Carlos González | Product school 00:00
Tanya. I typically do this, podcast interviews from my house. So let's pretend that there are no 2000 product leaders in the room. typically we get around 20,000 viewers or listeners per episode. I guess this one is going to get maybe an extra zero. and this is because of you. you are the CPO at motorway. former VP of product at Instagram with leadership experience at eBay. So I hope we can have a really good conversations around marketplace, scalability and monetization opportunities. but before that, I need to get this out of my chest. You are a certified double decker bus driver.
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:00 That is true. I am actually, although it's been a long time since I've driven a double decker bus, so, I'm not sure anybody would want to be a passenger. But I started my life many years ago, actually, as a journalist writing about transport, and they packed me off to write a feature on how to get qualified as a double decker bus driver. So it's hasn't been used a great deal in my career, but it's always a great fact to wheel out. So. And I do have some fantastic photos of me driving past Big Ben, which I do rather like.
Carlos González | Product school 00:01 I'm going to put that for the intro of this episode, because at the end of the day, like all of the product leaders that I've come across, they are curious. And that came by channelled in so many different ways. So before we get into motorway, I also want to learn a little bit more about your experience at Instagram, because you were the first VP of product hired by meta outside the US, correct? That's really cool. And I wonder, how that influenced the way you went about building a global team?
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:02 Yeah. So I was, sort of no pressure on arriving and discovering and being told that I was the first tech VP appointed outside of the US. And, in many ways, I can't really take any credit for building a global team, because one of the amazing things about working for a company like meta is that everything they do is around building for scale. So they had already in place many of the key foundations of having successful global teams. So I had some of my team in London, a lot of my team in California, and actually also a lot of the team in New York. So in many ways, what we did was sort of double down on much of the wonderful practices they already had, which was having sort of autonomous teams, which was great because there's a real desire for teams to be as autonomous as possible so they can move fast. And there's a lot of desire to be very clear with teams about what decisions they can make versus what decisions do they really need to float upwards, which is a great discipline, which I try and use today at motorway as well. but there's also a lot of work around building alignment. So there's a sort of operating cadence where, for example, roadmaps are shared, roadmaps are published. There's lots and lots of, artifacts that are published for everybody to read for teams. So you always know what other teams are doing. and then the other thing is, is that there's a real, sort of desire to work asynchronously. So it's wonderful getting people together. And it's always great to meet people face to face. But when you work for a global company and you have a team that stretches across continents, you can't always do that. So you have to really work hard to think about how you can do things asynchronously. So you can have teams that are picking up things as other teams are going to bed, and it all works brilliantly. The other thing I would add, which they had in place, which I really loved. they have this idea of canonical everything. So it's part of this approach they have at Metta called Extreme Clarity, which anybody who's worked with me subsequently will have heard me use that phrase, because I think anybody who's worked at meta will use that phrase. It's sort of like a PM superpower, and anybody can read about it, because there's this amazing woman at meta called Naomi Light, who has this approach of canonical everything as part of extreme clarity, and she writes extensively about it. So I'd encourage everybody listening, everybody here, in the spirit of being curious to go and read about it, because I think it really makes better product managers when you put that in place. So everybody, whenever you arrive at a project, because you're always hiring, whenever somebody is new or somebody has been assigned to a new piece of work, the approach around canonical everything is you can always find out exactly how is a project doing, how the decisions made. What is the end goal? And it's very quick to be able to get up to speed. So all those things make working across borders a lot easier.
Carlos González | Product school 00:05 My challenge with that canonical everything is that usually what I've seen in the US based companies that hire someone in the leadership team outside the US is they end up getting the short end of the stick. So like canonical for HQ and then you kind of have to follow along. So curious to know like how you actually make it canonical equal for people who are not in HQ.
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:05 Yeah, actually, that never even crossed my mind. So I think, it is canonical for everyone. So there's the same expectation for whatever team. I suspect, even if you are a team that is sitting in the on the same floor as Mark Zuckerberg, I suspect you still are doing the same discipline around canonical everything. I think where you do get the sort of short end of the stick potentially Chile is when you are working outside the US, so I know there will probably be people who worked at meta or worked at Google. and we will all be very familiar for the rather long hours. So as all our friends are heading off home at 6:00, you know, kind of there's still a few hours to do at the end of the day.
