Episode 265: How Marketplace Teams Decide What to Build
Creating great product organizations takes more than setting roadmaps. It requires clear priorities, shared decision-making, and a strong sense of what makes the business uniquely valuable. In this episode, Melissa Perri brings together insights from three product leaders on how teams can create focus, alignment, and clarity as they scale.
You’ll hear from Kristin Dorsett, Chief Product Officer at Viator at the time, on balancing top-down priorities with bottom-up autonomy and why doing fewer things at once leads to more meaningful progress. Craig Saldanha, Chief Product Officer at Yelp, explains how explicit product principles help teams make better decisions and stay aligned, especially in a two-sided marketplace.
Mauricio Monico reflects on lessons from eBay and Wish, including the risks of copying competitors, the importance of explaining strategy clearly across the organization, and why turnarounds often begin by fixing marketplace fundamentals before chasing growth. Together, these perspectives offer a practical look at how product leaders create alignment without losing adaptability.
You’ll hear us talk about:
Balancing strategy and team autonomy
Kristin Dorsett explains how her organization combines top-down company priorities with team-level ownership. Some teams are aligned to a small number of company-wide big bets, while others are given lightweight charters and room to define their own roadmap. The conversation shows how strategic direction and local autonomy can work together when expectations are clear.
Why doing fewer things leads to better outcomes
A major theme in Kristin’s segment is the discipline of focus. She describes the company’s evolution from trying to pursue dozens of major initiatives at once to narrowing that list down to just three. The result was stronger alignment across departments and better progress on the work that mattered most.
Product principles and marketplace decision-making
Craig Saldanha shares how Yelp codified its product culture into a set of decision-making tenets. He discusses how those principles help teams handle trade-offs, move faster on reversible decisions, and stay thoughtful on harder-to-reverse choices. He also explains how Yelp thinks about marketplace dynamics, consumer and business needs, and the flywheel that drives sustainable growth.
Why companies lose their way when they copy competitors
Mauricio Monico reflects on how eBay struggled when it tried to imitate Amazon instead of leaning into its own value proposition. He also walks through Wish’s turnaround, where the initial focus was not growth but restoring marketplace health through better merchant standards, product quality, and delivery performance. His examples show why clarity, differentiation, and strong fundamentals matter more than reactive strategy.
Episode resources:
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Episode 221: Balancing Strategy and Execution at Scale with Kristin Dorsett: https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking-blog/episode-221-kristin-viator-strategy-experimentation
Episode 162: Product Roadmap: Building a Platform for the Next Decade with Craig Saldanha, Chief Product Officer at Yelp: https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking-blog/2024/3/13/episode-162-product-roadmap-building-a-platform-for-the-next-decade-with-craig-saldanha-chief-product-officer-at-yelp
Episode 158: Turning the Tide with Mauricio Monico’s Lessons from eBay, Facebook, and Google: https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking-blog/2024/2/14/episode-158-turning-the-tide-with-mauricio-monicos-lessons-from-ebay-facebook-and-google
Kristin Dorsett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristindorsett/
Craig Saldanha on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigsaldanha/
Mauricio Monico on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mspmonico/
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Melissa Perri: Creating great products isn't just about features or roadmaps, it's about how organizations think, decide and operate around products. Product thinking explores the systems, leadership and culture behind successful product organizations.
We're bringing together insights from multiple product leaders, pulled from past conversations to explore one shared topic, offering different perspectives and lessons from real world experience.
I'm Melissa Perri, and you're listening to the Product Thinking Podcast, by Product Institute.
Today we're looking at what it takes to create focus, alignment, and clarity inside product organizations. What it really means to decide what matters, how teams should work, and how to make better decisions at scale.
We'll start with Kristen Dorsett, who is Chief Product Officer at Viator at the time. She shares how her team balanced top-down priorities with bottom up exploration and why narrowing down to just a few big bets helped them actually make progress.
Then we'll hear from Craig Saldana, chief Product Officer at Yelp on how product principles help teams make better decisions and stay aligned.
And we'll wrap up with Mauricio Monico who reflects on lessons from eBay and Wish and why companies lose their way when they try to copy competitors instead of focusing on what makes them different. Let's hear it from Kristen.
[00:01:19] Balancing Strategy And Autonomy
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[00:01:19] Melissa Perri: So when you have your teams who are out there experimenting as well and they're running these rapid iterations that you're talking about, and, improving checkout like this, what I found is that sometimes we need to have a strategy that helps point them in the right direction around what to experiment around. How do you set that tone, but also give them enough space to, surface up problems that we might not have known about?
