Episode 265: How Marketplace Teams Decide What to Build

Summary

Product Thinking Podcast: Episode 265

How Marketplace Teams Decide What to Build

Host: Melissa Perri
Date: March 25, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Product Thinking focuses on how top product leaders in marketplace organizations drive focus, alignment, and effective decision-making at scale. Drawing on the experiences of Kristin Dorsett (Chief Product Officer at Viator), Craig Saldanha (Chief Product Officer at Yelp), and Mauricio Monico (formerly of eBay and Wish), the episode explores the tension between top-down and bottom-up strategy, the power of explicit product principles, and the dangers of losing differentiation by copying competitors. Melissa Perri threads these conversations together, surfacing strategies to help product teams prioritize what matters most—and avoid common organizational pitfalls.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Balancing Top-Down Focus & Bottom-Up Discovery (Kristin Dorsett, Viator)

Main Insight: Sustainable progress in product orgs comes from narrowing focus to a few big bets while empowering teams to discover and execute.

• Two-pronged planning approach: Viator identifies a small set of company-level “big bets” (top-down) and complements them with team-driven charters (bottom-up), allowing for organic discovery and experimentation.
  • “Some of it in our planning cycle we have two different ways that we prioritize what we're going to fund. So one of them is what we call our big bets ... Then we have other problems ... we write a lightweight charter for that pod ... and they're driving their own roadmap." – Kristin Dorsett [01:42]
• Evolving to fewer, better-aligned priorities: Viator moved from a fragmented approach (30+ “big bets” annually) to only 3 core company-wide initiatives, learning that excessive priority dilution led to lack of progress.
  • “We would have 30 big bets in a year because we were just trying to make everybody happy ... And then now it was like we still didn't make enough progress across the six. So we're going to do three.” – Kristin Dorsett [02:39]
• Cross-functional collaboration and prioritization: “Big bets” transcend just product/engineering, securing cross-company alignment and resource allocation.
  • "Every single person in the company knows, okay, we have these three big things that we're trying to do ... any resources that are needed to go after it, that gets first in the pecking order of any project." – Kristin Dorsett [03:49]
• Memorable Melissa Perri takeaway:
  • “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.” – Melissa Perri [04:42]

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2. Codifying Product Principles for Better Decisions (Craig Saldanha, Yelp)

Main Insight: Clear, documented product principles allow distributed teams to move fast, resolve trade-offs, and stay aligned—especially in marketplaces.

• Developing product ethos: Craig shadowed Yelp’s CEO to learn organizational DNA, eventually proposing 5 product tenets, which sparked months of leadership debate and alignment before organization-wide rollout.
  • "I decided that I had to codify what the product culture was ... After three months, we rolled them out to the whole organization and that's the basis of what we use for our decision making." – Craig Saldanha [05:14]
• Yelp’s Five Product Tenets [07:28]:
  1. Delighting a two-sided marketplace: Serve both consumers and local businesses, recognizing their occasionally conflicting interests.
  2. Thoughtful decision making: Move quickly on reversible (“two-way door”) decisions, be cautious on irreversible (“one-way door”) choices.
  3. Build at scale: Move beyond MVPs to scalable, robust solutions.
  4. Diversity & inclusion: Ensure products and teams reflect their diverse user base.
  5. Think big, learn fast: Take bold swings, embrace fast learning from failure.
• Resolving two-sided marketplace trade-offs:
  • “Have a clear mental model for how you're going to resolve a conflict ... As long as you have a clear framework, you'll be okay.” – Craig Saldanha [09:34]
• Single unifying metric (connections): Yelp focuses on “connections between consumers and local businesses” to drive their marketplace flywheel and avoid metric myopia.
  • “We landed on connections because that's core to making our flywheel go ... if you focus on the wrong thing, then you basically design a product which might be successful in moving the metric that you think.” – Craig Saldanha [11:06]
• Understanding the marketplace flywheel: Self-sustaining growth comes from satisfying both customer and business needs—e.g., quality, price, timing for consumers and high-intent leads for businesses.
  • “A flywheel is what is the mechanism that's going to deliver sustainable growth over time ... We think of the product levers that will help drive that growth.” – Craig Saldanha [12:45]
• Consumer and business requirements:
  • For consumers: 1) quality, 2) price, 3) timing
  • For businesses: high-intent, location, and fit

