Tim Holley
VP of Product, Etsy (buyer experience)
Where to hear and read about Tim Holley1 episode or test
Lenny's PodcastInside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)Tim Holley is VP of Product for buyer experience at Etsy, where he has spent over a decade as GMV grew from about $500 million to over $13 billion. The most useful thing to learn from him is how one clear metric, repeated relentlessly, replaced a slow consensus culture and gave a small team focus.
I would wager you need to say it another three times before they internalize it.
Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)
Tim Holley: the story and the lessons
1Tim Holley's path at Etsy
Holley has led Etsy's buyer experience through a decade of growth. He has been at Etsy for more than ten years as VP of product for the buyer experience. Over that time GMV grew from about $500 million to over $13 billion.
His team's work touched buyer retention, conversion and global expansion.
He left Etsy for SoulCycle, then came back. After six years he left to test a theory that proactive health leads to better outcomes. A year away taught him he wanted a product that helps people, alongside people he respects.
SoulCycle had a known brand and street presence, but he did not want to spend his energy there. At Etsy the daily work is helping sellers reach an audience they could not reach alone.
2How Holley helped Etsy leave consensus culture behind
Etsy made gross merchandise sales the measure in every meeting. After 2017, GMS became the front-and-center KPI. Teams had to say how their project drives GMS and over what timeframe, whether a quarter or 12 months out.
Etsy had lacked this clarity before, and it made prioritization far easier.
Holley pairs a KPI with a story and repeats both. During change, teams need clarity on the goal and on why. He credits CEO Josh Silverman for telling the story consistently over time.
The usual adage says three repeats. Holley says it takes another three before people internalize it.
The shift felt existential because heavy debate had once been the strength. Etsy's consensus habits produced thoughtful products but too slowly. The change came alongside layoffs, and many staff had their identity tied up in how Etsy worked.
Holley kept his job and says his version of hard is not everyone's. The business needed faster launches and a predictable way to drive GMS.
He grounded decisions in how buyers shop across the whole internet. Etsy has no one-to-one competitor, since sellers are independent and items are unique. Benchmarking still showed where buyers spend money and how they think of Etsy.
Other brands compete for the same eyeballs and wallets.
Etsy runs on two principles: dig deeper and minimize waste. Digging deeper means understanding the why with qualitative and quantitative research. Minimizing waste means asking whether work adds value for the customer and the business.
With just over 2,000 people, Etsy calls these guiding principles, not core values. Holley says product teams are often wrong, so saying a project is no longer valuable and moving on has served Etsy well.
Etsy shut Studio because it failed the new constraints. Studio fit the brand but missed all three post-2017 goals: short-term sales, ROI-positive marketing and focus on the core marketplace.
Closing it was hard to manage, but Holley calls it the right call. The lesson is to decide against current constraints, not the original idea.
3How Holley improves conversion and tests changes
With 100 million items, conversion comes from buyer confidence. Buyers choosing among near-identical results need reassurance. Etsy adds buyer review photos and video to seller photos so the next shopper can judge size and color.
Reviews have long been one of Etsy's most fruitful conversion tracks.
He surfaces glanceable signals such as 'only one left'. Drawing on the behavioral economics work on signals and nudges, Etsy pulls buried facts forward. The aim is a buyer who feels this is the one they feel best about buying.
Etsy has seen great success on this track.
One line about carbon offsets lifted cart conversion more than expected. The cart now says Etsy offsets carbon emissions from every delivery. It communicated company values to buyers who come to Etsy.
Holley weighs effort against reward, and a one-line copy change can beat a large build.
Holley expects most experiments to fail and cannot predict winners. He agrees with the figure of about 80% of experiments failing. Changes expected to be big hits often end up with minimal value, while others win in an outsized way.
A rating bug once showed a half star as a horse emoji, giving four stars and a horse. Teams dressed up as it for Halloween.
He wants validation methods beyond A/B tests for big bets. A/B testing is the highest bar for causality, but it can miss a larger net-new product. Etsy shows seller-set sales without a test and studies them with pre-post analysis.
Holley calls finding other ways to validate a growth edge for Etsy. SEO work also cannot be judged the same way, so the team is looking at cohorts over time.
