Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign.
A (0:08)
Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corazon.com brand welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Ezra Ozturk. Ezra Ozturk is the head of Product at Luffa, where she leads product strategy and execution as the company evolves its secure messaging platform into the next generation of fan loyalty technology. With a career spanning meta Uber, Zillow, Instacart, Ozturk brings a proven record of building products that combine user insight, trust and scale across some of the world's most recognized consumer platforms. Good afternoon, Ezra. Welcome to the show.
B (0:54)
Thank you so much for having me, Brian.
A (0:57)
Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it and making the time. You're in New York, I'm in Kansas City. We're an hour apart trying to survive the cold. I guess the cold's coming your way now. We just had a bunch of snow. So I appreciate your flexibility with the weather, the challenges, the time zones. Ezra, I'm going to jump into your first question. You've worked on some of the world's largest consumer platforms. Instagram, Reels, Uber, Zillow, Instacart. What core product principles have stayed constant for you across these very different ecosystems and which ones have evolved to the most?
B (1:28)
I'd say yeah, Brian, thank you so much for that question. So across all of those companies, a few principles have never changed for me. First, I start with the human and not the feature. Whether it was someone posting on reels, getting home safely in an Uber, finding a place to live on Zillow, or getting groceries delivered, the question is always, what is the real moment in their life that we're showing up for? If you stay close to that, you make better trade offs, you prioritize differently, and you avoid chasing vanity metrics. Second, I design for the ecosystem, not just the user. All of those products are multi sided. So writers and drivers, buyers and sellers, shoppers and retailers, creators and viewers, the best product decisions respect incentives on every side. If you solve for only one actor, the system breaks somewhere else and eventually the metrics will tell you that. Third, clarity of success. On every team, we had a small, legible set of metrics that everyone could recite. You can't operate something at that scale if nobody knows what good is that discipline of here's the North Star. Here are the leading indicators. Here are the guardrails. That's been consistent in every role for me. What's evolved the most is how I think about attention and trust. Earlier in my career, growth and engagement were often the loudest voices in the room. Over time, especially with social platforms and marketplaces, I've seen how fragile trust is. Now I'm much more interested in healthy engagement. Does this product respect people's time, their data and their long term well being? At Leffa, that shows up as privacy first, communication and identity that the user controls instead of growth at all costs inside another walled garden.
