem for Wish, which you know.
When you're selling very low-priced items and it takes so much to bring a user to your site, that can be a problem.
And, but as far as competition goes, you think of Amazon, you think of eBay, you think of others.
Yes, their e-commerce sites, their marketplaces as well, but they were not truly competitors.
People were not making decisions between Wish and Amazon, right?
They had, Wish had its own demographics.
It's a little bit older, a little bit more regional, even though we're in, at that point, I think, a hundred different countries.
Like our demographics was actually very separated.
We're not head to head to Amazon like very different value proposition, very different levels of commodities that you would see.
And also very different levels of products, right?
Those products usually don't do well on Amazon.
Amazon is a very much, you search for a product you need.
You want to get this, like this earbuds, like you're going to search for it.
I wish it's going to be things that you didn't even know existed.
It's a new product that in the past would have to take years of go-to-market funding to kind of make it mainstream.
But I wish we actually had a model to help you discover products.
And because we knew your interests, we were able to say hey, you're going to have this product I'm going to put in front of you.
And The more people bought it and the feedback grew, that product actually got more attention.
So on and so forth.
But it was a very like discovery based experience that really didn't compete against anyone.
So you look at AliExpress, for example very similar types of products, very similar logistics issues, but they were also very much like eBay, very search driven.
They're like, we're the only ones playing discovery shopping at that point.
At that time, it was clear that the problem for which, like the turnaround for which, was like we didn't pay attention to the basics of marketplace.
We need to put some health into it and we need to kind of basically save our brand reputation from the mistakes that were made in the past.
This was going to, how do we make sure that we're vetting our merchants?
Like the first thing that I did when I joined the company.
Like two weeks in, we closed the marketplace from new merchants.
And we said, we're only going to, we're going to do invitation only.
That basically means that business development team is going to bring merchants they have vetted and they're very like confident about them.
And we introduced a bunch of capabilities to say how we're going to know who the customers are, making sure that they're fully identified, introducing merchant risk, introducing seller standards and what are the rules of the game.
Meaning we wanted people to ship, we wanted merchants to ship their products in less than 24 hours.
If you don't ship a product and the user never receives that product, here are the penalties.
If the product is significantly not as described, here are the penalties.
And we introduce stylish standards into the ecosystem.
We really focus on that very first year on the three primary problems.
Product quality being the first one.
The second one being pipe to door.
In some places, on average, it would take almost a month to get people their products.
Once we ship the product within 24 hours and we introduce a lot of innovation in our warehouses combine those products and send those products to the final customer.
We took that 28 days, 30 days down to 10 days in some places and 15 days for the majority of our markets.
And in some markets in which, like Import, customs is like very complex, like Brazil, around the 20 something days right.
So it was very much of what are the core issues with the company and can we revive it from itself?
So we basically stopped trying to do a bunch of growth.
Like it was not a growth minded place.
It was very much issues we have to fix in order to be able to continue to grow and retain the users you're going to acquire through that.
That's interesting.
So it feels like to me when we were talking about Indigo, that was very much like a business model shift which feels more like the thing we were doing was working, but we kind of overextended ourselves.
And we didn't focus on some of the things that was going to help us win.
So we were declining because of it.
And instead we need to really drill down on.
Here's the strategy that's going to help us win, and just focus there instead of spreading ourselves too thin.
But that's episode one of Wish.
That's year one.
They're 100% right.
And year one is exactly that.
We did this and it was actually work.
We saw the improvements on NPS.
NPS went from minus four to 36.
Our refund rates.
I don't think I can quote the numbers because we're a public company, but it went from very high to below industry standards.
It was like ridiculously high to below industry standards.
And obviously we could see retention moving in the right direction with the improvements that we're making.
We could see our adverse transaction values, like the number of products in a basket, people actually giving it the chance and buying multiple products from us and not seeing shipping as an issue anymore, because now we have this flat rate shipping that allows you to buy as many products as you want for one flat fee.
And you could see that moving.
And then you got into phase two, which is when we actually started to have very, very heavy competition.
At that point.
I think the best way to look into this is that we're playing alone on an initially small market.
Nobody cared.
The market started to grow.
As their market grew, other players started to kind of do very, very similar things.
And what we saw at that point is that just doing exactly what we're doing, by just being better than we were before, is definitely not going to do it anymore.
We needed to figure out ways of actually doing it, providing a value proposition that did not rely purely on being the cheapest thing on the internet.
And that's the realization that hey, if we're going to have a competitor like this, it's paying as much as they do.
We're going to lose market share continuously to the point that it's not sustainable anymore.
And we need to kind of figure out a way to have a differentiated value proposition, right?
And that's the journey that we're in right now, which is really focused on not just so much like you need this product or you discover this product that you didn't even know existed, but more focusing to your interests, your desires, your hobbies, and connecting that into a much richer experience of all the products that come together to make that reality.
And having the right content, the right videos, the right text, every media that's needed for you to understand why you're buying, what you're buying and the richness associated with that.
You know, if you are into espresso making, like what are all the different tools to do the distribution and all that good stuff or whatever your hobby is?
Well, we built models that no longer just rank the right product for you, but models that actually understands their interests and actually rank the right basket for you, right?
So that you can have a much more catering experience.
That's it for today.
Hopefully this episode gave you a clearer picture of what it takes to create focus and alignment in product organizations.
If you want to hear the full conversations, check out episodes 221, 162, and 158.
And if you're looking to grow as a product manager or level up how your team works, head over to Product Institute to learn more about our programs and resources.
One last thing before we go.
I want to recommend a tool I use every day called Granola.
It's an AI-powered notepad for meetings that helps capture notes and decisions automatically without interrupting your flow.
You can get three months free on any paid plan at granola.ai slash product institute.
Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast.
We'll be back with another episode soon, sharing practical insights from across the product world.
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We'll see you next time.