Retention had to be measured over 30, 60 and 90 days. Etsy's testing culture was built around purchases within a visit or week. After the 2020 influx of new and reactivated buyers, driving frequency pushed the team out of its comfort zone.
4Holley on balancing buyers, sellers and brand
Buyers come first because sellers stay only where they make sales. GMS is a buyer buying from a seller, so the job is to help that transaction happen. Supply without demand is not a marketplace, and neither is demand without supply.
Holley says the seller-first story was certainly not a linear one, and the focus flipped back and forth. Not every team builds buyer features, because too many teams on the same page real estate get in each other's way.
Etsy used the buyer experience to tell sellers what matters. Highlighting photos in search and surfacing fast replies to buyer messages show sellers what the marketplace rewards. Etsy also uses marketplace data, such as the best time to put an item on sale, to guide them.
Many sellers are small business owners with no time for data, and a seller sees only their own shop. Etsy picks the single most valuable ask.
He phoned sellers when mask demand hit overnight in April 2020. Traffic went from a typical April to Black Friday levels. Etsy made its first-ever call for sellers to make masks and phoned sellers about capacity.
Some sellers said masks were squarely in their wheelhouse and others needed a pause. His lesson: "good old-fashioned know your customer, what do they need from you at that moment."
Holley protects the brand by policing supply, not adding it. Etsy resists new supply types that would make it like eBay or Amazon. The brand line is "keep commerce human", and production help is allowed only if the seller knows who makes the item and how.
Etsy has supply in spades, so the work is keeping out what doesn't belong. Gray areas and copied designs make enforcement never done.
5Holley on acquiring and retaining buyers and sellers
Etsy's long tail of niche items brings in buyers through search. SEO and Google Shopping match very specific searches from people not on Etsy. The shopper sees the exact item plus similar options from nearby subcategories.
Sellers also recruit other sellers through Teams, a platform where they ask each other questions. Early on they recruited in person at craft fairs like Renegade.
Seller referrals pay in listing credits instead of cash. Etsy charges 20 cents to list, a small barrier, so credits lower it for new sellers and avoid the fraud risk of cash.
It was not a huge growth driver, but it worked well in certain markets and pockets.
The buyer referral program flopped by undervaluing a new buyer. Run about eight years ago, it did not account for a new buyer's later purchases. Holley's takeaway is that a first purchase is only the start.
Etsy builds retention on a habit loop of trigger, action, reward. A favorite signals intent. An updates feed and push notifications, such as an item going on sale, pull the buyer back.
Adding to cart or buying are stronger signals than a favorite. Etsy already had plenty of this activity, so the work was closing the loop.
After the mask surge the job was proving Etsy was more than masks. New and reactivated buyers arrived in a huge influx. For roughly the next 18 months from mid-2020 the team broadened the story to many categories and added hooks to bring people back.
Sellers who outgrow Etsy tend to stay. Fees are low and competitive, Teams gives sellers a place to share ideas, and a standalone site is neither cheap nor fast to build. Driving traffic to one is expensive.
Etsy aims to be where sellers love to sell, even when they also sell elsewhere.
6How Holley runs and hires product teams
Holley staffs squads with five functions, not three. Etsy adds research, analytics and marketing to product, engineering and design, and treats the five as the core leadership team. Marketing can be product or brand marketing.
Not every team gets every role, so full coverage is the aim, not the reality. Etsy rejects the PM as mini CEO.
One accountable decision maker, usually the PM, breaks deadlocks. When consensus is unclear, the PM steps forward and decides, then owns what was learned and what to do next after a failed experiment.
Etsy's CPO Nick says "you don't have to have the best ideas, but you have to choose the best ideas." Accountability does not license deciding in a vacuum.
He hires PMs who collaborate, decide fast and stay curious. Good PMs are excited to consult across functions yet still decide when data is ambiguous. Priorities shift in a small org, so a growth mindset matters.
He uses live case studies to see how candidates think on the fly, and asks what they taught themselves.
He asks teams to post a weekly focus and review last week's. Each Monday people post their priorities, not tasks, and whether they finished last week's focus, in a lo-fi Slack channel.
Over time it shows which work takes longer than expected and what recurs seasonally. Holley admits the line between priorities and tasks is blurry.