Carlos González | Product school 00:06 I'm from Spain, live in San Francisco. So for me, there was no other option, especially at the beginning. We couldn't afford to hire many people in Silicon Valley. So everybody got used to the idea of working across the globe, which has many other advantages other than cost. I know that you let a ton of, monetization initiatives, including real ads, e-commerce subscriptions. So Mark Zuckerberg, I can remember him talking about the importance of monetizing reels. So cuz, you know, like, what are some of those practices that hopefully can be applicable for other PMS working on monetization?
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:06 Yeah. So I've been really lucky in my product career, because I've had to sort of tackle with teams and really gnarly product problems. So, I worked at the Guardian when there was this huge shift around consuming content from newspapers to online. I was actually at the forefront at eBay when we did fixed price selling, which sounds crazy, but at the time was such a controversial decision. and at Instagram, it was a very similar moment where there was this, really gnarly issue around reels. So for those of you who may not be aware, if we go back in time to say, 2022 reels on Instagram were taking off like crazy. And it was wonderful to see, because if you're being compared, your growth being compared to, say, TikTok, seeing our video consumption growing fastest in the market is wonderful. And we also knew it was a format that the users of Instagram really loved. So you could see they were spending more and more time on reels and sort of shifting their time away from feed and stories and spending more time overall on Instagram. So there's lots of goodness. But there was a downside, which was that the monetization of reels was not as effective as it was in other parts of Instagram. So as people shifted their time to spend time on reels, actually Instagram was losing money. We weren't making as much money. So not surprisingly, you heard people like Mark Zuckerberg talking about it because every earnings call, it became a really hot topic. So it was regarded as probably one of the toughest problems that we had to solve within meta. And it was particularly tough because even though, again, at companies like Meta and Google, they're really great at building out playbooks, you couldn't sort of apply the playbook here. We'd only get you so far because video was a very new format, and it's also for monetization tricky from a product point of view, because people consume videos slower than they do stories and feed so less advertising opportunities. So how we approach that, which, I think works for there probably lots of elements about this for any gnarly product. Problem is, one, we were really clear with the team what success looked like, and that was about having advertising monetization net neutral. So effectively, where monetization was being displaced from other parts of Instagram, we look to reels to make that up. So the goal by which the team was being judged was very clear. We also had very clear guardrails because we were not willing to sacrifice the growth, the engagement, the user delight around, reels. And that was really strict. And that's testimony to the really high standards that Instagram has, because at the end of the day, you want your users to love your product. And we realize that we didn't want to put grit in the way of them loving the product. And by that decision, it also allowed us as product people to in many ways discard some of the potential product solutions. So we decided pretty early on that we didn't want to look at formats, advertising formats that other video providers have. For example, forcing somebody to watch an ad in order to consume the content, that would not have worked, and we didn't want to consider it at that time. So what the team did was have to really think about approaching the problem from many different angles. So as we know as product people, when you are faced with a product challenge, it's rare that there is one solution. You have to identify many. And for the team at Instagram, they had to look at what was going to be the right format. That would really delight the users. So when they were faced with one of these advertising products, it would feel seamless and meaningful. You'd have to find a format that would work for the advertisers. So it had to be effective, and you also had to find a format that creators loved as well, because they're a very important part of the ecosystem. So they had to feel happy as well. So it was a product from where you had that beautiful Zen Venn diagram rather well. You get to Zen when you get in the middle. So and that's what we did. We actually got it by the end of 23. We actually managed to get to net neutrality very quickly, because.
Carlos González | Product school 00:11 I've noticed that type of challenge across other marketplaces that have different business models at the same time, adds with obviously the transaction between the supply and demand. As you think about those KPIs, like especially when your org is large, like how do you go about making sure that certain teams who are pushing a specific initiative are not cannibalizing other metrics that could be useful for the overall success of the business.
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:11 Yeah. Well, actually, that's a really that's very pertinent to the work of motorway, at the moment. So for example, being a marketplace, we're obviously looking at a lot of work about how can we make the seller experience even better, kind of remove the friction, make it really easy. how can we just make it sort of so wonderful? And on the other side, we're trying to make sure how can we provide dealers with all the information they need to be able to make the purchase? But we have to look across the whole marketplace because, for example, if we remove too much friction at the beginning of the process for somebody trying to sell their car, we're then going to get them through the funnel, but the dealer doesn't have enough information. So when they are actually faced face to face with the kind of to make the purchase, and they're looking at that vehicle, but actually they didn't see all the damage or the issues that potentially that vehicle has. They cancel. So one metric looks great at the beginning of the funnel, but ultimately the top line metric doesn't work, so you have to really be careful about it.
