Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest)

December 27, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Sarah Tavel, a partner at Benchmark and former first product manager at Pinterest, shares two frameworks to guide founders building consumer social products and marketplaces. Drawing from her experience, she critiques vanity metrics like MAUs and GMV, emphasizing focus on core actions and constrained opportunities to create enduring value.

Hierarchy of Engagement

Consumer products succeed by climbing three levels of engagement. Level 1 is defining and driving the core action—such as pinning on Pinterest, friending on early Facebook, or subscribing on YouTube—that signals understanding and predicts return visits. Founders identify this through bottom-up analysis (actions most correlated with next-week retention) and top-down reasoning (does it capture the product's essence?). The new user experience must lead to this action quickly. Level 2 builds retention by making the product improve with use and create mounting loss, like Pinterest's personalized feeds from pins or Evernote's searchable note repository. Level 3 makes it self-perpetuating via network effects and loops: growth loops for sharing (e.g., collaborative invites), SEO from metadata, and re-engagement notifications (e.g., "Sarah pinned your pin").

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What you'll learn

1 `* (00:01:28) **Guest Intro: Sarah Tavel, ex-Pinterest PM, Benchmark Partner**`
2 `* (00:03:49) **Hierarchy of Engagement Overview & Level 1: Core Action**`
3 `* (00:10:32) **Level 2: Retention (Gets Better, More to Lose)**`
4 `* (00:13:56) **Level 3: Self-Perpetuating (Loops & Network Effects)**`
5 `* (00:38:54) **Hierarchy of Marketplaces Overview**`
6 `* (00:46:13) **Marketplaces Level 1: Extreme Focus (Thimble, Happy GMV)**`
7 `* (00:58:10) **Level 2: Tipping the Market (Growth/Happiness Loops)**`

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Sarah Tavel is a General Partner at Benchmark and sits on the boards of Chainalysis, Hipcamp, Rekki, Cambly, and Medely. She is a founding member of All Raise, the nonprofit organization working to accelerate the success of women in the venture-capital and VC-backed startup ecosystem. Before Benchmark, Sarah was a partner at Greylock Partners. She joined Pinterest in 2012 as their first PM and launched their first search and recommendations features. She also led three acquisitions as she helped the company scale through a period of hypergrowth. In this episode, we discuss:

Sarah’s Hierarchy of Engagement framework for growing a consumer startup

• The three levels of the Hierarchy of Engagement: core action, retention, and self-perpetuation

• The importance of measuring cohorts and maintaining focus on the core action

• Examples of core user actions from Pinterest and YouTube

Sarah’s Hierarchy of Marketplaces framework for building a marketplace startup

• The three vectors of growth for dominating a marketplace

• Advice on “tipping the marketplace” and ultimately dominating the market

• The value of focusing on a constrained market

• How to avoid disruption

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