He kept changing how he checked in with his team in the pandemic. Daily coffee chats soon covered the same topics and nobody wanted more video calls. Needs differed sharply, for example between parents and others.
Holley had no kids and worked in a critical industry, so he felt less stress than many.
Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution | Tim Holley (VP of Product)
Etsy's product leader explains how the company shifted from a consensus culture to a single north star metric, and how it improves conversion, acquisition and retention in a marketplace with over 100 million unique items. Over a decade he saw Etsy grow from around 500 million to over 13 billion in GMV.
Holley has led Etsy's buyer experience through a decade of growth. He has been at Etsy for more than ten years as VP of product for the buyer experience. Over that time GMV grew from about $500 million to over $13 billion.
His team's work touched buyer retention, conversion and global expansion.
He left Etsy for SoulCycle, then came back. After six years he left to test a theory that proactive health leads to better outcomes. A year away taught him he wanted a product that helps people, alongside people he respects.
SoulCycle had a known brand and street presence, but he did not want to spend his energy there. At Etsy the daily work is helping sellers reach an audience they could not reach alone.
Etsy made gross merchandise sales the measure in every meeting. After 2017, GMS became the front-and-center KPI. Teams had to say how their project drives GMS and over what timeframe, whether a quarter or 12 months out.
Etsy had lacked this clarity before, and it made prioritization far easier.
Holley pairs a KPI with a story and repeats both. During change, teams need clarity on the goal and on why. He credits CEO Josh Silverman for telling the story consistently over time.
The usual adage says three repeats. Holley says it takes another three before people internalize it.
The shift felt existential because heavy debate had once been the strength. Etsy's consensus habits produced thoughtful products but too slowly. The change came alongside layoffs, and many staff had their identity tied up in how Etsy worked.
Holley kept his job and says his version of hard is not everyone's. The business needed faster launches and a predictable way to drive GMS.
He grounded decisions in how buyers shop across the whole internet. Etsy has no one-to-one competitor, since sellers are independent and items are unique. Benchmarking still showed where buyers spend money and how they think of Etsy.
Other brands compete for the same eyeballs and wallets.
Etsy runs on two principles: dig deeper and minimize waste. Digging deeper means understanding the why with qualitative and quantitative research. Minimizing waste means asking whether work adds value for the customer and the business.
With just over 2,000 people, Etsy calls these guiding principles, not core values. Holley says product teams are often wrong, so saying a project is no longer valuable and moving on has served Etsy well.
Etsy shut Studio because it failed the new constraints. Studio fit the brand but missed all three post-2017 goals: short-term sales, ROI-positive marketing and focus on the core marketplace.
Closing it was hard to manage, but Holley calls it the right call. The lesson is to decide against current constraints, not the original idea.
With 100 million items, conversion comes from buyer confidence. Buyers choosing among near-identical results need reassurance. Etsy adds buyer review photos and video to seller photos so the next shopper can judge size and color.
Reviews have long been one of Etsy's most fruitful conversion tracks.
He surfaces glanceable signals such as 'only one left'. Drawing on the behavioral economics work on signals and nudges, Etsy pulls buried facts forward. The aim is a buyer who feels this is the one they feel best about buying.
Etsy has seen great success on this track.
One line about carbon offsets lifted cart conversion more than expected. The cart now says Etsy offsets carbon emissions from every delivery. It communicated company values to buyers who come to Etsy.
Holley weighs effort against reward, and a one-line copy change can beat a large build.
Holley expects most experiments to fail and cannot predict winners. He agrees with the figure of about 80% of experiments failing. Changes expected to be big hits often end up with minimal value, while others win in an outsized way.
A rating bug once showed a half star as a horse emoji, giving four stars and a horse. Teams dressed up as it for Halloween.
He wants validation methods beyond A/B tests for big bets. A/B testing is the highest bar for causality, but it can miss a larger net-new product. Etsy shows seller-set sales without a test and studies them with pre-post analysis.
Holley calls finding other ways to validate a growth edge for Etsy. SEO work also cannot be judged the same way, so the team is looking at cohorts over time.
Retention had to be measured over 30, 60 and 90 days. Etsy's testing culture was built around purchases within a visit or week. After the 2020 influx of new and reactivated buyers, driving frequency pushed the team out of its comfort zone.
