Designing for the Customer’s Customer with Nick Volpe, Etsy

Episode Transcription

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:

Nick Volpe, a product designer focused on the seller side at Etsy.

Meghan Pfeifer:

And to clarify for everyone, Etsy is a two-sided marketplace. They have both buyers and sellers.

Christian Beck:

Yeah, exactly. So, it's important to know how Nick's role fits into that larger scheme.

Nick Volpe:

So, we have definitely core areas of the product to being a two-sided marketplace. You could think about a buyer area and a seller area, but the reality is that we believe, I think, that really doubling down, focusing on either of those two areas, it might cause us to miss the mark when it comes to our KPIs and trying to make sure that all of those customers' successful. So, I am on a team that skews a little more towards the seller side being a... It's called seller performance. We really focus on our seller tools and making sure those tools are efficient, making sure those tools are exactly what sellers expect and want, and it enables them to do their job well, which is satisfy both of our customers, which is the buyer at the end of the day.

Christian Beck:

Now, Meghan wasn't part of the interview, so she'll be hearing Nick and I's discussion for the first time right alongside you. As you'll soon hear, Nick shares how Etsy views the design function as a collective unit and part of their opportunities to think about... Well, I'll just let him tell you.

Nick Volpe:

One of our major goals is thinking about the customer's customer. So not only do we interact, definitely interact with all sides of Etsy, we making sure that successes is actually met on both sides.

Meghan Pfeifer:

Success is met that on both sides, sure, but nothing exists without sellers being able to sell product successfully. So how does Nick balance it all? Because depending on who you are in the system, an entirely different experience is needed, right?

Christian Beck:

Yeah, and that's a challenge. One of the challenges with the marketplace is that you have a business that's trying to make money, but you have basically two different sides that are contributing to that. So having to balance the two sides, especially in Etsy's case, you've got sellers, you need to support them to make it easier to sell, but you can't do it at the cost of making it easier to buy because you need buyers for sellers to sell to. So, it's really hard to just maintain that, that balance. For me, it's almost like balancing a seesaw. But anyway, here's Nick and he'll do a better job explaining.

Nick Volpe:

Etsy has a few precedents for this. One is being Etsy is a very, very big experiment culture, especially when we're thinking about when it comes to servicing buyers. We really want to make sure that everything we put on the website is in service of making sure that they have a good experience and in turn, come back and shop at Etsy. So thinking about how we prioritize is really thinking about breaking down our problems and just smaller iterative experiments and make sure that we're tracking towards the right thing. When it comes to both sides, we really do that so we break down these problems into smaller chunks.

Christian Beck:

So you've had a lot of experimentation on the buyer side, the experimentation culture. You're mostly on the seller side, experimentation culture over to the seller side.

Nick Volpe:

What we're trying to do on the seller side right now is really trying to understand it at a deeper level and a level when it comes to thinking about the customer journey and their goals and what they're trying to do. We have a lot of tools on the seller side. We offer sellers a broad suite of tools from marketing to ads, to being able to closed up their listings very quickly, but really what we're trying to do right now and what the opportunity for us is to figure out where the walls of those experiences are broken down and where we can replace those experiences with more of a goal-oriented mindset.

Nick Volpe:

As a seller, I want to provide great customer service. I don't only want to list an item, but over time I want to optimize it. I want to make sure that it has the right search terms. I want to make sure that the content on there is fresh. I want to make sure that buyers are converting. I want to start an ads campaign, but I want to make sure that the budget that I'm putting into it is right. So again, instead of breaking those down into thinking about those individual features or feature sets, we're trying to break down those walls and try to turn those into workflows and goals and think about how we can optimize those. So instead of taking any one of those experiences and just throwing it out and let's say rebuilding it, we're trying to figure out how to really optimize the workflows that happened in between them.

