Achieving Customer Outcomes Beyond Conversion with Heather Campbell, Etsy
Conversion is what keeps businesses alive, but to get there we have to back up to the customer outcomes and milestones that lead to conversion.
Heather Campbell joins us to share her perspective on the customer journey as a Product Manager at Etsy.
We discuss creativity in product management, how to create long-term buyers, and the steps that lead to conversion. And Heather shares Product Managers’ pivotal role in making this possible by fostering collaboration.
Takeaways:
- Expand your customers’ perceptions to create long-term buyers
- Cross-functional teams foster creativity in product management
- Focus on customer outcomes beyond conversion
Things to Listen For:
- [02:35] Dynamics at Etsy
- [04:00] How Etsy handles trending product categories
- [04:15] Designing the buyer experience
- [05:20] The two sides of Etsy: buyer and seller
- [05:55] The influx of demand on Etsy in 2020
- [07:00] Managing buyers’ and sellers’ expectations
- [07:50] Creating long-term buyers
- [09:00] Expanding buyers’ perceptions of Etsy
- [12:20] User research at Etsy
- [13:10] Anticipating buyers’ wants and needs
- [13:50] User metrics and the buyer’s journey
- [15:30] Setting benchmarks for your buyer’s journey beyond purchasing
- [17:40] Putting yourself in the buyer’s shoes: the steps that lead to conversion
- [18:45] Creative problem-solving in product management
- [20:45] Facilitating collaboration as a product manager
- [22:00] Conversion is the true test of your product
- [23:00] Balancing experience and conversion
Episode Transcription
Heather Campbell:
So for my team, that became a big question for us in Q2 of last year. You can imagine, we didn't actually really know what was going to happen like how long are masks going to last? How long is the pandemic going to last? This was something that no one had any information on.
Christian Beck:
This is a Better Product exclusive going behind the product of Etsy. I'm Christian.
Meghan Pfeifer:
And I'm Meghan.
Christian Beck:
Three years ago.
Meghan Pfeifer:
And some change.
Christian Beck:
Yes, three plus years ago, Heather Campbell came to Etsy as a product manager.
Meghan Pfeifer:
Having come from booking.com she developed a love for working in two-sided marketplace businesses as she puts it.
Heather Campbell:
There's just no shortage of interesting problems to work on on the demand side, on the supply side, and also matching people in the middle. I really wanted to keep working for a company that I was a more active user of. I thought that would be a really fun experience as a PM. And so Etsy was actually my top choice there. I really loved the product as a user, really love what it enables for sellers. I really loved the kind of mission of what they're trying to create in the world so that's what drew me to Etsy. And then since being there, I've worked on both the seller and buyer-side.
Christian Beck:
So, no shortage of interesting opportunities for Heather to get involved with at Etsy. When you have this sort of two-sided business, what happens is when one side changes, it affects the other.
Meghan Pfeifer:
So in Etsy's case, does that translate to when they get new types of sellers or really new sellers in general, it impacts the buyer experience and vice versa?
Christian Beck:
Yeah. And I'll let Heather add more color to what that really means for her.
Heather Campbell:
It's really dynamics. And so I think that dynamicism in a way, sometimes it's hard because you don't have total control over the end-to-end experience for your customers, in the end the product is being fulfilled by someone else, but that also makes it interesting. And I think, especially with Etsy, we don't plan our inventory. It's not like we're trying to follow in detail trends. We see them happen because our sellers are so on top of it and then we try to proactively improve the experience and make sure the experience will work for new things as they come up.
Christian Beck:
Before my conversation with Heather, I admittedly hadn't really thought about the fact that Etsy doesn't actually control the inventory. I mean, I know they don't, but I just hadn't really thought about it. So what that means is they don't go to their sellers and say, "Hey, go design and make more of this because it's trending."
Meghan Pfeifer:
And that's probably got to be pretty challenging, right?
