Nickey Skarstad: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, let's get into it. Where'd you go next? So after seven years at Etsy, I was kind of getting the itch to try something new. When I took a step back and was like, all right, what do I want to do next? I really loved the marketplace component at Etsy. And I don't know if this is just says something about my personality, or actually probably your personality too, is marketplace product is really hard, right? You have this constant balancing of both buyer and seller sides or both sides of the marketplace. And I really liked that. And it was something that I was good at. And so I was like, all right, where else could I go that's interesting or having a moment? And I was like, Airbnb. Has to be Airbnb. I was a huge fan of their product. They were also post-product market fit. But sniffed around, ended up basically getting an opportunity to join the experiences team. And I joined that team when the product had just launched. So they had done sort of their early thinking, the existential thinking. Had a brand new product in market, and then I joined the team. And so I was the first boots on the ground product manager, and really helped that team figure out how do we get product market fit? And then how do we start to think about how to scale it, which was, you can imagine, experiences is interesting because it is a very nuanced product in that, and this is similar to Airbnb if you work on homes as well, but part of it is building the digital experience that someone will interact with when they're booking an Airbnb experience. And the other part is actually influencing the live event experience that you will experience when you actually join an event or an experience. And I think that layer of abstraction for me was really fascinating, and something I've learned a ton about is it's not just influencing the digital product, but it's actually the consumer experience when their boots around the ground. And that is another layer of complexity. And so that was super fun. I was there for about, I think, a little over two and a half years. Started as a PM. I think I got promoted a couple times. Left as senior product lead, I believe was my title. And forever grateful for that experience because I learned a ton about product market fit and also product quality. Is there anything else you took away from that experience? Because I was at Airbnb at the same time. We never really got to work together. But I just heard amazing things about you on the experiences team. And experiences was a wild ride, from what I understand. Is there anything that you took away from that experience that kind of has stuck with you as a PM?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.