Intersecting Business Value and Customer Needs with Christina Goldschmidt, Etsy

Episode Transcription

Christina Goldschmidt:

Don't get me wrong. We do launch prototypes and make sure that we are putting things in the world, validating them with user research, et cetera, et cetera. But when you can see that an actual experience moves the mark on one of those KPIs, and it does it better than a previous experiment, you know that that is actually delivering that business value.

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:

If you've been in the digital space for a while-

Meghan Pfeifer:

Some of us longer than others.

Christian Beck:

Okay. Yes, Meghan, I'm an elder millennial or a geriatric, Gen Z. I don't know, whatever the kids call us these days. But where I was going is that if you've been in the digital space for a while, you'll know that product design hasn't always been a thing. In fact, I challenge that it's still finding its way, mainly because when I started my career, 15 years ago, we were called interaction designers, then UX designers, then product designers, and now product designers are trying to figure out what they're doing. So it's a bit challenging to find our way because as design has grown, the oversight of design has grown. Well, back when I started, you didn't necessarily have to worry about visual style. You did interaction design, and didn't have to worry about necessarily what it looked like because you were using styles that was defined by the operating system. Today, product designers have to worry about everything. How is it branded? How are you designing something that people want to use, not just find easy to use? It's just a lot has changed over the last few years.

Meghan Pfeifer:

Yeah. And what I love about this next interview you did is the layers of perspective Christina Goldschmidt has because to your earlier point, the career she has today as a product designer at Etsy, wasn't one that even existed when say I got working in product.

Christina Goldschmidt:

So back in the day, I was like, ooh, I learned how to code. So I learned how to do front-end development. And I was like, I'm going to revolutionize social sciences. And everyone was like, no, social sciences are not ready. So I was like, cool. This internet thing in the mid-90s is blowing up. This is really fun. And I started to do that and to make and put out information, you need to actually design it and make it work and make it look good. And I found out that, oh, I have an eye for design. And that was actually something that became much more interesting to me, than to keep up with all of the fast-changing things that one needed to do in development.

Christina Goldschmidt:

So I basically decided to go get a design degree and still stayed sort of cross-functional. So I had done jobs in front-end development as well, but it was really design where I fell in love and where I felt that I could solve really interesting problems and stay cross-functional and really have this impact and really stay connected to people.

Christian Beck:

Christina went on to take interesting career twists and turns, but ultimately found her way back to design and is now leading a department to scale right along with the growth Etsy is experiencing as the Head of Product Design.

Meghan Pfeifer:

So not to go too off track, but what the listeners don't get to hear is that Christina's degree is actually in anthropology. So Christian, I'm curious, how do you see maybe non-traditional tech backgrounds actually being a valuable asset?

Christian Beck:

Well, I could do an entire podcast episode on the subject because I'm always advocating for the liberal arts and tech. My wife is an anthropologist and I would say I learned a lot from her in design because I really understood the people side of technology, which is really helpful in understanding that when you're designing something in technology, ultimately people are still what matters the most. It can be easy to lose sight of that when you're in tech.

Christian Beck:

So I think that when you have these non-tech backgrounds that are from the outside, you actually come to tech with a really helpful lens that I think every year we wake up more and more to the fact that it is vastly important in tech that people bring different backgrounds to it. And I think anthropology very specifically is amazing because it is the study of people and culture. And that's really one of the most important parts of making great products today. So I think there's a convergence between her background and its impact on how she's leading the design today. So with that, let's hear how she's leading the design team today. Take a listen.

Christina Goldschmidt:

And that convergence is really about helping the team always think about design as impacting business, but also with being truly customer first. So designers are naturally passionate and empathetic, right? And I actually kind of talk about design as being a little bit of a lifestyle career that people choose this career because they have that deep passion that they want to do this job because they are sort of driven to solve problems. And that I think comes also with that anthropology knowledge. So we always have to remind people, you're doing this in service of that customer. And the solution that the designer is always bringing is the solution that is at the intersection of what drives business value and drives a solution that meets the customer's needs. And that's what designers have to constantly think about. And that's really the right solution.