[00:01:42] Kristin Dorsett: So some of it, in our planning cycle, we have two different ways that we prioritize what we're gonna fund.
So, one of them is what we call our big bets, and that is where those are top down mandates of these are the three big problems, like we have three this year. These are the three big problems we wanna try to solve as a company. And then there are certain pods that are pointed at those problem spaces, and then they get to figure out like, how are they gonna do it? And then we have other problems where it's more, it's not one of the big bets of our company, but there are areas that we know we want to fund. And so we basically, we fund a pod and we write a lightweight charter for that pod of, you are here to make logins easier. Then they go and figure out how to do it. And they're driving their own roadmap. So we're a mix of tops down and bottoms up.
[00:02:26] Doing Fewer Things Better
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[00:02:26] Melissa Perri: I see that trap a lot where we try to do way too many big things and then nothing gets done. How did you all come to agreement to focus on less? I imagine it wasn't a, an easy discussion, but what type of...
[00:02:39] Kristin Dorsett: it was a journey over several years. It was where, probably four or five years ago we started doing OKRs at the company level, period. Like we, it used to be very much bottoms up, like every function and team would come up with their own OKRs and they roughly laddered up to a higher level strategy.
But it wasn't always, what wasn't always fully aligned. And so we moved to company level OKRs a few years ago and, but we still then tried to satisfy every, everyone's bottoms up idea of what they wanted to do and so we would have 30 big bets in a year and because we were just trying to make everybody happy.
And then I think we've had enough years, and I think we went from 30 to 14 to I think six maybe. And then now it was like we still didn't make enough progress across the six, so we're gonna do three. And I, everyone had seen enough of that evolution to realize we can't keep trying to do as many things at once.
[00:03:31] Melissa Perri: With that that focus as well, what I've seen is sometimes things that we would like to get done in other departments are just not prioritized. We're not gonna be able to do that. How do you balance that too, as an executive team and talking to other departments on what's the tone in the culture there to, to get people on board with that?
[00:03:49] Kristin Dorsett: On the whole, we're very collaborative and very helpful. And again, like sometimes it's where we're too helpful and we have too much work in progress because we're trying to be helpful and help everybody. But I think it is where, like these big bets, they're not just R&D, they're cross-functional. so it is where every single person in the company knows, okay, we have these three big things that we're trying to do and so any resources that are needed to go after it, that gets first in the pecking order of any project. And the next would be anything, that's what we call a team driven project.
I mean the, prioritization's always hard, but when in a business like ours, marketplace, it's complicated. There's a lot of high ROI opportunities. But we found in the past, we've tried to do too many at once and we didn't have enough progress on any of them. So this year we really committed to doing fewer things and so far so good.
What we seem to be making a lot more progress because we pick fewer things to focus on.
[00:04:42] Melissa Perri: So Kristen walked us through how to balance alignment and autonomy using a mix of top-down direction and team-driven discovery. And one of the biggest takeaways is that focus is a discipline. Trying to do too many things at once, slows everything down, but narrowing in on a few key problems creates the conditions for real progress. But setting priorities is only part of the equation: teams also need a shared way to make decisions as they execute. Next, let's hear from Craig on how product principles can help guide those decisions and keep teams aligned.
[00:05:14] Product Principles For Alignment
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[00:05:14] Craig Saldanha: there were a couple of things that were very helpful, some that I was, that I was forced to do, and then others were just a byproduct of being remote. So the first was I got a chance to shadow our CEO and founder Jeremy. And so I basically shadowed him for, for a couple of weeks, attended all of the meetings he was in and even beyond product, just got a sense for the whole company and how it worked and how, and what actually actually made it tick. And I don't think that that would've been an option had we been in the office, just walking into a meeting. But then this was really helpful just to be a, a, a fly on the wall. And I thought that was super, super interesting.
What was even cooler for for me was because we were a fully remote organization, I knew that there would be folks coming in after me who would need the same kind of context that I was getting as I was. I was dropping up, and so I decided that I had to codify what the product culture was and what the product ethos was, and so I ended up writing five tenets.
That I think are just very core to how we think about Yelp product. What was in, what was interesting was I remembered taking them to Jeremy the first time and I said, Hey, from all of our conversations, I've written down these five tenets, and he kind of read them and he said, maybe one in two make a lot of sense.