Christian Beck:

It's almost like there's the functional lens of what you have. Like you said, the feature baselines is like, okay, can they run ads? Check. Do we allow them to do marketing? Check. We've done that. But it's like you're stepping back to think, "Okay. We've been doing this for a while now. We have enough data." You've mentioned there's a lot of different types of sellers and I'm wonder if it's like, now that you started to see there's differences, you can almost elevate and say, "Let's get back to the goals." Because I imagine no seller is just like, "I want to do ads." If they do say that, it's because they've read somewhere or somebody told them like, "You should have ads." But nobody sets out to do ads. It's always in service of something grander. So it sounds like you're almost moving from that functional lens to what is ultimately your goal that you're trying to achieve there? It sounds like a richer experience you're trying to provide.

Nick Volpe:

Absolutely. One of the common things between all of our sellers is that they all want to sell their products. They all want to make sure that their customers are happy. A lot of the research that I've conducted at Etsy, we asked sellers, "What's most important to you?" Time and time again, they tell us that their customers are satisfied. Not only that, is that Etsy can't think about that one of the core tenants of Etsy is our sellers being able to sell their unique items or their unique products. So they really care about their products. We really want to make sure that the time that they spend on Etsy is super valuable so that they can actually get back to their products and the things that they really care about.

Nick Volpe:

When it comes to marketing and ads, those are only functions of trying to increase your buyers, increase sales, increase your reach. But at the end of the day, they really want to do is they really want to focus on their product. They want to get in. They want to get out. They want to make sure their customers are happy and that they can move on and make their products great.

Christian Beck:

Since you've worked in a B2B SaaS type of product, now you're in a marketplace dealing with selling, in what you just described, is there something fundamentally different in the way that you approach, I guess, success metrics there? So, you want to get them back to their work. Is that any different than how you were with Buddy Media or Salesforce, where you're trying to optimize the usage of the tool? Have you found yourself having to shift the way that you think about design or think about research with this shift?

Nick Volpe:

Absolutely. The context between a SaaS tool versus a tool that has buyers, I mean, it can't be really more different. But in both scenarios, we talk about customer success. We talk about frictionless experience. We talk about, they can get to their goals as fast and as efficiently as they want, right? That is common throughout designing anything when it comes to user experience. But when it comes to a SaaS product in a work setting, we really want to make sure that we're providing them with always the features and functionality that they need in the moment. They come up with completely unique challenges all the time, especially in the space that I was working, in the marketing space, and those challenges actually got even increasingly more complicated when we were in the customer data platform space.

Nick Volpe:

I worked with users before that. A lot of them really didn't even want our UI. They really just wanted a way to upload the information or a way to download the information. So for them, that experience was really about just making sure that the goals, and oftentimes, all the time, they'd be working through an organization or company so that they could basically meet their company goals. At Etsy, it's really all about making sure that our sellers can get in, get out and get back to what they love. So it's really even that much more crucial that we provide time-to-value or ROI when it comes to Etsy sellers. But last thing I'll mention is the commonality between those two is that something we talked about at Salesforce a lot was that concept of the customer's customer. So, we did really want to make that the outcome of both of those or we want to make sure that the outcome of those products is meeting the needs of the end user. Oftentimes, the product that you're designing for is not the end user of the product that will be used.

Christian Beck:

It's funny. But first off, I just have to say that I started my career at Autodesk designing AutoCAD software and the software was basically how you got work done. If you were designing an electrical network, you did it in AutoCAD. So when I started my career, it was like, "We're not trying to get you back to your job. This is your job. You use this to do your job." Then I worked at a large marketing automation software, and it became clear to me that the goal of this software is to start to get them to be able to do other things. But it's inevitable with some, where in Salesforce, go on LinkedIn and there are people who specialize in Salesforce as a product. The product got so large, it got big enough that it became someone's job, right?

Christian Beck:

Amazon, you see people that specialize in setting up and optimizing Amazon. I'm not saying this in a negative, but I have to think at some point, Etsy could go down. It's gotten so big. There are people that you pay to just optimize Etsy. Maybe those already exist. But as the designer, there's almost something disheartening to know that you're designing something that people don't want to use, or at some products, you're like... Salesforce is great, don't get me wrong, but some people are like, "God, I don't want to get back in there." I feel like that attitude is usually because it's keeping them from doing something else. It's got to be tough. You've experienced that world, where I'm imagining now you're working with sellers and you don't want to get so big that you become this like, "Oh, I've got to open up the Etsy seller tool again and do whatever they need to do." You want to be a breath of fresh air like, "Don't worry. It's going to be super fast. You can get back to what you're doing."

