Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:04)
When I asked to my newsletter Slack community, who I should have on the podcast who's a bit under the radar, but amazing. Nickey Skarstad was the first name that I heard, and I was not surprised. I actually overlapped with Nickey at Airbnb, where she had a legendary reputation as a PM who everyone loved, but got shit done. Before Airbnb, Nickey worked at Etsy for over seven years, where she went from being a forum moderator to director of product management. Then she went on to work at Airbnb for a couple of years. After leaving, she went on to be a VP of product at The Wing and is currently a director of product management at Duolingo. In our conversation, we cover how to set vision, translate that into goals and then how to execute on it, making your strategy actionable and keeping your teams aligned and focused, designing your product review sessions, how to maintain product quality, and what skills have most contributed to her success in her career. I hope that you enjoy this conversation with Nickey Skarstad.
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Nickey, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really excited for a chat and to get to learn from you, so welcome.

**Nickey Skarstad** (3:28)
Thank you, thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:30)
My pleasure.
Today, you are Director of Product at Duolingo, which is an awesome product and something that I used to use. I'm not learning a language currently, but I know where to go if I were to. Can you just talk about how you got into product and then a bit about just kind of your journey from that point to where you are today?

**Nickey Skarstad** (3:47)
Yeah, so it's been a long meandering journey, which is fun. And so I've been in technology roles now for 12 years. I've been in PM roles, actually product roles, for 10 So I'm starting to be the person with experience in the room, which is really fun and kind of daunting at times. But how I got my first role in product was, I was at Etsy in 2010 is when I joined. And I joined them, it was like post-product market fit, but before they truly started to like really grow and scale. And I actually joined them on their community team. So I worked as a forums moderator, and then as a seller education specialist.
Yeah, I spent a couple of years doing that. And then through that process became sort of like one of the internal voices that had a really good understanding of how their customer, one of their core customers, their sellers were actually using their product.