Christina Goldschmidt:

And it's design because it's working within those constraints constantly. If not, it would be art, right? If you were just making something that was just purely aesthetic or just was what you wanted to do. But design really is magic because it's those constraints that fuel us. And so it's my job to really make sure that designers understand the business. So every Wednesday I pull together all of the managers on my team and all of the staff designers and above, and I give them a rundown of what's actually happening across the business. We go through KPIs, we go through, what's actually happening across all of our results. And I even walk through all of the trends that we're getting from the merchandise team. And I actually find a lot of fun because I'm also like, "Hey, here's your shopping guide?"

Christian Beck:

You're actually doing what I love to hear, because I hear people say understanding the business is important. I say that a lot with design myself, I think it's really important, but I love hearing how you actually translate that into something. Out of curiosity, how engaged does your team get? Do they ask questions? How can you tell they're getting it? If that makes sense. Like you say something like, "Do you all understand this? Is it connecting?" How do you figure out whether it's all making sense to them?

Christina Goldschmidt:

So I'm actually told routinely that it's some people's favorite meeting of the week, which is kind of crazy to be told that a business review meeting is your favorite meeting of the week, but it just goes to show that knowledge is power. And I believe in a real dialogue and a transparency. So it's just a 30-minute meeting and I'm actually pulling together all of these reports that come from across the company and actually sort of summarizing it, giving them my hot takes. And then we're able to talk about it and debate about it and have an actual dialogue about it. And because it's not just me talking at them, we're actually having a conversation and able to converse about the thing, I know that they're actually getting it.

Christina Goldschmidt:

There's a summary document that I give them and they're able to ask me questions about it. So I know that people are reading it if they weren't able to be in that meeting. And they'll ask me questions about it. And every once in a while, there's a document that I'll put in there that was sent to me, but they don't have access to. And then they'll ask me, "Hey, can you get me access to this document?" And so if they're actually asking me, "Hey, I'd like to read this thing," maybe it's a research report that was given to me, or it was a new sort of summary of a new trend or something like that, you know that they're engaged because they're actually trying to get access to the data.

Christian Beck:

How do you maybe coach the designers on utilizing that information in their day-to-day?

Christina Goldschmidt:

What's really interesting about Etsy is that we're a two-sided marketplace. And so the dynamics that happen across the marketplace are really important. So when you're thinking about the customers, we have two major types of customers. We have buyers and sellers. And they have different motivations and they affect each other. So specifically during the pandemic, buyers are coming here because they need to get things that they can't necessarily get somewhere else, or they are really looking to celebrate themselves or to double down sort of on Etsy's mission. Right? We are really able to tout things like our mission to go carbon neutral by 2030, which we're really proud of, or we're able to extend and support communities. Like we just recently did this great feature on Gee's Bend, which are these great quilters. And so, to support like a black community of quilters. And so they're able to sort of buy things that are really special and to support with their interests, how they're shopping. And they can do that both for special things or even for everyday items, which is wonderful.

Christina Goldschmidt:

And then you have the sellers who might have lost their jobs in another sector who are coming to Etsy to save their income, or who maybe are actually trying to save their retail shop with a completely different channel. And they need to have an audience of buyers. And that's why they're coming to Etsy because they know that it's there. So, that dynamic across the marketplace is really important. And the best way to coach designers is to have them understand how those metrics work and how everything is working across the marketplace so that they can see when they're working on their small sliver of the larger marketplace, how their work affects everyone else and how it affects those customer dynamics and how it's affecting actually that larger macro environment that's going on in the world right now. And that's, I think what's really important and impactful is that they have to see both the larger view and that smaller view and how to move back and forth and really understand it so that they can make decisions and work cross-functionally to make decisions.

Christian Beck:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'd actually like to even step back and understand, we talked about how business decisions are now focused, maybe how they help impact a designer's work. So step back, I want to talk about Etsy in general. I think anybody in tech would probably be aware that e-commerce has really taken off, I mean, just for the last several years. I think I've first used Etsy maybe a decade ago and it was amazing and you're still here, but in that time, I think e-commerce has taken off a lot. What does that mean for Etsy's business overall?