Christian Beck:
Yeah. In her words, Heather shared that it's a challenge, yes. But it's also interesting and it's what makes the marketplace continue to work and thrive over time. Now to get us started, let's actually have Heather jump in with how this looks using a recent experience and how it impacts her on the product team side.
Heather Campbell:
Recently, where we have ask sellers to make something was with masks. Last year, we put out a request basically saying we're getting a ton of demand for this. But even with that, what we sold in 2019 and 2020 shifted because our sellers are responding to what they see as buyer needs in a way that I think it's impossible for a non marketplace business to do so.
Christian Beck:
I can definitely see how masks, hopefully a once in a lifetime event, but how much do the trends in selling factor into your day-to-day? Do you sit down and say at some point like, "Hey, what is trending right now and have to make sense of that?" Or was that unique in the way that you all handled something like that?
Heather Campbell:
That was definitely unique. We have teams that think about what's trending to shape our merchandising content, some of what goes out in our emails, some of what goes into our blog, et cetera. But then from the product side of things, it's a little bit more evergreen and we want to know what people are buying on Etsy so we can understand what is the use case and the experience that we're designing for. But it's not necessarily trying to figure out everything that's trending.
Christian Beck:
And I imagine it doesn't just because something's trending, doesn't necessarily change the product in any demonstrable way, or does it ever have a deeper impact on a product roadmap?
Heather Campbell:
I think maybe not in terms of if it requires a very different buyer experience. So, I think we're thinking more on the product side about what are buyers coming to Etsy to do? And how can we get them from A to B as quickly as possible? So it's maybe not necessarily as much about from category to category, but more about the mission that they're on you can imagine.
Christian Beck:
Sp let me understand more because you're on the buyer-side. So, and I don't want to assume what people understand and I'm going to make sure I understand when you say buyer, you're talking about somebody coming to etsy.com, I'm looking to go buy some jewelry, that buyer?
Heather Campbell:
Exactly. We have the buyer's side, which is you're going to shop on Etsy. And then we have the seller-side, which is if you're going to sell something on Etsy.
Christian Beck:
Let's get to 2020, and we talked about this specific thing with masks, but e-com really took off in 2020, I think for obvious reasons people are at home. And did you see a large influx of demand on both sides? Where are you seeing a lot people selling more stuff because they were at home knitting socks because they didn't have anything else to do or was it more seeing a lot more purchasing behavior coming?
Heather Campbell:
That is a great question. I actually don't know the answer specifically to the sequencing, but they both happened within the same time period. We had a time period in which we just saw traffic and demand skyrocket to the site. It was very unique because we were getting a lot of people coming to buy masks, which was a category we had previously not sold that much of. We actually saw in Q2 of last year, almost $350 million in GMS, which is gross merchandise sold on the site, so that was huge. And in that quarter, we also acquired a lot more sellers. So I think they happened simultaneously, I'm not sure what followed the other. We also put out an ask to our seller community, which was also unique about making masks, just because the demand was so high. It's very interesting to reflect back on this, it feels like a really long time ago, but it was very fast. It all happened very fast.
Heather Campbell:
And we ended up having cross-functional task force work on tackling that because you can imagine there were a lot of pieces that had to come together, both in terms of making sure it's clear to buyers what they're buying, what the expectations are that they have. It's clear to sellers that this is an opportunity out there for them, how to meet buyer expectations. And then also when it comes to customer service and fulfillment, how can we make sure we're trying to get things to buyers in as fast as possible, and then answering their questions along the way.
Christian Beck:
As a product manager, how do you try to turn those buyers into more longer term buyers? So they're not just there for the mask and they leave, how do you get them to come back?
Heather Campbell:
So for my team, that became a big question for us in Q2 of last year. You can imagine, we didn't actually really know what was going to happen and how long are masks going to last? How long is the pandemic going to last? This was something that no one had any information on.
Christian Beck:
I miss when we thought it was going to be a month, it was like a year ago we were like, it's probably going to change in a few weeks and here we are.