Nick Volpe:

Something that I was focused on for a decent amount of time when I first started at Etsy was our Sell on Etsy tool. So, what we really wanted to do with that tool is do just that. We wanted to make sure that sellers could... We have a Sell on Etsy tool. Today, it does almost everything that the desktop can do, but it could use a refresh. It's something that was worked on, and then it wasn't as much work on recently. We changed priorities, but then it cycled and we said we wanted to double down on working on that product. We saw that product as really just that. We saw that as a mobile tool that you could log in at anywhere. Anywhere you are in the world, you can open up and understand, "How am I doing at Etsy? How many orders? Maybe I'm out during the day." What happens a lot with sellers is that they're out during the day. They're out a lot of times. This is not their primary job.

Nick Volpe:

One of the things that they really love about the app and that we definitely brought into the new app is the concept of the cha-ching, which the cha-ching is a sound that happens whenever you get make a sale and that is something that sellers absolutely love, because is that why are you selling your products in Etsy? Because you want to sell your product. So whenever they make that sale, that is something that they really love. So we wanted to bring that back into the mobile experience and also take that concept and extrapolate it to the rest of the UI. So making sure that not only is that UI efficient, but it's something that sellers really feel like they can just get in, enjoy it. It's something that feels really good. It's something that, again, they can do really fast and put down and get back to what they were doing.

Christian Beck:

That's a really good example. It reminds me of the MailChimp when they had this Freddie the chimp, this High Five. I don't know if you're familiar. After you do your first campaign and I saw one of their co-founders talking about the decision to do that because when you do your first email campaign is really anxiety. Once you press send, it was like this, like you did it. It sounds very similar. But my question for you as a designer is how do you ensure that things like that get prioritized? Because where we started this conversation is it's not a functional things that it can do, and you can get stuck in the trap of development. "Is this something we can build it? Is this really a functional requirement?"

Christian Beck:

The cha-ching sound, even just saying it over, it was like, "That's not helpful. That doesn't help anybody get their job done." So if you got that successfully prioritized, I'd love to work backwards from and say, how do you even catch certain things that are almost more emotional that you can add value that's outside of a functional area? How does that happen in what you do?

Nick Volpe:

It just goes back to what I was talking about is the research track. I mean, we do a lot of talking to an understanding, trying to understand our sellers and understand their motivation.

Christian Beck:

Tell me what that's like. Do you talk to them on the phone? Are you sending out forms?

Nick Volpe:

Yeah. One of the things that we did, once a month, we either bring a set of buyers or a set of sellers into the office or virtually into the office. What we'll do is we'll set this up on a rotating basis so that any product team can actually come and join that session and they have access to ask sellers pretty much anything. We also do this for buyers, but I'll talk about it from the seller side, because that's what I've been focused on. But we ask them pretty much anything. We'll show them some of the latest things we're working on. Maybe we'll do some more formative research about maybe what their motivations are and try to understand them a little more deeply, and then all the way up to usability research, where we actually let them try out something or try out a prototype and we just talked to them.

Nick Volpe:

We asked them questions. We asked them all the way from how they got started in Etsy and try to really understand, again, their motivations, all the way up to how they might feel about a particular feature or functionality that we're building. So not only do we have product teams, but we open it up to have people actually listen in also according to that and make sure that everybody can hear the voices of our customers. I mean, I think that that is something that's really helpful for us.

Christian Beck:

When you say product teams, what types of roles?

Nick Volpe:

Let's say product team is encompassed of a product manager at the head, alongside a designer, engineers, one or more designers sometimes, and then also some people around the periphery. At Etsy, we usually think about it as those core product teams. And then there are people that are on the periphery that are shared resources across marketing, product marketing, branding, and things like that. Usually, it will start with the core product team that has a hypothesis or something that they want to ask, but usually we'll extend the invite to multiple people that can actually listen in and also participate.