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3. The Dangers of Imitation and the Power of Differentiation (Mauricio Monico, eBay & Wish)

Main Insight: Marketplace success hinges on authenticity and focus—companies that copy competitors or lose sight of their unique strengths stagnate or decline.

Lessons from eBay’s Failed Attempt to Imitate Amazon

• eBay’s strategic misstep: In the mid-2000s, eBay tried to directly copy Amazon’s model (including large warehousing and shipping efforts), failing to recognize the infrastructure disadvantage and fundamental differences in value proposition.
  • "We saw a strategy that worked really well. We need to figure out a way to literally copy what they're doing and do the same thing." – Mauricio Monico [17:29]
  • “If we try to be Amazon, we're just a few billion dollars behind all the infrastructure investments that they have done over time.” – Mauricio Monico [17:30]
• Communication pitfalls: Leaders failed to communicate the rationale behind shifting priorities, leading to employee confusion and mistrust.
  • “If you can't explain why the priorities for this year versus the priorities of last year ... people just assume that you don't know what you're talking about.” – Mauricio Monico [19:32]
• Takeaway: Authentic focus and transparency are critical—a product strategy only works if the whole organization can understand and execute against it.

Wish: Fixing the Basics, Rediscovering the Differentiator

• Wish’s turnaround:
  • Phase 1: Address foundational problems—product quality, shipping time, merchant reliability—before chasing growth.
    • Closed the marketplace to new vendors, implemented strict standards, cut delivery times, and introduced bundled shipping.
    • "The first thing that I did when I joined the company: ... we closed the marketplace from new merchants ... We introduced merchant risk, introducing seller standards ... and we really focus on that very first year on the three primary problems." – Mauricio Monico [24:21]
    • Saw tangible improvements: NPS went from negative to positive, refund rates plummeted, customer retention up.
  • Phase 2: As competition intensified, Wish realized it could not rely only on price; they focused on their unique discovery-driven, interest-based shopping experience to create differentiated, rich user journeys.
    • “…just being better than we were before is definitely not going to do it anymore. ... We needed to figure out a way to have a differentiated value proposition.” – Mauricio Monico [27:19]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Kristin Dorsett:
  • “Focus is a discipline.” [04:42]
  • “We went from 30 to 14 to … three [big bets]. Everyone had seen enough of that evolution to realize we can't keep trying to do as many things at once.” [02:39]
• Craig Saldanha:
  • “Have a clear mental model for how you’re going to resolve a conflict [in two-sided marketplaces]. As long as you have a clear framework, you’ll be okay.” [09:34]
  • “You need to understand your flywheel before you design your product.” [11:06]
  • "Take big swings but ... don't be scared of failing. When we fail, we want to learn something fast and sunshine it so that other people don't make the same mistakes." [07:28]
• Mauricio Monico:
  • “If we try to be Amazon, we're just a few billion dollars behind all the infrastructure investments that they have done over time.” [17:30]
  • “We didn’t pay attention to the basics of marketplace. ... We need to kind of basically save our brand reputation from the mistakes that were made in the past.” [24:21]
  • "We needed to figure out a way to have a differentiated value proposition." [27:19]

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Timestamps for Core Segments

• [00:00–01:42] Episode framing and Kristen Dorsett intro
• [01:42–04:42] Viator: Balancing big bets and team discovery
• [05:14–09:11] Yelp: Crafting and debating product principles
• [09:11–15:18] Yelp: Managing two-sided trade-offs, unifying metric, and flywheel
• [16:40–20:27] eBay: Losing the path by copying Amazon
• [20:32–29:18] Wish: From scaling pains to refocusing on discovery and differentiation