Heather Campbell:
We went to work from home as a test. And I remember really thinking it was just a test. And then when we got told we're working from home for the next two weeks, I was like, "Wow, so it was just a test and now we're home." So for us, that was definitely something we started to think about. Okay, we have buyers coming for this very specific category so we want to set them up for success with this category, but then we also want to introduce them to more of what they might be interested in on Etsy. As time went on last year, the e-commerce trend stayed consistent. We ended up having to stay home a lot longer than we initially expected so buyers already started branching out, but in product we definitely were thinking about at the time and we continue to think about in the buyer experience, how can we get you to think about what else Etsy might offer you? So, one thing that we see a lot with these newer buyers and not just newer buyers, I don't know. Do you ever shop on Etsy?
Christian Beck:
I have before. It has been awhile.
Heather Campbell:
Can I ask, what did you purchase?
Christian Beck:
The last thing I remember purchasing was a citrine ring for my wife because it's one of the birthstones of our son. It was a few years ago, but yes, I do remember that.
Heather Campbell:
So what can happen in a case like yours is that you start to think of Etsy as the store where you can buy rings as gifts for people in your life. And that maybe has a limited applicability and so we might not be that top of mind for other things that you might be shopping for, like things for your home or things for your work from home setup or vintage stuff or things for maybe more niche hobbies that you have. And so part of what we're trying to think about in the buyer experience is how can we, when you are purchasing something specific that you're interested in like that ring or like a mask, how can we also show you a little bit more of what you might be interested in on Etsy?
Heather Campbell:
And that's about different shopping missions that you could be on if you're planning a wedding or if you're planning a birthday party or something, but it can also be about categories or longer-term interests. And one other thing that we see as an important part of that is how do we help you find shops that you're going to be really interested in that you might end up wanting to purchase from more than just the one time?
Christian Beck:
It sounds like there's a lot of different. So yeah, I like using me as an example, that's a great point. I hadn't thought about that, but you're absolutely right. I think I'm aware that Etsy has a lot of different things, but I definitely associate it with jewelry predominantly. It sounds like you try a bunch of different things. Is your role, do you find that you're experimenting, you're throwing different things out? You're like, "Hey, let's try recommending different stores that are like that store, or maybe let's try to recommend other jewelry to him first to ease him into other things." How do you figure out how to do those? Is there experimentation or do you have a playbook that you follow?
Heather Campbell:
So we definitely experiment a lot. I would say that and user research or how we learn about different ideas and hypotheses that we have. An overview of our basic process when we start on a new business opportunity or a new business problem, we'll do some foundational research to really figure out what's the lay of the land and why are buyers not for example, exploring a new category or finding something else that they might be interested in on Etsy? And then we'll come up with, based on that initial research that we pulled together, what are some hypothesis we have about how we could get buyers to find that next thing they're going to love in this case. And then from there, we'll figure out what's the best way to learn about if that's actually a good hypothesis or not. And there's usually we have a lot of different tools we can use for that.
Heather Campbell:
Sometimes the easiest way to learn about something is to create a wire frame and do user testing and just get some initial qualitative feedback. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to set up an experiment on our site. Sometimes it's both, sometimes we want to get live data, but then also we want to have some understanding of why we're seeing the behavior that we're seeing. So we usually start with business problem, customer outcome, what are the kind of underlying drivers of why we're not currently achieving that customer outcome? And then what are the hypothesis we have? And at that point, that's when we start to think about, okay, how can we learn about these hypothesis? And our focus is really on framing it through, how can we learn?
Christian Beck:
How do you figure out what type of customer someone is? Do you have these shifting categories that you try to understand people in?