Christina Goldschmidt:

Etsy's a 16-year-old company, but actually during the pandemic, the entire e-commerce industry advanced by 10 years. The industry like had this great CAGR of equivalency of 10 years of growth.

Christian Beck:

Sorry, a what?

Christina Goldschmidt:

Oh, a CAGR, a compounded annual growth rate.

Christian Beck:

Wow.

Christina Goldschmidt:

Sorry. That's a total-

Christian Beck:

That's like a million dollar acronym right there. I don't think I've heard that. That's great.

Christina Goldschmidt:

Yeah, a CAGR. That's a total business school term. I'm so sorry. Yeah.

Christian Beck:

No, don't be. That's great. I need a new one to throw out there, even if I can't remember what it stands for. It's good. So you said a CAGR is what?

Christina Goldschmidt:

A compounded annual growth rate. So CAGR is basically what's your growth rate from year to year. And so that's what the compounding means, right? So it means that this year I grew more than I grew the year before basically. And so what we're seeing is a massive hockey stick of growth in e-commerce. And so it's accelerated as if we grew 10 years and it actually happened in three months' time. And this is reported by the Department of Commerce, by McKinsey, by Forster. All of these sources are saying that this is what happened when all of these retail stores shut down and everyone had to go buy everything online in early COVID. So you can imagine a company like Etsy experience that growth, just like the rest of e-commerce did.

Christian Beck:

So you have the impact during the pandemic, which I'm sure has had a lot of impact. How do you figure out what it looks like post pandemic? I mean that's, I think the question everybody has, but being e-comm, how do you figure out, well, people are going to maybe stop doing this or are they going to change behaviors? How do you sort of predict and sort of plan around that uncertainty that you might have right now?

Christina Goldschmidt:

We actually just had our earnings call yesterday and we gave guidance for the second quarter, which actually does give some of that reopening flavor to it. And so I can only say just a little bit much about it and in all honesty, I don't know that I'm fully comfortable answering this question, Christian.

Christian Beck:

That's fine. Let's see. I could go... Yeah, I didn't mean for it to be in that way. Let me think of another-

Christina Goldschmidt:

Because it just gives too much speculation for the street. You know what I mean?

Christian Beck:

Yeah. I understand. I'm not used to talking to bigwigs like this in the market. Let's see. What I want to get... Well, looking at your [crosstalk 00:14:04].

Christina Goldschmidt:

I just don't want you to have to cut it later when our PR team says, no.

Christian Beck:

Yeah.

Christina Goldschmidt:

What are you trying to get at because maybe I can help you rephrase the question better so that I can answer?

Christian Beck:

Yeah, that's what I'm looking at. I was just trying to get at sort of the future, like how... It may just not be really easy for you to answer in this context. It's usually, like lately, I would say over the last two months in my podcast, I'm asking people how they're handling this shifting because I'm dealing with it personally as a business level. It's like you had this great year or this bad year, what's real going forward? But for you, it's a little bit deeper because of the public's part. I'm trying to get at some aspect of maybe what Etsy's thinking. Is there a positive way we can just like, what are you thinking about rather than like, what are you expecting and getting to the level of guidance, but more like, what are you all thinking about? What are the things that are interesting to you? Maybe we could go with that lens. Just something forward-looking.

Christina Goldschmidt:

We can stay a little bit more in the present, as opposed to the future. I can answer things about the present. You know what I mean?

Christian Beck:

Okay. So the last 18 months have been really challenging to figure out what's going on. In some ways for e-commerce it's been a huge boon. What are you working on right now? Where's your head at? What are you focused on?