Carlos González | Product school 00:12 I think that's a great point. Sometimes, like even slowing down your boarding process, the benefit of the overall success metric versus just pushing something too hard, that is obviously going to create a little further down the funnel. And I think I should provide some context on your current company. Motorways, the UK's fastest used car marketplace with gross market value of $2.5 billion per year and over half a million people have enabled to sell their cars through your network. Yeah, that's that's legit.
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:13 It's honestly I was amazed on joining motorway. This is a huge market. And again, as a product person, I feel really privileged to find myself, I think in the right place, in the right time, with the right products, with the right people. And it's often when you're looking at scaling a product, you're often looking at how can we expand overseas and how can we do all these other things? Because the UK is fairly small, in the grand scheme of the world. But what's amazing with the used car market is that it's massive. So in the UK alone it's worth £100 billion. And to put that into context, the whole of UK retail is 400 million. Or if we take food delivery, that's 30 billion. So it's wonderful that we have the ability to build a market leading product in a market that is enormous in the UK. So if we can kind of spend a lot of time just getting the UK right, which we're doing and it's exciting.
Carlos González | Product school 00:14 So one of the unique things in the particular marketplace is that it's a C to B model, right. Compared to maybe eBay can have some key to key components or there are other types of marketplaces. So I wonder how the marketplace model influence your product strategy.
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:14 obviously it influences a lot. It's a really interesting marketplace because see, to be is pretty unusual. and the reason that it sort of works is that the market is currently broken. So from a and it's broken on both sides, which I think is important as a product person to appreciate. So how it's broken is that for sellers at the moment most people do part exchange. Many people in this room or listening may be thinking about part exchange, but they're willing to lose quite a lot of money for that convenience. We work. Our research shows that on average, people get 1500 pounds more by selling on my to a. So that's often how much people.
Carlos González | Product school 00:15 That's your value. You can make them more money than if they take it to you.
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:15 You can make more money. And it's lovely and easy because on the other side of the marketplace, it's also broken. Because for that part exchange, you go and give your car to a dealer. Actually, I didn't appreciate this until joining motorway. Most dealers don't want your car. They want your business for the new car. But you're giving them a call they don't necessarily want, then they then have to spend some time making it look nice. They're probably going to have to transport it to a physical auction to sell it, and they have to go to that physical auction to buy the stock that they do want. So actually, by having a marketplace on that sort of the C to B side, dealers can actually get stock and acquire stock really easily. And we do an end to end solution, which again, from a product point of view is really interesting because we're the only place where dealers can actually not just source vehicles, but they can fund, buy and will transport them. So we'll actually even organise for them to be delivered to their forecourt. And I think that's really exciting from a product point of view, because you have that whole end to end proposition, which when you look at really great marketplaces and really great marketplace leaders, that's often what you see, because that is.
Carlos González | Product school 00:16 So value prop ultimately as as someone is thinking about their their product, like there are few elements that make them unique. In your case, we mentioned like higher price. when someone is selling the car, the convenience of selling the carpet as you scale, how do you kind of protect and even increase those elements of your value prop? what has to go, right? Because you can't just optimize for everything?
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:16 I think, in my mind, it's about really making sure that the marketplace works so we can think about seller pieces, we can think about the dealer pieces. But I think when you're doing a marketplace, you have to really be focused ultimately on the health and hygiene of the marketplace. And everything that you do should hopefully build efficiency and effectiveness and hopefully sort of trust in the, in the marketplace. So, a good example of how you have to think across those things is that dealers often will ask for information for the sellers to provide that. And what we want to do is make sure that we can get that information extract from the seller, but in the way that it's most usable and benefits both sides. So, for example, photos is something we wrestle with a lot. We have something called eye image Assist, which allows people to take photos really easily on the app. And we found that not only by having much better quality photos are we helping dealers have better confidence. So we're really building the activity of the dealers. It's making life easier for the sellers and removing the friction at the same time. So for example, when we introduced AI Image Assist, I believe the percentage of resubmitted photos fell by 67% because people were finding it so hard.