Heather Campbell:
We definitely try to people. Who they are, what they're trying to achieve on Etsy, what their behavior looks like. We have a lot of different ways of tackling that through both qualitative research and data. I think on the buyer-side right now, because at sea has so many sellers and so many products, we genuinely think that there are going to be other things that you're going to be interested in on Etsy that you're just not aware of at this moment. So we're always trying to think about what's the next thing that you might be interested in, but we aren't just thinking about necessarily purchasing. We're also thinking about how frequently are people visiting, how frequently are they engaging? How frequently are they seeming to find things of interest? Those are quicker signals that we might have that you're on the right track. And then when we're thinking about buyers that don't shop frequently right now, we are thinking our kind of approach has been, what are the steps along the way between being someone who doesn't shop that much on Etsy and being someone who's an Etsy loyalist.
Heather Campbell:
I'm an Etsy loyalist, I already went on this whole journey and what are the aha moments that people have along the way and how can we get people to those faster? And so that's how we think about structuring it so that we're bringing people along a journey and then focusing on milestones, not just from A to B, if that makes sense?
Christian Beck:
Yeah. So another dumb question, if you just invented Etsy today, any people are creating a new startup have to figure out what is a reasonable assumption. If somebody, they come back to our shop and buy something once a month, then when you're getting started, you'd be like, "That's amazing. I'm so excited." But then at some point you're like, "I want to try to get them to do more." From the listener's perspective of a show like this I think a lot of people are not at Etsy's level, but thinking, okay, how can I apply some of this and figure out? A lot of their criticism of big companies like [inaudible 00:13:49] I was like, we should be so lucky to have millions of users. If I had that, I could do that testing too. So how do you set benchmarks? And I'm sure they're always in flux, how do you figure that out?
Heather Campbell:
Yeah. Okay. So when we're thinking about what does good look like, what I was talking about before we are thinking about, okay, when you go from not shopping, not frequently to becoming a habitual buyer, what does that journey look like? There are milestones along the way that you achieve that aren't just about purchasing. So how measuring and understanding whether buyers are proceeding past those milestones, I think we don't start with necessarily metrics first, we start more with customer outcomes and attitudes. So you can imagine a buyer going from a place. So you bought a ring, you finding another shop that you're going to like or searching for a new type of thing on Etsy. That might be a milestone for you because it's an unlock. So how do we start to see when buyers are proceeding past this initial stage and are building more of a relationship with us outside of just purchase frequency?
Heather Campbell:
So that's thinking about it from a customer outcome point of view, and then thinking about how do we measure that? I think when it comes to benchmarking, we can look at analogous things. We can look at our own data. I think another thing I'm just trying to think from your perspective about a small company, because one thing I was going to say is we can also run some experiments, see how much we can actually move something and that also gives us a sense of how easy is it going to be to affect this part of the buyer experience?
Christian Beck:
Sticking to that idea that it's not just about conversion, I think is really important to think about. There's these other things that you look for. Like you said, if I buy something, that's one thing, but it's not just, I think you talked about something unlocking. I hear that a lot more. I don't know if I'm new to that term, but this idea of unlocking this behavior, you see that I'm browsing for other stuff. I haven't bought anything yet, but now you start saying, "Okay, they've reached this milestone." I think that's really a interesting way to think about it.
Heather Campbell:
And I think for us, conversion is important. Conversion is still a measure of frequency and loyalty. Whether someone purchases with you ultimately that is a core metric, but thinking about what leads to that conversion and what leads to the frequency of that conversion, we really try to put ourselves in the buyer's shoes also by doing a lot of research with them. What are the steps between coming up with an idea of something that you might be interested in, actually starting to shop for it and shopping for it on Etsy? There's a lot that happens there before you're even in the phase where you're necessarily deciding between three different products to purchase.
Christian Beck:
I think a lot of times we think about product management for e-commerce or consumer side, we think a lot about metrics, KPIs, experimentation, looking at the numbers, but I was curious how much creativity factors into it. How much does that factor into the type of work you're doing on the product team? Do you spin up creative ideas or is it just very metric oriented like just turning dials on different things?