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Key Takeaways for Product Leaders

• Narrow your focus to few, company-aligned bets for real progress.
• Codify your product principles, and debate them at the highest level for true organizational alignment.
• Establish clear frameworks and “flywheels” before jumping into product or metric decisions.
• Emphasize clarity and transparency in strategic shifts—if the why isn’t clear at every level, alignment and execution will falter.
• Don’t try to win by imitating competitors; instead, double down on what makes your product, brand, or experience distinct.

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This episode is a must-listen for product managers and leaders grappling with prioritization, marketplace complexity, and the challenge of making authentic, organization-wide decisions that scale.

Transcript

[A]

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 Perry and you're listening to the Product Thinking podcast by 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 Kristin Dorsett, who was 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 Saldanha, 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. So when you have your teams who 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.

[B]

So some of it in our planning cycle we have two different ways that we prioritize what we're going to 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 want to 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 going to 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 podcast and we write a lightweight charter for that pod of you are here to make logins easier and then they go and figure out how to do it and they're driving their own roadmap so we're working a mix of tops down and bottoms up.

[A]

I see that trap a lot where we try to do way too many big things and then nothing gets done. How did you kind of come to agreement to focus on less? I imagine it wasn't a, an easy discussion, but what type of been a

[B]

journey over several years it was where probably four or five years ago we started doing OKRs at the company level. Like we it used to be very much bottoms up. Like every function and team will 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. 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 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 going to do three. And everyone had seen enough of that evolution to realize we can't keep trying to do as many things at once

[A]

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 going to 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 and the culture there to get people on board with that?

[B]

On the whole, we're very collaborative and very helpful. And again, 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 these big bets, they're not just R and D, they're cross functional. And 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 is always hard. But when in a business like ours, marketplace, it's complicated, there's a lot of higher 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. We seem to be making a lot more progress because we pick fewer things to focus on.

[A]

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.

[C]

There were a couple of things that were very helpful. Some 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. Uh, and so I basically shadowed him 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 what actually made it tick. And I don't think that that would have been an option had we been in the office just walking into meeting. But then this was really helpful, just to be a fly on the wall. And I thought that was super, super interesting. But what was even cooler 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 ramping 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 interesting was I remember 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 1 and 2 make a lot of sense. 3 I would modify. 4 and 5 I actually don't agree with. And so that set up three months of debates that me and Jeremy and other members 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 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.

[A]

What are your five tenants?

[C]

I got them on my desk. Let me just pull them up and

[D]

read them out to you.

[C]

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 going to 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 want to move very quickly to two way doors and roll things out and experiment quickly. But when there's a one way door decision like a pricing change, which would be hard, hard to roll back, we want to be very slow and thoughtful and deliberate. Tenet three is we want to be consistent scalable and sales service. And that just speaks to building an MVP is great but we want to build at scale and we want to be thinking about that from the time we 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 want to be very thoughtful and deliberate about making sure that every seature 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 big swings but we want to 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 something fast and sunshine it so that other people don't make the same mistakes.

[A]

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 talked a lot about making the consumer happy. Like how do you also think about what the businesses need since they're usually the ones who are paying right whether they're advertised or the revenue. And I know you do ads and stuff through that. How do you balance the two?

[C]

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 model for how you're going to resolve a conflict. So I've worked in three two excited marketplaces on 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 are watching and then movie houses were making movies. And then now at Yelp we had consumers and 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 win rate. So the metric that we optimize on is connections between local businesses and consumers. 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 conflict and goals and requirements.

[A]

How did you land on or how did Yelp land on the connections between the consumers and marketplaces as that? I guess you guys could. Do 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?

