Melanie Perkins: commitment

Transcript context

…I want to come back to this closing the loop process. Let's say that you have where you figure out what to build. A lot of your ideas come actually from the community. Talk about just that process and how many of your ideas actually came from your community. Oh, it's one of my favorite things. We've been doing it for years now, and so we get more than a million requests from our community every year and we've got a whole incredible team that then tallies them, breaks them down, and then delivers them to all of our product teams and then those actually get closed. So this year we've closed more than 200 loops, but we know that each one of those things is going to be loved and needed by so many more people that don't bother to actually fill out the request form. So many things from gradient text, like little things like gradient text to really big things like our Sheets product. There's just been countless products. In the early days with our AI products, we didn't release them to teachers because we knew there was a lot of hesitancy for teachers using AI in the classroom. And we got so many requests from teachers saying, "Can I please use this MagicWrite in the classroom?" And so with them we unlocked that and put on safety controls for teachers. And so it's just constant, actually. It's just part of our product process. I think there's two parts to product. One is building the future and towards the mission and the mission pillars as I was saying before. And the other is actually listening to our community and building what they want. And so I think that that's the two core pieces of product in my mind. And the closing the loop comes in so many different forms. There's the explicit asks, and then the other thing that we double down on all the time is user testing and watching people use it. And if people hesitate clicking a button or people don't quite understand how something works, it's amazing to me how you can find 10 random people on the internet and they can give such astute feedback that then is so representative for such a large number of people. I've personally run hundreds if not thousands of user tests myself and it's been deeply embedded in our product teams also. Wow, that must be really stressful for someone looking at a test of Canva, trying to try something when you're in the room.…

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