Buyers come first because sellers stay only where they make sales. GMS is a buyer buying from a seller, so the job is to help that transaction happen. Supply without demand is not a marketplace, and neither is demand without supply.
Holley says the seller-first story was certainly not a linear one, and the focus flipped back and forth. Not every team builds buyer features, because too many teams on the same page real estate get in each other's way.
Etsy used the buyer experience to tell sellers what matters. Highlighting photos in search and surfacing fast replies to buyer messages show sellers what the marketplace rewards. Etsy also uses marketplace data, such as the best time to put an item on sale, to guide them.
Many sellers are small business owners with no time for data, and a seller sees only their own shop. Etsy picks the single most valuable ask.
He phoned sellers when mask demand hit overnight in April 2020. Traffic went from a typical April to Black Friday levels. Etsy made its first-ever call for sellers to make masks and phoned sellers about capacity.
Some sellers said masks were squarely in their wheelhouse and others needed a pause. His lesson: "good old-fashioned know your customer, what do they need from you at that moment."
Holley protects the brand by policing supply, not adding it. Etsy resists new supply types that would make it like eBay or Amazon. The brand line is "keep commerce human", and production help is allowed only if the seller knows who makes the item and how.
Etsy has supply in spades, so the work is keeping out what doesn't belong. Gray areas and copied designs make enforcement never done.
Etsy's long tail of niche items brings in buyers through search. SEO and Google Shopping match very specific searches from people not on Etsy. The shopper sees the exact item plus similar options from nearby subcategories.
Sellers also recruit other sellers through Teams, a platform where they ask each other questions. Early on they recruited in person at craft fairs like Renegade.
Seller referrals pay in listing credits instead of cash. Etsy charges 20 cents to list, a small barrier, so credits lower it for new sellers and avoid the fraud risk of cash.
It was not a huge growth driver, but it worked well in certain markets and pockets.
The buyer referral program flopped by undervaluing a new buyer. Run about eight years ago, it did not account for a new buyer's later purchases. Holley's takeaway is that a first purchase is only the start.
Etsy builds retention on a habit loop of trigger, action, reward. A favorite signals intent. An updates feed and push notifications, such as an item going on sale, pull the buyer back.
Adding to cart or buying are stronger signals than a favorite. Etsy already had plenty of this activity, so the work was closing the loop.
After the mask surge the job was proving Etsy was more than masks. New and reactivated buyers arrived in a huge influx. For roughly the next 18 months from mid-2020 the team broadened the story to many categories and added hooks to bring people back.
Sellers who outgrow Etsy tend to stay. Fees are low and competitive, Teams gives sellers a place to share ideas, and a standalone site is neither cheap nor fast to build. Driving traffic to one is expensive.
Etsy aims to be where sellers love to sell, even when they also sell elsewhere.
Holley staffs squads with five functions, not three. Etsy adds research, analytics and marketing to product, engineering and design, and treats the five as the core leadership team. Marketing can be product or brand marketing.
Not every team gets every role, so full coverage is the aim, not the reality. Etsy rejects the PM as mini CEO.
One accountable decision maker, usually the PM, breaks deadlocks. When consensus is unclear, the PM steps forward and decides, then owns what was learned and what to do next after a failed experiment.
Etsy's CPO Nick says "you don't have to have the best ideas, but you have to choose the best ideas." Accountability does not license deciding in a vacuum.
He hires PMs who collaborate, decide fast and stay curious. Good PMs are excited to consult across functions yet still decide when data is ambiguous. Priorities shift in a small org, so a growth mindset matters.
He uses live case studies to see how candidates think on the fly, and asks what they taught themselves.
He asks teams to post a weekly focus and review last week's. Each Monday people post their priorities, not tasks, and whether they finished last week's focus, in a lo-fi Slack channel.
Over time it shows which work takes longer than expected and what recurs seasonally. Holley admits the line between priorities and tasks is blurry.
He kept changing how he checked in with his team in the pandemic. Daily coffee chats soon covered the same topics and nobody wanted more video calls. Needs differed sharply, for example between parents and others.
Holley had no kids and worked in a critical industry, so he felt less stress than many.