Carlos González | Product school 00:18 So this reminds me of the early days at Airbnb. This is before I they were also sharing a similar story. They were sending photographers to the host homes because they realized that the quality of the image would influence the Their decision to just rent or not a house. So they were hyper focused on ensuring that those homes would look fantastic and they didn't have these AI capabilities. But there was another element for them that was like the quality of the reviews they were obsessed around getting to. I think it was nine. That was the magic number. So there were certain moments that would determine when a product is now going to be able to sell consistently. So in your case, maybe we can connect this with other marketplaces. What are some of the specific moments that you knew that you had to get there in order for that product to start getting more, more liquidity?
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:19 I think with motorway on getting that liquidity, it's sort of I'm going to sort of contradict I think you have to one you have to think that marketplaces are inherently efficient. I think you don't want to dabble too much in the mechanics of a marketplace. I think if we were to all leave it alone, a healthy marketplace should still work. but I think our job as product people is to really help provide some oil in the system where it's needed. so there's a lot of, I'm sure, like many people in this room and people listening, they will have read about, if you're doing a marketplace, do you do the supply side first or the demand side first? my very simplistic, point of view is it really sort of doesn't matter because if you get one going, the other will follow. And we see that on motorway. It's really we had very recently, we had an absolutely huge, wonderful, uptake in numbers of people who were selling their cars. And within hours there's a huge uptick in the number of dealers. We don't have to tell them. so I think in terms of those moments is to sort of, knowing when to dive in and knowing when to hold back. So we do dive in in some ways in motorway, because being the B to C to B marketplace, there's an interesting, sort of bit of grit in the system. Is that because people selling their cars, if you're going to list your car, you're going to list it after work, before work, or at the weekend, because you've got to take the time to take some photos and provide the details. But if you're a dealer, you're working effectively 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, which is when the sellers are not active. So, for example, we do do a little bit of work behind the scenes to make sure that, for example, at weekends, we're trying to make sure that we have the right number of cars for the right number of dealers. So we sort of do intervene where we can help the smoothness of the marketplace. But stay back.
Carlos González | Product school 00:21 What I've noticed, and this is not just for marketplaces, but beyond the kind of high level revenue numbers, which in the marketplace, I guess is GMV, the gross merchandise value and the liquidity, the average order, like there are some leading KPIs that are absolutely critical and sometimes unique in order to get to that end result. So and then you have the other dimension, which is supply, demand. Probably those leading KPIs for one side are different than for the other. So what are some of those that really unique leading KPIs that can influence the ultimate revenue number? And I ask that because that's ultimately a lot of the challenges for for PMS, right? I don't want people to leave with a cheat sheet. I was like, okay, I need to focus just on revenues. Like, what do you need to do to actually influence revenue?
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:21 Yeah. So, I love this because the thing is, is that with KPIs, there's always so many that we can look at and there's this tension of wanting to look at everything, but also knowing that you have to really be very clear on the handful that you're really going to look at. So we do have, a very small number of very top level ones. And we try to make sure everything nests, underneath. But in terms of those sort of leading indicators, for us, for example, we can see, we, we can see, for example, things like number of photos. That is the moment of a piece of friction where somebody is sitting on the sofa. They're listing their car. And unfortunately, there is the moment in time where somebody's going to have to go and take a photograph, and you have to leave the photo and you have to leave the sofa, and it might be that it's nighttime, or it might be that it's pouring with rain or something. So it's not just the person doesn't feel like doing it. There might be a real reason why they can't do it. So for us, we really look at that friction point very carefully because for us, that can tell us how everything is going to work subsequently. Because if by making sure that people can really find ways of making that point as easy as possible, we can then see how it's going to impact revenue down the line. So that is just one moment in a very sort of long funnel, but it's a really pivotal moment. So for example, things that we do, we send weather reminders. So if you didn't take a photo and let's say it was sort of pouring with rain, you can sign up and say, would you like us to to remind you to take a photo at another time and we can provide things like we provide an email, say, hey, we think it's going to be sunny. If you haven't taken your photos, maybe you'd like to do that this weekend because it's looking great.
Carlos González | Product school 00:23 Know that it's so amazing how those seemingly small details can make such a big difference. Exactly.