Christian Beck:

You can lie or we can cut the answer if it's bad, but are the engineers coming to these sessions? You send invites, but are people coming?

Nick Volpe:

They are. They are.

Christian Beck:

Really? Okay.

Nick Volpe:

I love to talk about that. Yes, I think one of the great things about Etsy is every piece of the organization is really thinking about the customer. So when it comes to engineers and maybe functions in your organization that you don't normally think of participating in research, we have repeatedly engineers absolutely coming in participating, sometimes directly participating, asking questions, sometimes listening in. Sometimes we have note takers and we think that is... Let's say I don't speak for Etsy, but I am going to say that that is something that we hold very high at Etsy to make sure that everybody can hear that direct voice of the customer. I think that is something that funnels through when they go ahead and develop and things like that.

Christian Beck:

Well, I will say, nobody can see your reaction when I ask that, but the enthusiasm and passion, I don't have a lie detector, but I will tell you at least, you pass the eye test. I ask you skeptically because engineers, they want to code and things like that and it's really easy to put them in that box, but I think it's fantastic that you build that culture to bring that everybody needs to be centered on it. Reflecting on my own time as a designer, I think part of me felt... I almost felt like that was my domain, understanding the research, translating it and designing it. As I reflect back, there was almost something like a mysterious about what I did. I think part of that was maybe making sure I felt valuable.

Christian Beck:

While you're describing it, I'm like, "Oh gosh, could I have done that when I was starting out, like really open it?" Because it's almost like, "Hey, you can come in and hear the same things." That would hurt my ego as a designer like, "No, I'm going to figure out all this stuff and just deliver these designs and you're just going to build them because you think I'm brilliant." But you're like pulling back the curtain and inviting them in. So maybe it's just a problem with me, but I'm just curious, did you ever struggle with that, bringing other people outside the domain whose maybe expertise isn't user research or user-centered design, or was it easy to just invite people in and it makes your conversations easier from that point forward?

Nick Volpe:

I think many designers struggle with that, and that's something that I struggled with earlier in my career. Something that really switched for me was really at Salesforce. When I was working with engineers at Salesforce, some of the problems that we were solving were so, so complicated that me as a designer, I even felt like I was not as qualified. Some of the problems that we were solving were actually more developer things. If you're designing a development interface, then actually I'm not the most qualified at designing it. So, it really made me understand the value of bringing in others into the conversation and other than myself and other than our little core group of product.

Nick Volpe:

At Etsy, I would say that's doubled down on even more. We have a very strong culture of, we talk about it as discovery. So whenever we start a project or usually this happens maybe towards the beginning of a year, we actually bring in everybody into the conversation to really, really actually hone in and really figure out exactly what we're going to work on. So a lot of times we'll have presentations from maybe someone on the analytics side, understanding the data coming back from our customers, presentations from product managers to understand what we're doing on the strategy side. And then everybody's participating and trying to wrap our brains around any particular problem and it definitely extends to pretty much everybody in the organization.

Christian Beck:

I didn't mean to seem skeptical that you did it. It's my own problem, but you're right. I also worked in products, where it's like you can't even... Some of them are just business logic. You can look at as design, but this seems overly complicated. You redesign something and you talk to engineering like, "Well, that's because it integrates with 17 other things that you don't see that you need to understand." It's like, "Ah, man." It's just like, "Maybe I'll just talk to you next time before I have an idea." But that sounds great. You've got it. It seems like you have a lot of different things that you do at Etsy that helps break that down. When you see your role as a designer at Etsy, not just in the general sphere of being a designer as you might explain to your friends and family, but inside of Etsy, with this team approach, what is your role? How do you see? What's the value that you bring ultimately to that team role on the seller side?