[C]

That's been Yelp's mission, to make quality connections seamlessly between consumers and local businesses. The way it plays into this two sided marketplace is local businesses come to Yelp because there's a lot of high intent consumers looking to hire local businesses. And consumers come to Yelp because there's a lot of local businesses that are reviewed and the reviews are deep and broad. We landed on connections because that's core to making our flywheel go. 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 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 want to know that we made a meaningful connection between a consumer and a local business because we know that that's what gets done.

[A]

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 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?

[C]

Yeah. So product Managers are always looking for product market fit. That's like the 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 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 a flywheel. So we think of a flywheel as self sustaining growth and we think of the product levers that will help drive that growth. And that's how we come up with a two sided marketplace roadmap.

[A]

Okay, so for Yelp, you've got your growth metrics is trying to make those connections, like more businesses, more consumers on the platform, the more you could do that. Those connections is what people keep coming back to. How do you think about the product levers connecting that?

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

So just to start, we think about both sides of the escrow marketplace. And 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 local business, they have three basic requirements. The first is quality. Whether it's the quality of food, 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 going to get a reservation? Am I going to have to wait? Can I eat when I want to eat? If it's a pro, is this an emergency job? Do I have to get it done now, can I, et cetera? And so we think about how do we give them all of the information with the least amount of friction to address their questions on quality, price, type. And on the pro side or local businesses, what they've told us, what they're looking for in a quality lead is high intent. So is this person really interested in connecting with a business and service area? Are they in my service area? Am I in the same city? Do I provide the type of service that they want? 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 reasonably well.

[A]

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 explicitly. 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. I don't recommend tools unless I actually use them. So when I tell you granola has become a daily essential for me and most of my team, that means something. We're all in a lot of meetings. Granola is an AI notepad that quietly enhances your notes in the background. No bots joining your call, no awkward recordings, just cleaner thinking after every meeting. It's the rare tool that gives you time back instead of asking for more of it. You can try it yourself with three months free on any paid plan at granola. AI productinstitute. EBay's a really good example because I think they were probably one of the first companies to start to feel that pressure to 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?

[D]

Yeah, of course. So there were a few things happening at that time. Ebay was like the darling of Wall street around 2004 or so. That's around the time I joined. Like, the 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 we were seeing Amazon on the side and kind of seeing them as like this bookstore that's unprofitable day in and day out, and really ignoring them right 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 worked really well. We need to figure out a way to literally copy what they're doing and

[C]

do the same thing.

[D]

It took a while for ebay to understand that, hey, we have an actual different value proposition. We're not Amazon. We're not going to be Amazon. If we try to be Amazon, we're just a few billion dollars behind all the infrastructure investments that they have done over time. 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 environment? Which by the way, Moho 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 Amazon had. What's key to, to get ebay into the right path.

[A]

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?

[D]

Yeah. So it's interesting because when you were there just listening to like our strategies, our priorities, and here's what we're gonna do. I mean, going to invest on this warehousing system that we're going to do some shipping coming from all products coming from China. And on the end of the day, after all that investments, if you actually stop and think about it like when you're listening to that story, you see, okay, so we're going to do all that and then we're assuming that one, Amazon going to stay exactly as they are right now and then two, when we finish this, we're going to be a little bit worse than Amazon. Right. So we're not actually competing, we're 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 because they probably, they're much more senior than I was at that point. They probably had their reasonings. But what it take away is like you people that are like down to that level, they're looking at the basics like they're basically looking from consumer perspective. Right. And trying to understand how does that strategy makes any sense.

[C]

Right.

[D]

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 this turnaround and why it's important to do this first and then the second, the next, people just assume that you don't know what you're talking about. And there was that huge assumption, especially in the world of changing CEOs. We went from magic to, I think it was Devin at that point. And you still Try to kind of create some trust on 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.

[A]

So with Wish, when you came in there, what was the situation there and what type of turnaround did you have to do?