Christina Goldschmidt:

One of the things that I'm focused on is actually, what are we doing in terms of Etsy's culture to make sure that we're able to still continue to work well, because this thing is not really slowing for us, right? So we're still in a lockdown situation in our office. And there was this really interesting article in the New York Times, a couple of weeks ago on languishing. And it's sort of this last year in 2020, everything was really hard and we should all feel really great now and be totally thriving, but yet we all have difficulty getting up in the morning and we're all sort of doing this revenge late night staying up, sort of like to try and get our days back. It's a really interesting article. I highly recommend it.

Christina Goldschmidt:

But it's given like a word to us to say, why are we not doing as great as we want to be right now? And sort of running around with freedom. But that ability to say, I would really like to have much more confidence or be able to keep the team from having all of this deep burnout while we're still trying to get through all of the still busy time, I think is really an important thing to think about right now because we still have a lot of volume. We still have a lot of things on our roadmap and we're still trying to figure all that out. So that's, I think the main focus is what things are we still trying to preserve in our culture? How are we still trying to plan for the future, which is still a lot of work to do, and how to still keep the team motivated?

Christian Beck:

Yeah. It's like, we're not going to get a break from the pandemic. It's like, yes, the pandemic's over, but things are still happening. It's like we just ran a marathon and we just want to relax because we just ran a marathon, but actually the pandemic's like, oh no, no, no, no, no, you still need to keep running. That part might be over, but it's still going on. Yeah. That totally makes sense.

Christian Beck:

So when you think about your team and how you're working, I mean, you're remote, what's been the biggest change as you've now got a year and a half behind you? When you reflect back on that, what's the biggest change that you think, given your long career that you had to make last year as a leader and maybe as a designer on your team?

Christina Goldschmidt:

That's a really great question. I think that I wasn't prepared to go fully remote and grow a team while going fully remote. I have had team members who are fully remote and I've had moments of great growth. I've never had to do all of that all at once. And to actually do that while joining a new job. That was actually a lot of things all at once for me. And Etsy has such a great culture that I wanted to make sure I was preserving and adding to it. And a lot of that culture is really about being transparent and also giving people a lot of agency.

Christina Goldschmidt:

We had talked earlier about that squads model and that actually gives these teams so much agency to move forward as that unit. I didn't want to come in and be a top-down person who said, I have all this business knowledge, and I want to know everything that everyone is doing. I thought it was really important to make sure that we preserved that idea of making sure that teams could continue to do what was so great about Etsy. And also, that never scales, right? When you become very top down, it's the opposite of being able to scale.

Christian Beck:

I was thinking, as you're talking too about, we sort of have done a little bit of that ourselves in our business. And I thought, for me personally, I started realizing how much room for error I'm allowed in person. Like, if I say something wrong and be like, "Oh, I didn't mean it that way," but when it's all remote and I write something by text, I tend to be a very no-frills texter. And I've realized that as I'm using these text tools, I'm like, everything sounds really cold and people are like, "You seem really upset." And I'm like, "No, I just wrote that I need you to do that." Like, "Well, it just seemed really direct." I was like, "If you could have seen my face as I was typing that, you would've realized that." So I feel like that was one of the hard things. It's got to be tough leading, too, that you lose a lot of the goodness you have in person.

Christina Goldschmidt:

Oh, absolutely. Right? That's the thing is if you don't have all of these connections, people, actually, the trust starts to get eroded, unless you can find ways to build them back because you're not getting those moments to be human together. And that was actually the thing that I tried to figure out how to do is how do we get to be human together again so that we can actually solve for those exact moments where, oh, over Slack, you're impersonal or over email you're impersonal. And it might sound arbitrary to a lot of people, but I tried to build in moments of connection, engagement, fun, play, what we actually called product design breather moments, where for a while, we were doing them once every two weeks, which is kind of excessive. And at a certain point, the team were like, "Hey, this is too much." And I was like, "Cool, thanks for telling me."

Christina Goldschmidt:

But where it was like, "All right, what kind of fun do we want to have today?" And it was always optional, right? So if someone was busy, they didn't have to show up. But we would actually have a choice of 15 different things that we could do every two weeks in order to just say, we're going to hang out, we're going to chill out. We're going to do something fun and engaging. And it's work because we have to be connected. And then also things like professional development, I think a lot of people have just been like, oh, I can't go to a conference. I'm going to give up on professional development right now.