Heather Campbell:
I think product is an incredibly creative job. We need to be super creative. We can't just do exactly what everyone else is doing. And honestly, the problems that we're solving are genuinely unique. That's the thing about Etsy, right? We sell things that no one else sells so how we work to an extent has to be a little bit unique. I think also when we're trying to think about people, people are busy, people have a lot of things that they want to dedicate their time to. So in order for us to really make it interesting for you to explore and shop and find new things and new items, it has to be an amazing experience. It can't fall flat and creativity is definitely required for that. I think what helps us a lot with that is being really cross-functional and having a lot of people working together and have been trained in different ways, working really closely with designers and engineers and analytics.
Heather Campbell:
Our analytics team is super strong, they're super creative. When we were thinking about, "Okay, we have this customer outcome we're trying to achieve, how do we know we're actually achieving it?" That is creative problem solving. There's not an easy answer to that question. And so I think from a PM's perspective, figuring out how to bring all those people together and make those discussions really productive and make sure you're maximizing on the variety of perspectives that you have is huge. That is really huge.
Christian Beck:
I can imagine. And I think a lot of the creativity that I think product does, it's hidden. [inaudible 00:18:34] easy, it's like I'm creative designer, you can visually see it, but the creativity behind the ways you approach problems, it seems like a little hidden with product. And it almost seems like you're almost integrating a bunch of different perspectives as a PM.
Heather Campbell:
I think there's this perspective sometimes that makes sense to me where I don't know if I like totally agree with that PM's are facilitators and that's ultimately what they're doing is trying to facilitate collaboration between a wide variety of people to get to a positive outcome.
Christian Beck:
So you're talking about switching from just conversion oriented, which I get, conversion is sales. So for anybody that wants to have a business you need to make the sale, but there are so many different ways you can handle that. You could just sell and at all costs, you need to sell this product. I don't care, whatever, but what you're saying is that's not the full picture. You want to build something larger than that. So you say more circular, but so let me just ask the question. Why has that evolved? I don't want to make any qualitative assessments, but Amazon is very conversion oriented, just all about just getting, converting, buying a product, making it really easy, kind of no frills for the most part. But what you're describing seems more experiential, more circular building around that so why would you shift away from that? What do you think is on the other end of a strategy like that?
Heather Campbell:
So I think it's maybe not shifting away, it's more expanding. So you can think of conversion is so core to everything, right? It's not just sales, it also represents that you're actually doing the thing that your business set out to do and matching a seller and a buyer in our case, but you can apply that to so many cases, but it's ultimately whether someone decides to hand over dollars and cents is the true test of your product at a very high level. But you can imagine, you can expand your definition of success to think about other things that might make that a more positive experience that may might make you want to do that more than once on the site. I think it's interesting actually the point about Amazon, because I think Amazon is also very oriented towards frequency and that anytime you visit Amazon, they're trying to sell you something else so I think that they have an interesting balance there.
Heather Campbell:
I think for us, it's really thinking about how can we serve you for more than one thing? So we want you to have a great experience with the thing that you're here to buy today. We also want you to think about other things that you can shop for with us. And so balancing those two things, figuring out how they work together, I think, is requiring us to be pretty creative about needs to work very well for buyers that are on a mission. How do we then extend them to think about other types of things on Etsy and make that a fun experience?
Christian Beck:
Amazon is selling things that you've need. I've never felt that it was geared towards exploration. It's just, there's these things, you search for it, you find it, click buy. I felt like Etsy, you would like to sell more, but it's not like I'm not there, okay, now that you bought this ring, why don't you add this to your cart? It almost seems much more exploratory, how do you branch out and think bigger about what Etsy is as you mentioned earlier? So in that way it seems like, yes, it's frequency, but it's not just adding more things to your cart, it's getting you to explore more.