[D]

Yeah, so Wish is a very interesting place because 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 is that we have very low prices on products that are usually about your passions, about your hobbies. They're not products you need, they're products you like to have.

[B]

Right.

[D]

There could be a bunch of gadgets for your kitchen. They could be, you like fishing, that is a bunch of gadgets of fishing or bits of baking and things like this.

[C]

Right.

[D]

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 with the growth, our time to door became very ineffective. 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 I actually got from Wish, and it was usually a joke or something extremely different, was not quite that bad, but it was not great either.

[C]

Right.

[D]

And also the perception that you're paying more for shipping and sometimes reality, honestly that you're paying more for shipping, that you're paying for the products itself.

[C]

Right.

[D]

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 uxr, the problems are very obvious. And also the thing that that's interesting, as we talked about competitors at the time that I joined the macroeconomics was actually not that bad. Digital ads, it was starting to kind of get expensive, which was a problem for Wish, which, you know, when you have, when you're selling very low priced items and it takes so much to bring 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, they're marketplaces as well, but they were not truly competitors. People are 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're not head to head to Amazon. Like very different value proposition, very different levels of commodities 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 want to get this like this earbuds like you're going to search for it for. I wish there's going to be things that you didn't even know existed.

[B]

Right.

[D]

It's a new product that in the past would have taken years of go to market funding to kind of make it mainstream. But I wish like we actually had a model to help you discover products and because we knew your interests we were able to say hey, you're going to have this product, I'm going to put it in front of you. And the more people bought it and the feedback lift grew, that product actually got more attention, so on and so forth and but it was a very like discovery based experience that really didn't compete against anyone. So the you look at AliExpress 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 on 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 basically save our brand reputation from the mistakes that were made in the past.

[C]

Right.

[D]

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 going to, we're going to do invitation only. That basically means that business development to you is going to bring merchants they have vetted and they're very like confident about that. And we introduced a bunch of capabilities to say how we're going to 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 a merchants to ship their products in less than 24 hours. If you don't ship a product and the user never receives that product, here are the penalties. If the product is significantly not as described here, 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 being time to door in some places. And on average it would take almost a month to get people their products. Once we introduce the ship the product within 24 hours and we introduce a lot of innovation, our warehouses combine those products and send those products to 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 import customs is like very complex like Brazil around the 20 something days. Right. So it was very much of 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. It was very much issues we have to fix in order to be able to continue to grow and retain the users you're going to acquire through that.

[A]

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 focus on some of the things that was going to 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 going to help us win and just focus there instead of spreading ourselves too thin.

[D]

But that's episode one of which that's year one. So 100% right. And year one is exactly that. We did this and it was actually work. We saw the improvements on NPS. NPS went from minus 4 to 36 by our refund rates. I don't think I can quote the numbers because we're a public company, but it went from very high to below industry standards. 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 up a 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 then you 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 this is that we're playing alone on a initially small market. Nobody cared. The market started to grow. As their market grew, other players started to kind of do very, very similar things. And what we saw at that point is that just doing exactly what we're doing by just being better than we were before is definitely not going to 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 realization that, hey, if we're going to have a competitor like this is paying as much as they do, we're going to lose market share continuously until the point that it's not sustainable anymore. And we need to kind of figure out a way to have a differentiated value proposition. And that's the journey that we're in right now, which is really focused on not just so much like you need this product or you discover this product that you didn't even know it 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 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 the richness associated with that. If you are into espresso making, like, what are all the different tools to do the distribution and all that good stuff or whatever your hobby is. We've built models that no longer just rank the right product for you, but models that actually understand their interests and actually rank the right basket for you. Right, so that you can have a much more cater experience.

[A]

That's it for today. Hopefully this episode gave you a clearer picture of what it takes to create focus and alignment in product organizations. If you want to 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 want to 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 3 months free on any paid plan at Granola AI ProductInstitute. 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. Make sure you like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. We'll see you next time.