Three, I would modify four and five. I actually don't agree with it. And so that set up three months of debates that me and Jeremy. And other, other members of, of the exec team had. And there were these really in-depth debates that we had just based on these five tenets that I had, that I had written. And after three months, we rolled them out to the whole organization and that's the basis of what we use for our decision making.
So ended up being a really positive experience and I got a chance to really tap into what made the organization tick and then put it down in actual words and writing, which is very cool.
[00:07:25] Melissa Perri: What, what are your five tenets?
[00:07:26] Craig Saldanha: I've got them on, on my desk. Let me just pull them up and read them out to you.
So, tenant number one is delighting a two-sided marketplace, which essentially means we acknowledge that we have two different constituencies that have different goals and needs, and while we always look for a win-win. There's some instances where there's gonna be conflict and we have to use extremely high judgment to resolve those.
Two is a decision making. We, we talk about one way doors and two way doors, and we wanna move very quickly to, to two way doors and roll things out and experiment quickly. But when there's a one radar door decision, like a pricing change, which would be hard, hard to roll back. We wanna be very slow and thoughtful and deliberate.
Tenet three is we wanna be consistent, scalable, and selves service. And that just speaks to building an an MVP is great, but we want to build at scale and we want be thinking about that from the time you write down the requirements.
Our four is we want to be diverse and inclusive in our product thinking. So we have a very diverse and inclusive set of consumers and a very diverse and inclusive team. And we wanna be very thoughtful and deliberate about making sure that every feature that we, that we roll out has, has the broad appeal that we want.
And then the last one is think big and learn fast, which essentially means we want to take, take big swings, but we wanna be honest and upfront about the risks and hypotheses and we, we don't want to be scared of failing. When we fail we want to learn, start fast and sunshine it so that other people don't the same mistakes.
[00:09:17] Two-Sided Marketplace Mental Model
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[00:09:17] Melissa Perri: So when you're thinking about building two-sided marketplaces like this as well, we have the businesses on one side and the consumers here.
How do you think about that, that balance? And we, we talked a lot about making the consumer happy. Like how do you also think about what the businesses need since they're, they're usually the ones who are paying, right? Whether they advertise or the revenue, and I know you do ads and stuff through that. How do you balance the two?
[00:09:39] Craig Saldanha: So it's hard and I think the best advice I can give PMs is when you are building a two-sided marketplace, have a clear mental, mental model for how we're going, when to resolve the conflict.
So I've, I've worked in three, two excited marketplaces, at Amazon. I launched an ebook subscription service where the two sides were authors and readers.
I worked in Prime video where the two sides were consumers who, who were watching, and then movie houses were making big movies.
And then now with Yelp, we had. Consumers and local, whole local businesses. And I think as long as you have a clear framework, you'll be okay.
And at Yelp, we always look for the way, so the metric that we optimize on is connections between local businesses and a consumer. At Amazon, we were very focused on consumers. And so we focused on giving them the best experience while being fair to the other side of the marketplace.
And so I think you can build a marketplace as long as you have a clear framework and stay true to how you're going to resolve that, that conflict and bold and requirements.
[00:10:56] Melissa Perri: How did you land on, or how did Yelp land on the connections between the consumers and marketplaces as a, I guess you guys could, would you consider that your one metric that rules them all type thing or the one that you really try to go after the primary metric, or is there a system and how do you get to that?
[00:11:14] Craig Saldanha: That's been Yelp's mission to make quality connections seamlessly between. Consumers and great can create local all businesses. The way it plays into this new sided marketplace is, local businesses come to Yelp because there's a lot of high intent consumers looking to hire businesses. And consumers come to Yelp because there's a lot of local businesses that are, are reviewed and the reviews are deep and broad.
We landed on connections because that's core to making our, our flywheel glow. And I think that's the other big insight that I got as a pm was you need to understand your flywheel before you design your product, because like you're pointing out if you focus on the wrong thing, then you'll, then you'll basically design a product which might be successful in moving the metric that you think like we could have easily focused on, like revenue or, or something else. But we focus on connections, whether it's advertisers or non advertisers, and whether it's a phone call or an email or request a quote or going to their website. We wanna know that we made a meaningful connection between a consumer and a local business. 'cause we know that that's where it gets done.
[00:12:34] Melissa Perri: The flywheel concept, I feel like is incredibly important in product management but not super well understood. Can you walk us through how you would, if you, if you were coming into an organization like you came into Yelp, right? How do you figure out, or how should a product managers right, figure out what their flywheel is? How do they model it so that they can wrap their head around it?