Christina Goldschmidt:

And I think now's the time to try and figure out alternative ways to actually go into professional development. Things like how can we do lunch and learns? How can we send someone to a virtual conference, but then have them come and teach that back to the team? How can we try and do as many watch parties as we can? How can we turn things like virtual earnings announcements into actually a watch party for the team? How can we turn any sort of thing into a celebration in order to get some kind of ability to celebrate ourselves, drive connection, support each other? Those kinds of things, I think really matter and drive connectedness.

Christian Beck:

You're right too. I think it takes conscious work to do that on remote, for sure. It just doesn't get to happen naturally. You need, like you said, I love the product design breathers. It feels awkward remote to have to do it, but you have to because you don't really have the same tools available when you're remote. So you talked a little bit about professional growth and the things you're doing with your team. Tell me a little bit more about what types of things you're talking about at the lunch and learns.

Christina Goldschmidt:

We talk about all kinds of different things. So from how to get better at public speaking to how to actually do some of the things that make us great at product design. One of the things that Etsy is really known for is a deep experimentation culture. And it's something that we really look for in anyone who's going to come into Etsy from the outside is, do you have experience in AB testing, multi-variate testing, that kind of thing. And so it is actually something that I think makes working in product design at Etsy really rigorous and hard is that a lot of people don't have deep exposure to that, especially if you haven't come from a e-commerce environment that's used to that kind of optimization or maybe at a tech company that is used to doing that quite a bit.

Christina Goldschmidt:

And so we've actually developed deeper onboarding sessions, lunch and learns all around how we approach experimentation. And we're actually trying to push how we're doing that to get even more broader around it, to think about forms of multi-variate testing and how we can try other forms of hypothesis testing and teaching that across all of product design and even trying to help think about that as a form of how we go out into the world in terms of sharing it as thought leadership.

Christina Goldschmidt:

And one of the other things that we've done is developed how we look at our experiments and have developed this concept of shopability. So we're starting to evaluate just like you would say, oh, how usable is that? We're saying, how shoppable is that? And so looking at all of those experiments and trying to say these are shopability principles that we can determine out of these experiments so that we have sort of a rubric for saying these are great things that we have based on experimentation, that we know work for us and are validated with data that are always sort of grounded in great user experience design as well.

Christian Beck:

Why is experimentation so important at Etsy? How does it tie to the business model to what you're doing as a company?

Christina Goldschmidt:

Experimentation is really great because our business model is tied to making sure that we have confidence in the things that we launch and that they're actually going to move the needle for things like driving conversion rate or helping to make sure that we can bring back customers to drive repeat purchase rate or driving repeat visit rate. So the things that we know are key metrics for driving our business and driving business results and also that help our customers do the things that we know that they are trying to achieve, i.e. they're here on our site to shop, or they really are saying, Etsy has the things for me. So I'm going to keep coming back. That's that frequency or that repeat purchase rate or that repeat visit rate. Those are totally understood by those KPIs.

Christina Goldschmidt:

And so when we do that experimentation, we know that we are hitting those marks. So don't get me wrong. We do launch prototypes and make sure that we are putting things in the world, validating them with user research, et cetera, et cetera. But when you can see that an actual experience moves the mark on one of those KPIs, and it does it better than a previous experiment that that is actually delivering that business value.

Christian Beck:

So we just want to end by learning, what are you most excited about for the rest of the year, both at Etsy or professionally, whatever? What's the most exciting thing that you're looking forward to?

Christina Goldschmidt:

Honestly, I am most looking forward to getting back in the office and having lunch with everyone. And I know that that's around the corner because we all know that we can do that soon. And at Etsy, we like to call things with Etsy in the name. So we have lunch and it's called Eatsy, which is really cute. But Eatsy is awesome. We actually support all kinds of local restaurants and we have them come in and cater lunches. And I can't wait for Eatsy.

Meghan Pfeifer:

To help take the conversation into action, Christian is joined by Mike Hardy, Senior Product Design Manager at Etsy.