Nick Volpe:

As a designer, as I progress in my career, I think I asked that question more and more every day to be real honest and not in a, "What am I doing?" Because my calendar is very filled and I'm doing a lot of things, but it seemed a lot more clear cut when I was on a team doing the designs and then passing the designs and what have you. But as I started progressing my career and thinking about Etsy, I think we as designers, we are really the nexus of a lot of those other functions because we have that power of turning a lot of those things or a lot of those problems into something that is able to be understood, oftentimes visual, but also not always visual. I think that me constantly going in between these different functions and trying to understand everyone's perspective, whether it's putting it into a framework or putting it into a visual, putting it into something that can be codified and understood by multiple parties, I think that is really the job of a designer.

Christian Beck:

We're back with the one and only Mike Hardy from Etsy to help us recap some of these Etsy episodes. In the first episode, we heard from Heather Campbell, who's a product manager on the buyer side of Etsy. So if you want to go buy something on Etsy, that's the person that connecting that experience. Now we're going to switch over to the other side because we kicked this off saying what's interesting. I would say unique. There are other marketplaces, but I think Etsy is very different. I want to call it unusual, by the way, Mike, because that's the right word to use. I'm trying to bring that invoke because everybody overuses unique. It can't be unique. There's other market. But every time I say unusual, I don't know, you tell me. Does unusual have a negative connotation to you?

Mike Hardy:

I don't think unusual has a negative connotation. If you've been keeping your eyes on the interwebs, everyone's talking about Tubby nowadays. You usually catch [crosstalk 00:22:27].

Christian Beck:

Well, wait. Wait. What? I am not on the interwebs.

Mike Hardy:

You're not on the interwebs.

Christian Beck:

What did you just say?

Mike Hardy:

Yeah, Tubby or La Tube. I think I've pronounced that the correct way. So things that millennials that Gen Z might think is a little dated or out of the mainstream. I think that Etsy is that and so much more. Unusual definitely fits. You just have a variety of different things for variety of different interests. It's equally as diverse medium on the seller side of the house. People were making some really cool stuff that's out there. So yeah, not unusual is not bad.

Christian Beck:

Okay. Cool. So Etsy is unusual in that way. I think the creativity that you all, I think, foster is fantastic. And so, on the one side, we've already covered with Heather, who is on the buyer side, who are sort of like, you don't know what they want to go find out. Sometimes they don't always know. Now we're going to talk to, or now we're going to talk about Nick Volpe who covered what it's like designing for the seller side. The first thing that I think is important to note here is how you design for the customer's customer. So tell me what that means to you and help us translate what Nick said to other people building product when you talk about a customer's customer.

Mike Hardy:

A lot of things that you'll hear are a lot of things that Nick really described. He was talking about making tools that help a seller efficiently run their business to where they can be in the experience in the product, do it as they need to do, list their items, sell them, promote them, place them, and then get back to the thing that they really care about doing, which is making really unique handmade goods or selling their vintage items, or just expressing yourself creatively for sale on Etsy. So, when Nick talks about design for a customer's customer, we're just an intermediary. We facilitate that relationship that that seller has with the buyer and they're making the tools to help seller earn a living, and then also help us earn a living as well. So, that's what I understood from Nick's designing for the customer's customer. We're thinking about both the seller and the buyer together and figuring out what's the right thing to prioritize and really give value to build them.

Christian Beck:

It feels like there's almost like this invisible balance that exists on a marketplace. I don't know. Let me play this out. You could lean too hard on the supporting sellers and it becomes a bad experience for the buyer because the tools, the things you do to help someone make money might be counter to what a buyer wants. Or you could swing too hard on the buyers side and support things that are just too discovery-oriented and then you're probably realizing that, "Oh shoot, some of those changes we made have caused our sellers to make less money." So, how do you on the design team balance that almost invisible, I guess, seesaw?

Mike Hardy:

We heard in the first episode with Heather talking about the role of experimentation, Nick talks quite a bit about experimentation as well to make sure that we're not creating those moments of calamity to where something is made for a seller that really gets in the way of what a buyer is trying to achieve and then also vice versa. So, the way that we really do that from design is really working very closely with our other design partners, so folks from product marketing, folks from UX writing, folks who were coming from the marketing sides of the house, and then definitely research.