[00:12:55] Craig Saldanha: So product managers are always looking for product market fit. That's that's like core thing that we're taught to look for. And in a two-sided marketplace, a lot of time the product market fit comes from growth. You need to be big enough for one sided side of the marketplace to attract the other side of the marketplace.
And so I think of the flywheel as: what is the mechanism that's going to deliver sustainable growth over time? And that's how we think about product initiatives, to drive the flywheel. So we think of a flywheel as self sustaining growth and we think of the product levers that will help guide that growth. And that's how we come up with a two-sided market roadmap.
[00:13:43] Melissa Perri: Okay, so for Yelp, you, you've got your, your growth metrics is trying to make those connections. Like more businesses, more consumers on the platform. The more you can do that, those connections is what people keep coming back to. How do you think about the product levers connecting that?
[00:13:58] Craig Saldanha: Yeah, so just to start, we, we think about both sides is there, as the marketplace. So for a consumer, we think about the needs that they have to satisfy to make a connection. And if you boil it down to the very basics, I think most consumers, when they're thinking about connecting with a a local business, they have three basic partners.
The first is quality. Whether the quality through the quality of the service doesn't matter. They think about quality first.
Two is price. Everybody wants to know how much they're paying. And three is timing. If it's a restaurant, am I gonna get a reservation? Am I gonna have to wait? Can I eat when I want to eat? If it's a pro, is this an emergency job? They have to get it done now to check, can I read et cetera. So we think about how do we give them all of the information with the least amount of fiction to adjust their questions on quality, price and time.
And on the pro side or local businesses, what they have told us what they're looking for in a quality lead is high intent. So is this person really interested in connecting with with a local, local business and service area? Are they in my service area? Am I a same city? Do I provide the type of service they're paying for? And so our product is really focused on taking both sides of that marketplace. Taking the consumer's needs, taking the business needs, and essentially matching them.
And I think, that's what we do.
[00:15:31] Melissa Perri: The part that I love about you explaining this is that it really all goes back down to deeply understanding your customers on both sides of this marketplace.
Craig just showed us how powerful it can be to make product thinking explicit. When teams have a shared framework for how to make decisions and navigate trade-offs, they can move faster and stay aligned even in complex environments. But even with strong principles and clear focus, organizations can still struggle if they lose sight of what makes them unique. For our final perspective, let's hear from Mauricio on how that plays out in practice.
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[00:16:34] The Cost Of Copying Competitors
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[00:16:34] Melissa Perri: eBay's a really good example because I think they were probably one of the first companies to start to feel that pressure of the competition coming out there. And you and I were talking a little bit about how when you were there, they were going through a turnaround. Can you talk us a little bit through what was happening at eBay at the time? Why were they turning around? What were the pressures there?
[00:16:54] Mauricio Monico: Yeah, of course. So there was, there were a few things happening at that time. EBay was like the darling of Wall Street's around 2004 or so. That's around the time I joined. Like stocks are growing like crazy. The company was growing like crazy and there was a little bit more pressure, i'll grow even a little bit more and. Well, we have, we're seeing Amazon on the side and kind of seeing then as like this bookstore that's unprofitable day in and day out and really ignoring them, right? I to the point that we couldn't anymore and what I saw was very much this, which is, and again, I was a lonely PM at that point.
Not very, involved in the strategies of the company. But the view that I had at that point is that, hey, we saw a strategy that works really well. We need to figure out a way to literally copy what they're doing and do the same thing. It took a while for everybody to understand that, hey, like we have an actual different value proposition, right?
We're not Amazon. We're not gonna be Amazon if you try to be Amazon we're just a few billion dollars behind all the infrastructure investments that they have done over time, right? And we needed to kind of focus on what are the verticals that actually works for us. Is it, are we a mobile first or not, uh, environment. By the way, mobile is a huge driver for eBay to kind of finish the turnaround. And the focus on the right verticals, the right inventory, and how you're buying the right inventory, rather than just trying to copy the warehouse ecosystem that the Amazon had was key to, to get eBay into the right track.
[00:18:26] Melissa Perri: So when you were a product manager at eBay, right, you're not making these choices, you're hearing about them, you're observing, like what was your, what was your take on how things were happening? What do you think they did well to communicate? What do you think they, they may not have done so well to communicate and how did you kind of perceive it playing out?
[00:18:44] Mauricio Monico: Yeah, so it, it's interesting because we, when you there, just listening to like our strategies, our priorities, and here's what we're gonna do and we're gonna invest on this warehousing system that we're gonna do some shipping coming from all products coming from China. And on the end of the day, after all the investments, if you actually stop and think about it, like when you're listening to that story, you see, okay, so we're gonna do all that.