Heather Campbell:
A 100%. And I think the thing is our inventory is fun, it's unique, it's oftentimes very meaningful to people and it's not utilitarian, if that makes sense. So how can we get people to start to explore in a way that matches what those shopping missions actually entail and makes it fun and unique. If you shop on Etsy, it will resonate that we have a lot of fun, unexpected things that still help you achieve a mission. If you want to plan a great wedding or you want to get a really meaningful gift for someone or you're decorating your house or honestly, I got my stand-up desk on Etsy and it was custom made by this very nice man in Florida. And that is a very functional product, but the quality is great, it's custom, I bought it from a real person. So I think that there is a match of there's fun and there's functional, but it's also, we believe, more rewarding to shop from real people also. So reinforcing that as part of that shopping journey.
Meghan Pfeifer:
To help take the conversation into action Christian is joined by Mike Hardy, Head of Product Design at Etsy.
Christian Beck:
So for this series on Etsy, we are going to switch things up a little bit as we recap the episodes and bring in yet another Etsy expert, my good friend, Mike Hardy, who is, and I don't want to get the title wrong, but I'm just going to say you are a very seasoned product designer.
Mike Hardy:
I'm the Senior Product Design Manager here at Etsy, two big focuses, one, not doing anything to [inaudible 00:23:38] to grow their business and the other one really focused on keeping the marketplace safe overall. So yeah. So do your at Etsy.
Christian Beck:
Yeah, that's great. So we have three episodes as a part of this series. And on this first episode I talked to Heather Campbell, who's a PM on your team. And I think one of the backdrops, I think for all of this, that probably I should kick off is that you're a marketplace. You have the buyer-side, you have the seller-side and there's a complexity, I think, for everybody that's inside of Etsy, when you're having to sort of balance those two sides of marketplace, especially one as mature as Etsy's. So talking to Heather, we really dove into what it's like on the buyer-side. So what it's like on the consumer side. The thing that stood out to me really was how experimentation is a part of Etsy culture. I'd love to hear your thoughts connecting the experimentation with what Heather was talking about on the buyer-side of Etsy.
Mike Hardy:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think her experience and her story on the buyer-side really captures a lot of what Etsy has seen over the last 18 months and definitely what we're thinking about right now. The last 18 months have honestly been phenomenal for us. It's been very, very challenging, very different to where you have an explosion of new buyers and explosion of new sellers that are on the platform. What Heather really gets at is the role of experimentation there. Talking about how can we run quick tests inside the marketplace to figure out what hangs, to figure out which trends that we're actually catching the right way and can actually make a difference in the lives of our buyers and then consequently our sellers, to doing qualitative tests, mocking up something very quickly, find a small set of people and saying, is this something that you think that you would get a value from? I think Heather does a great job of talking about how we experiment on those two fronts.
Christian Beck:
Yeah, so my background is in a lot more in the B2B SaaS world, where there isn't as much, I think, change that's happening. Let me back up because why is experimentation important when with a product like Etsy? In my mind, I'd be like Etsy, people are trying to buy stuff, people trying to sell stuff, what do you need to be researching? What do you need to even be experimenting with?
Mike Hardy:
So, Heather mentioned just the sheer diversity of things that people happen to be looking for on Etsy. They're there to shop for a variety of different reasons for inspiration to buying something directly. I think Heather definitely mentions that we're looking at more than just someone making a purchase or buying a thing on the site overall. So when it comes down to experimentation with a vast variety of interests amongst our buyers, with a lot of different things that they happen to be looking for, a lot of ideas would naturally emerge. So experimentation is a way for us to make sure that we're understanding the signal that we get, formulating a test that is our first best guess, and then validating that with the people who it really matters to. So we experiment and test in order to make sure that we're designing and making the right thing and getting it to the right person.
Christian Beck:
So she's on the product side and I think products, I don't know, you can disagree with this as a fellow designer that I always feel like product managers are the adults in the room. You're trying to lead with business value, you're trying to experiment and see what the buyers are potentially looking for on etsy.com, but how do you still on the design side weave in that, I don't know, the serendipity or the opportunity for total newness? Do you look at other things for inspiration? Tell me a little bit about how you sort of balance that from the design perspective.