Mike Hardy:

I think what's interesting about the research team is that they are their own independent unit. They do both market analysis and understanding that trends are going on in the world and they also help us do product research as well. So the way we really stay balanced is by leveraging those partners, asking them really sharp and smart questions, taking in those insights, and really making sure that we're bringing them to the table anytime we get ready to make a change in the product or even do something new.

Christian Beck:

Yeah, that reminds me of when he was talking about those learning labs that you all had, which I assume is pre-COVID where you brought sellers into the office. I love that concept.

Mike Hardy:

Yeah, they still happen. Learning labs still happen. They're just now virtual, where we're still bringing us those sellers and we've been bringing buyers too. Something that I've seen lately is that we'll find one-off sellers who just have a really compelling story to see what their take is on something that we happen to be working on or to just hear something that we haven't before. So those learning labs definitely still occur. I think Nick does a really good job in unpacking what those learning labs do for us and I think he also speak to how we're sharing that knowledge out to other teams here at Etsy.

Christian Beck:

Thinking back to Nick's interview, from the design perspective, you and I are both designers, so you'll know where I come from with this, in design in general, there's almost this understating that you have to embrace the unknowable. You just don't get it. Science is this thing where you run experiments to figure out the cause of something, isolate things. Eventually, you run enough experience to figure out the answer. But it's interesting as I think about when you're talking about experimentation at Etsy, and I hear you talk about design that I haven't heard you or anybody in the interview say, "We're doing experiments to figure out the answer."

Christian Beck:

It almost feels like you're doing experiments because there's no one unknowable thing, or you may run experiments for a couple of weeks and think, "Okay. I think I have a good idea." You go do that. It works for a week, and then I don't know, something massive happens, like masks become popular because there's a pandemic and it throws it off. So, I don't know what the question is, other than just like throwing that out there that this experimentation almost seems like you all embrace that there's no full way to get to a right answer. Would you agree? Does that make any sense?

Mike Hardy:

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think Nick speaks to this quite a bit about just the level of autonomy that he does have as a designer. He does talk a little bit about his experience on working on our seller app or something that we call Sell on Etsy and how we took a different take on what that app needed to be. Which features do we have that aren't in the web that we want to include inside that mobile application? That's a newish space. We do have information. We do have data on that. We know reasonably what sellers are looking for, but we haven't quite done it like this.

Mike Hardy:

So, I think it's accurate to say that there's no one best answer that we can know through experimentation, but we know that we can know something more than what we do at that particular moment. So that's why we test and that's why we get to that rigor. That's why we experiment in order to make sure that we're making quality product for people who happen to be using them, but it's not to get a perfect a degree of truth out of it, not at all.

Christian Beck:

So, one last follow-up question on that, how do you know as a designer that you've designed something well? If you experiment and you almost don't know if it's going to work and I design something, how do you have any confidence that you're doing well as a designer when there's that much change and uncertainty?

Mike Hardy:

I think Etsy product and also product design does follow a lot of the best practices that you'll see it in product company. Yes, we do have OKRs. Yes, we know that those Os more or less stay the same or those KRs can shift and change. So, we are applying a lot of the agile approaches that you'll commonly see on the test and learn approach, the fail-fast approach if we really try to push a lot of those key results to the limit and say, "Hey, what breaks it? If it does break it, is there a different goal that we actually need to go towards? What's the right hypothesis that we need to get to? How can we know and how can we use what we've already failed on to really inform our next best step is?" So as you know, go to enough reps, you talk to enough people, you run enough of those experiments to give yourself some confidence and then you take it out the rest of the way.

Christian Beck:

Awesome. That makes a lot of sense. So recap, so far, we talked to Heather Campbell, PM on the buyer side. We've now talked to Nick Volpe, designer. On the seller side, I'm going to just say that... Yeah. So next episode, we're going to be talking to the head of product design to just wrap all this stuff.

Meghan Pfeifer:

I'm Meghan.

Christian Beck:

And I'm Christian, and this is Better-

Meghan Pfeifer:

And this is-

Christian Beck:

... Product.

Meghan Pfeifer:

... Better Product.

Christian Beck:

Perfect.

Meghan Pfeifer:

Nailed it.