And then we're assuming that when Amazon is gonna stay as exactly as they are right now, and then two, when we finish this, we're gonna be a little bit worse than Amazon, right? So we're not actually competing on not bringing our value to it. So a lot of the times we you get that feeling that people if they're not explaining themselves well, 'cause they probably they're much more senior than I was at that point, they probably have their reasonings. But what you take away is like you people that are like down to that level, they're looking at the basic, like they're basically looking from a consumer perspective, right? And trying to understand how does that strategy make any sense? Right?
And if you can't explain that, if you can explain why the priorities for this year versus the priorities of last year, and why we're investing on the consumer selling versus the business seller now, why this whole thing is connected to the turnaround and why it's important to do this first, and then the second thing the next, people just assume that you don't know what you're talking about.
And there, there was that huge assumption, especially in the world of changing CEOs. We went from Meg to I think it was Devin at that point. And you still try to kind of create some trust in that leadership and you just can't connect. So it's very important to kind of think about like without the knowledge that you have all the strategic meetings, you have all the advisors, you have received information from all the different competitive analysis that your team has done, why in a way that the lowest level PM can actually understand and therefore optimize to the same thing that you're optimizing.
[00:20:41] Fixing Marketplace Fundamentals
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[00:20:41] Melissa Perri: So with wish when you came in there, what was the situation there and what type of turnaround did you have to do?
[00:20:46] Mauricio Monico: Yeah, so Wish is a very interesting place. 'cause I actually, long time ago I used Wish at one point like I'm not the demographics for Wish, like they're basically. The best way to think about this, that we have very low prices suit on products that are usually about your passions, about your hobbies.
They're not products you need, they're products you like to have, right? They could be a bunch of guides for your kitchen. They could be you like fishing. They do the better gadgets, or fishing or pizza baking and things like this, right? So, wish was in a situation that they had grown, especially through COVID.
But they grew in a little bit unsustainable way. Which meant that, which the growth, our time to door became very effective. Like we're bringing those things from across the world and it takes a little while. We didn't scale our logistics with the growth that we had. We also did not scale our ability to grow our merchants.
And our merchants grew uncontrollable. Which then caused a meme. I don't know if you ever saw the meme on the internet, which is the meme that, what I bought on Wish and what actually got from Wish, and it was usually a joke or something extremely different was not quite that bad, but it was not great tea, right?
And also the perception that you're paying more for shipping and sometimes reality, honestly, you're paying more for shipping than you're paying for the products itself, right? So, so, when you look into that company over the growth that they have gone through, you look internally, look at the product, look at the customer feedback, look at your xr. The problems are very obvious.
And also the thing that, that's interesting we talked about competitors. At the time that I joined the macroeconomics was actually not that bad. Digital ads, which it was starting to kind of get expensive, which means a problem for wish, which, you know, when you have, when you're selling very low price stipends and it takes so much to bring up a user to your site, that can be a problem.
And but as far as competition goes, you think of Amazon, you think of eBay, you think of others. Yes, they're e-commerce sites, their marketplaces as well, but they were not truly competitors before, not making decisions between which, and Amazon. Right? They had wish, had its own demographics. It's a little bit older a little bit more regional, even though we're in at that point, I think a hundred different countries.
Like our demographics was actually very separated. We not had to have to Amazon, like very different value propositions. Very different levels of commodities that, that you would see. And also very different levels of products, right? Those products usually don't do well on Amazon. Amazon is a very much, you search for a product, you need, you wanna get this, like this earbud site you're gonna search for it for. At Wish it's gonna be things that you didn't even know existed, right? It's a new product that in the past, it would've take years of go-to market funding to kind of make it mainstream. But I wish, like we actually had a motto to help you discover products. And because we knew your interests, we were able to say, Hey you're gonna this product, I'm gonna put it in front of you.
And, the more people bought it and the feedback lift grew that product that shifted got ward patients and so forth. But it was a very, like the scopey based experience that the region didn't compete against anyone. So the, you look at Ali Express, for example, very similar types of products, very similar logistics issues.
But they were also very much like eBay, very search driven. They're like, we're the only ones playing at discovery shopping at that point. So at that time it was clear that the problem for wish, like the turnaround for which was like we didn't pay attention to the basics of marketplace. We need to put some health into it and we need to kind of like basically save our brand reation from the mistakes that were made in the past.