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:23 Well, and as Brits we all know, Brits are obsessed about the weather.
Carlos González | Product school 00:23 I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about org design. So I think specifically marketplaces, there are so many flavors, right. Like you can focus on the different persona. They use the life cycle. So how do you go about structuring your your team?
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:23 so I think it's probably, it's probably not, dissimilar to many other marketplaces because we have the team that looks very much in the eyes of the people who are selling their cars. And we have a team that's very focused on the dealer side. And then we also have teams, for example, that are looking at things like pricing, that sit outside because they're in many ways sort of like the mechanics Because of, the mechanics of the marketplace effectiveness. So we sort of split the team up in that way. But we're also very keen to make sure that we're understanding the impact of each other. So there's a lot of work done to make sure that the seller team, as you were quite rightly saying beforehand, the seller team are not inadvertently making life harder for the dealer team. So even though these teams work very clearly on their own roadmaps, there's a lot of effort that we make across the team to bring them together, to make sure that that sort of rather cliched sort of two and two makes five, so that anything that the seller team's doing, that if there's some goodness we can squeeze out for the dealer side, we'll do that. At the same time, when you're.
Carlos González | Product school 00:24 Ultimately the tiebreaker and when you're looking at your roadmap or your strategic plan and see competing priorities across maybe supply, demand and other opportunities, like what is your mental process to untie those situations?
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:25 Gosh, I think it probably there's a very sort of simplistic framework that I'll take. First of all, it'll be is it one of the company's top priorities? So if you're trying to decide between A versus B and something is a top level priority that our CEO feels really deeply about, and we as an executive feel really deeply about, then that sort of often tips the balance. it might be, for example, if they're both top level priorities, then you might make a decision as to which one is going to deliver impact fastest, or, for example, which one will yield the most important learnings that will allow you to go faster once you've made that decision. So you look at the sort of quality of the actionable insight you're going to get as a result of doing that. I think one of the things, I would say is that the most important thing is not going to analysis paralysis, because I'm a big believer in the the sort of move fast and pivot if you need to.
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:26 So when you're in that moment in time, you go, do I pick A or B? my guidance to every product leader is just pick one. You can change your mind afterwards, but whatever you do, don't delay. Yeah.
Carlos González | Product school 00:26 I like that last thing you said about you can change your mind later. Jeff Bezos talks about the two way door decisions. Yeah, I think sometimes the risking the decision by knowing that it's not the end of the world and just making the decision, trying and knowing that it doesn't work. You can change your mind ultimately helps people move on.
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:26 Yes. Yeah. And I think it's really important for PMS. You know, the most hygiene thing a PM needs to do in their job is to execute and you to execute. You need momentum. So I think that's the really most important thing that any of us can do because one, we love shipping things, we love making an impact. But also it's really important for the rest of the organization to see, hey, this team can ship things and hey, they can have impact.
Carlos González | Product school 00:27 I'm going to leave us with this. I, I hosted another podcast interview at Broadcom in San Francisco last year. It was with a CPO at Cisco, and he said something very similar. He's talked about momentum is the ability to execute with speed at scale. So I'm curious to know how you actually do it.
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:27 I think it's I think it's one where as leaders, we just have to be really clear on the direction we want teams to travel in, sort of what does success look like, and then make sure that those teams are really set up for success. so that might be sometimes getting out of the way, or sometimes it might be making sure they've got the right, resources to hand, etc.. So I agree, I think you do need to sort of execute. You really need the momentum. And I think, really great product teams. Also, to your very opening point about that curiosity are working out what are they learning this week that will mean they're better at their job the following week we have a we have a sort of motto at motorway, better every sprint, because we want every team to feel that they have that little bit of extra knowledge this week that allow them to do their job even better next week.
Carlos González | Product school 00:28 I'm going to finish this with a quote I actually learned from Mark Zuckerberg at another podcast. It's funny, there's a podcast in San Francisco that was hosted live. It's called acquired, I love it. And they they had Mark on stage and he was talking about the obsession around learning fast and how he wants his company to be remembered as the fastest learning organization. And that's what gives them the momentum to know that you can try, like what's not acceptable is not to try. Yeah. so thank you so much for being with us on stage.
Tanya Cordrey | Motorway 00:28 My pleasure. Thank you so much, everyone.