Christian Beck:

The interesting thing about that for me, was getting to talk to somebody who's overseeing the leadership aspect of the product design team. And as you and I were talking, Mike, before the show, I think one of the things that stuck out was really the business value design. And what strikes me is that I still hear a lot of designers and still a lot of just people in general and in the tech industry, talking about design still trying to get a seat at the table. And I still think that's true in some industries and some legacy companies, but what Christina almost embodies is the next wave. Okay. There is a seat at the table. I mean, it's very clear the way she's speaking about it, but it doesn't mean that the business value of design goes away. It just means that you're not using it the same way. So I'd love to hear your perspective on that, or tell me your thoughts on how the business value of design sort of is weaved together through Christina's interview.

Mike Hardy:

What I like about Christina's interview is that she, different than the way that the rest of the industry might talk about design, having a seat at the table, she starts with saying that design is a valuable part of the business. And I think her point of view really does resonate and holds weight here at Etsy. She talks quite a bit about the collaborations that we have with product and also engineering and how that relationship starts from the very top going all the way down to the very bottom of the organization. She also talks a lot about squads or our Spotify S Model or our squad model to where squads have a lot of autonomy. So there is a deep relationship and partnership between product design and engineering to actually go and do some really compelling things for Etsy across the board.

Mike Hardy:

What I really admire about her conversation too, is the ways that she's approached operationalizing a design team and growing it and scaling it a little bit before COVID time started, but definitely afterward, seeing the things that she's had to lean into to preserve design culture, and also just to make sure that people feel balanced and feeling like that they're doing their most compelling work, still investing in their careers and doing something that really energizes them day to day.

Christian Beck:

Yeah, that reminds me of something she said that design is a lifestyle career. And what I took that to mean, myself, I never thought of it that way. And if she's quoting someone else, I don't even know. Don't care. It's on the podcast now that she said it. So I'm attributing that to her. What I took from that, I guess the way to look at it is like a passion career, you do design because you really love it. So when I took lifestyle, that's like sort of, some people have jobs, some people have careers and then some people like mix their identity up with their careers. I've always felt that way about design. You call yourself a designer, like you don't work as a designer, or I don't do design for Etsy. I think you would describe yourself by nature, by training, as a designer. And so I think when you were speaking about that, it was reminding me of that quote that it's a lifestyle career. Yeah. I think that seems to really resonate with me.

Mike Hardy:

Absolutely. Christina also goes in a little deeper on what that lifestyle actually is, about how design just has this unique skillset to where we really want to gravitate towards solving problems, really being empathetic to a number of different people and her viewing her job as like saying, all right, here's the data and the information, how can we connect that empathy and an understanding, that problem-solving rigor that you have, and then really aligning that to certain business outcomes and results that we really want to drive?

Mike Hardy:

I think there's actually one interesting anecdote that popped up whenever you were talking about the lifestyle or design being a lifestyle career. Let me say that more cleanly. About design being a lifestyle choice. I heard a conversation with another manager who I'm pretty close with. She was talking about a member of her team saying, "Hey, I want to retire at Etsy. How do I plan that out?" And when you think about the newness of design or at least this version of it, that we all practice, it hasn't been around for very long. So people thinking about designing through retirement is an entirely new conversation, not just for us here, but I feel like it's going to start becoming more of a thing at an industry as well. So yeah, it's just a testament to the team. It's really cool when you have people asking those things.

Christian Beck:

Yeah. No, that is actually pretty phenomenal. I think for me personally, I've always talked about, I'm not going to retire because I love what I do. I'm not actively designing, but I'm connected to it. So I get that. And it is interesting to think about someone talking about that with a large company. You've mentioned this a few times and she's a leader as well, Christina is a leader in how she sort of manages and maintains design culture. So help break that down for me a little bit. What do you mean, or what does it mean at Etsy to perpetuate or strengthen the design culture?

