Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…We call them guiding principles at Etsy. We have a few of them, and I won't go through all of them, but just to give you a flavor, one of them is around digging deeper, and that really speaks to aiming to really understand the why behind a change, to really push on the insights that we're learning through qual or quant research, or other inputs that we might be looking at in order to make the best decision possible with the information we have at the time. Another example of a principle is minimizing waste. It aligns with how we think about product development, which is, we want to know, is the work we're doing adding value to the customer and the business? And so something that isn't working out a lot of times in product development we're wrong. And so being able to say, "No, this is no longer valuable, we need to move on to the next thing," has been something that's served us really well. Ultimately, we are quite a small team. There's just over 2,000 people in the business, and if you then scale back to engineering and product, we're not big. And so we have to be really diligent about how we're investing our time and our resources in order to be successful. Awesome. Okay, so another big moment as an outsider that it feels like Etsy went through is during Covid. There's this huge transition to e-commerce, and I think Etsy was a big beneficiary of that. People wanting to buy more stuff online, go to stores less. And it feels like it was a huge accelerant for the business. I'm curious just what that experience was like leading the product team through that. It was quite wild, I'll say that. And to be more specific, as many or all of us did in probably the world of tech at least, we went home not knowing what the next weeks or weeks as we thought would bring, turns out years. But when the CDC mandated face masks in, I think it was early April 2020, that's when essentially we went to sleep one day with our typical April traffic, typical April sales, and then it was Black Friday overnight. And in part because nobody knew where to find face masks. Our sellers are incredibly astute business people. And if you had been making wedding dresses, and you know how to sew, and you've got material, and you've got a bit of time, making a mask is quite a simple task. And so we just saw this huge surge of demand, and then supply rising to meet it. And we did something that far as I know we've never done an Etsy's past, which is we put out a call to our sellers to say, "Now's the time. Now's the time to make face masks if you can." And so it felt like this is our time to shine, to really help sellers continue to make sales, to help buyers find this critical item that they were looking for. So it was a very, very exciting couple of weeks while we were kind of adapting to that change. And we were just really... Every day there would be standups. "What's happening? What do we need to change?" I remember distinctly, we were worried about certain sellers not being able to meet the demand that they were seeing. And so we did the old-fashioned thing, of not personally, but we called them and we said, "How are you guys doing? What can we do to help?" And some people said, "We've got this, don't worry. This is squarely in our wheelhouse. We can absolutely meet the supply." And others said, "Actually, we need a little bit of help. We need to take a pause for a moment while we catch up with all these orders, and then we can come back to taking more." [NEW_PARAGRAPH]And so just getting back to good old-fashioned know your customer, what do they need from you at that moment was just a really kind of powerful thing that took away from that time. And then from there, things kept going, and we really worked hard to make sure that the story was not just about face masks for our buyers, that they understood that Etsy's a place for so many different categories and so many different items. And that was then the next phase of the challenge. We got a huge influx of new or reactivated buyers. How do we keep them around? How do we make sure that the product does a little bit more work to retain them, and can really have hooks that bring them back time and again? And so that was kind of the journey that we then went on mid-2020, to probably the subsequent 18 months or so.…

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