Right? And this was going to, how do we make sure that we're vetting our merchants? Like the first thing that I did when I joined the company, like two weeks in, we closed the marketplace from new merchants and we said, we're only gonna, we're gonna do invitation only. That basically means that business development team is gonna bring merchants.
They have vetted and they're very like, confident about them. And we introduced a bunch of capabilities to say how we're gonna know who the customers are, making sure that they're fully identified, introducing merchant risk, introducing seller standards, and what are the rules of the game? Meaning we wanted people to, we want 'em purchase to ship their product in less than 24 hours if you don't ship a product. And the user never receives that product here at the penalties. It's, the product is significantly not as described here at the penalties. And we introduce stylish standards into the ecosystem.
We really focus on that very first year on the three primary problems, product quality being the first one. The second one would be pipe to door. In some places and on average it would take almost a month to give people their products. Once we introduce the ship to product within 24 hours, and we introduced a lot of innovation, our warehouses, combine those products and send those products to the final customer.
We took that 28 days, 30 days down to 10 days in some places, and 15 days to the majority of our markets. And in some markets in which like, imports, customs is like very complex like Brazil around the 20 something days, right? So it, it was very much a what are the core issues of the company and can we revive it from itself?
So we basically stopped trying to do a bunch of growth, like it was not a growth-minded place. Was very much. Issues we have to fix in order to be able to continue to grow and retain the users you're gonna acquire through that.
[00:26:25] From Stabilization To Growth
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[00:26:25] Melissa Perri: That's interesting. So it feels like to me when we were talking about Indigo, that was very much like a business model shift. Wish feels more like, "the thing we were doing was working, but we kind of overextended ourselves and we didn't we didn't focus on some of the things that was gonna help us win. So we were declining because of it. And instead we need to really drill down on here's the strategy that's gonna help us win. And just focus there instead of spreading ourselves too thin".
[00:26:52] Mauricio Monico: That's episode one of wish. That's year one. They're a hundred percent right. And year one, it's exactly that. We did this and it was actually work. We saw the improvements on N-P-S-N-P-S went from minus four to 36, right? Our refund rates, I don't think I can quote the numbers 'cause we're a public company, but it went from very high to below industry standards. It, it was like ridiculously high to below industry standards. And obviously like we could see retention moving in the right direction, right? With the improvements that we're making, we could see our average transaction values, like the number of products on a basket, people actually giving it the chance and buying multiple products from us and not seeing shipping as an issue anymore. Because now we have this flat rate shipping that allows you to buy as many products as you want for one flat fee, right?
And you could see that moving and they got into phase two. Which is when we actually started to have very, very heavy competition. At that point, I think the best way to look into data deck were playing alone on a initially small market, nobody cared. The markets started to grow as their market grew, other players started to kind of do very, very similar things.
And what we, what we saw at that point is that just doing exactly what we're doing and by just being better than we were before, is definitely not gonna do it anymore. We needed to figure out ways of actually doing, providing a value proposition that did not rely purely on being the cheapest thing on the internet.
And that's the, that's the realization that, hey, if we're gonna have a competitor like this who is paying as much as they do, we're gonna lose market share continuously to the point that it's not sustainable anymore. We need to kind of figure out a way to have a differentiate value proposition, right?
And that's the journey that we're in right now, which is, uh, really focused on not just so much like you need this product or you discover this product that you didn't even know existed, but more focusing into your interests, your desires, your hobbies, and connecting that into a much richer experience of all the products that come together to make that reality.
And, and having the right content, the right videos, the right text, every media that's needed for you to understand why you're buying what you're buying and, and the richness associated with that. Um, you know, if you are into espresso making, like what are all the different tools to do the distribution and all that good stuff or, or whatever your hobby is?
Uh, we'll, we're, we've built models that no longer just rank the right product for you, but models that actually understands their interests and actually rank the right basket for you, right? So that you can, can have a much more cater experience.
[00:29:34] Melissa Perri: That's it for today. today. Hopefully this episode gave you a clearer picture of what it takes to create focus and alignment in product organizations. If you wanna hear the full conversations, check out episodes 221, 162 and 158, and if you're looking to grow as a product manager or level up, how your team works head over to Product Institute to learn more about our programs and resources.
One last thing before we go. I wanna recommend a tool I use every day called Granola. It's an AI powered notepad for meetings that helps capture notes and decisions automatically without interrupting your flow. You can get three months free on any paid plan at granola.ai/product institute.
Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back with another episode soon, sharing practical insights from across the product world.
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