Mike Hardy:

The way I kind of think about culture is what are those partial solutions or those approaches to those things that people see every day from like finding this one design file to understanding how to interpret our design system, to ways to run a great workshop or do a great discovery? There's definitely that aspect of culture, the things that help you get your work delivered, helps you get made and also give you some type of signal on what good actually looks like. I think the other part of culture is making sure that people are balanced, that they have good energy when they're hopping on. We're still in a remote world. It's been taxing. It's been very, very different. And I think culture for us, our culture from, as Christina describes is very much focusing on that too. How do we make sure that people are engaged, feeling sharp, feeling like they're doing something that matters while we're still in a remote world?

Mike Hardy:

So yeah. Christina talks a lot about the hard skills that designers happen to have, how we actually go about supporting that, the knowledge that we want to give through lunch and learns or through knowledge share outs, working with other teams in order to make sure that everybody is working from a similar set of insights to her just straight up and down, holding that weekly meeting to where we all come together to talk about the business, get a good 360 of what's happening so that people can feel like that they're doing their best work. So, yeah, culture, I think, as she describes it is really about that mindset, that skillset and that tool set that you need to be a cohesive and functioning team.

Christian Beck:

I'm glad you brought that up. That was another part that resonated with me was that weekly meeting and as a leader myself, I reflect back and I had a design manager one time tell me to read the financial statements of our company. And I was just like, okay, didn't really get it. I read it. It made no sense to me at all. Never really followed up with me. But now when I look back, I understand what he was trying to do. It was a little bit of a passive approach to get me as a young designer to see the business. And then what I learned from that was, there's so many designers that actually don't understand the business they design for and I realized like, wow, I actually spent several years of my career not fully understanding that.

Christian Beck:

So where I'm getting now with this is what I appreciated from Christina's perspective is it seems that she takes on the responsibility of translating that. So for me, I didn't know what to do with financial reports. I didn't have a business background. I'm just reading and I'm like, okay. I don't understand half these acronyms or what they mean to me. I love that she takes that on. And you said this in one of our past conversations of design as communicators. I think we talked about it with Heather in the product role. But I feel like as a leader in general, you should be tasked with some of those sort of later stage things that you can put together, those insights. It's just hard to make this connection when you're younger. And I love that she takes that on and connects it.

Mike Hardy:

I think I get where you're going there. I mean, you're talking about the designer as a communicator and how she kind of like processes that [crosstalk 00:34:58].

Christian Beck:

And maybe what I'm seeing too, is a path for design expertise. Like, how do you grow as a designer? Well, part of it is actually growing out to figure out how to translate other things into design for your design team. How much does that business part come into play in what you do day-to-day as a design leader or leading other designers yourself?

Mike Hardy:

So Christina mentioned that weekly meeting, but she specifically focused on one part of it, which is just like the merchandise trends. And, over the last year of working at Etsy, that meeting and particularly that section was a way I got to know the marketplace, who our buyers are, who our sellers happen to be, what they're interested in. And it really allowed me to see opportunities in our product, across a lot of our different products for how we can really bring a lot of those to life. So for me, it was seeing a bunch of trending content for DMX and seeing T-shirts and seeing people really going very, very hard for someone that they cared about that had cultural weight and relevance. So it clicked for me pretty quickly in that meeting. I was like, oh, Etsy can be viewed as a mirror for everything that's happening in the world. And this meeting is where I get to go and take a look at it and see what's happening out there.

Christian Beck:

Yeah. And that actually connects to something you mentioned previously about you talking to small business owners and stuff. I'm imagining that helpful perspective almost changes the way you even look at a small business or it inspires a different connection to make. You could have the same conversation with, or without that sort of background data, that contextualizing, but with it you're actually looking at it from yet another lens when you're talking to a small business owner. It's interesting.

Christian Beck:

Well, this has been great having you help recap these episodes, Mike. I appreciate you joining me to help break these episodes down and represent Etsy's design team.

Meghan Pfeifer:

I'm Meghan.

Christian Beck:

And I'm Christian.

Meghan Pfeifer:

And this is Better Product.

Christian Beck:

And this is Better Product.