Mike Hardy:
Yeah. I heard two things there. Let's talk about Heather's role on the product side. She said something really cool inside the interview where she said, "I don't know how much I agree with this, but it starting to resonate with me more about product managers being a facilitator." Now, when I heard her say that in the interview, that's something that I've heard designers say for years or for almost a decade, they believe themselves to be the facilitator, the coordinator, the person that makes a lot of sense or the one that can make sense of a situation. To hear Heather say that really does speak to what my experience at Etsy has been. You honestly have product design and engineering all coming together to figure out how we're making the right thing for the right person at the right time. Now, I think in the second part your question was just like, how do I control the crazy? [Crosstalk 00:27:47].
Christian Beck:
Yeah, I mean, you've got to scratch the creative itch so it can't just all be about executing and making decisions off of experiments you're running. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong but that feels like if I just am always running experiments and then making the small design tweaks, I'm still curious, hungry for how do you weave in new concepts or totally new ideas into the product?
Mike Hardy:
So I know with my approach and then also the people who around my team, whenever we have conversations about opportunities in the marketplace overall, the thing I really try to do is think about outside-end things. So things that other companies happen to be doing, not just competitors, but people who are doing something similar to what we might be doing or who happen to be really resonating with people out in the world. So really bringing in those outside examples of just good digital experiences, things that make people happy, things that make them smile, things that people find useful are always a part of our conversation and are really a part of how we actually go about making product. Now for me personally, I know COVID has been a little hard, I still try to interact with small businesses. A friend of mine's mother-in-law or soon to be mother-in-law, she's a same stress, she sells fabric and she runs classes and she's really been experimenting with a lot of online tools or online channels in order to sell her work or to sell her time and do a variety of different things.
Mike Hardy:
So, I heard that story. I said, "Put me in contact with her. I would love to talk with her and hear a little bit more about her story and then what she's doing." This has nothing to do with Etsy overall, it can inform a lot of the work, but it's a way for me to stay really plugged into what small businesses thinking, what independent creatives happen to be doing or what they happen to be thinking about and then it actually shows up in work and also in conversation. So for me, I just try to get out there and interact with as many small businesses, creative types, as I possibly can to really understand what matters to them.
Christian Beck:
That's cool. I mean, it doesn't sound like you're required to do that, either you're just kind of staying curious. So that's cool. And I think even as Etsy's grown over the last decade, it's nice to hear that from behind the curtain, you're still sort of keeping that, I don't think that what you just said is necessarily a startup mentality, I only say it is in the sense that a lot of startups when they're starting don't have a choice, but to stay connected. And as you get bigger, sometimes you become really disconnected from the audience because you get too smart for your own good sometimes. So it's good to hear that you still are down in the trenches with the small businesses to really like keep up with what they're doing.
Mike Hardy:
Absolutely. Small business is part of the reason why I wanted to come to Etsy overall or why I chose to join Etsy from the jump. I knew I had a passion for small business, what they were doing, what they found interesting, what they wanted to get out into the world. I think you often hear that people want to join product companies or come on the product side of the house. They're like, "Hey, I want to live with a product for a long period of time or for a number of years." For me, it was a little different. I really wanted to have a set of users, a set of people, a set of consumers that I probably wouldn't mind having dinner with for five or 10 years. What's on their mind? What are they thinking about that's not business-related? And let that be the real driver as to why I even want to be here and actually help them out.
Christian Beck:
We'll get into that a little bit more in the next two interviews we have. I think it's a great kickoff to the series. So to recap this episode, Heather is really energetic and love the energy she had and I can feel that through the Etsy product. And so, yeah, thanks for helping us recap that episode, Mike. And we will pick this up with our next interview with Nick Volpe, who was another designer on the Etsy team.
Meghan Pfeifer:
I'm Megan.
Christian Beck:
And I'm Christian.
Meghan Pfeifer:
And this is Better Product. [crosstalk 00:31:24].
Christian Beck:
Oh, dang. I think we nailed the timing on that.