Etsy
Shaping the Future of Etsy Payments
Defining a long-term strategy and product vision to enhance trust, security, and scalability—ensuring Etsy’s payments ecosystem could support the company’s future growth.
Tags
Organization Strategy
Design Leadership
Collaboration
Product Discovery
Product Vision
Role
Design Lead, Payments
2
In-Year Product Launches
8.4%
1-Year Seller Sales Growth
$16M
1-Year Revenue Growth
Navigating Leadership Uncertainty in a Critical Organization
By 2023, Etsy’s Payments organization stood at a crossroads. The former Vice President had departed the year before, leaving the organization leaderless while the Executive Team conducted a global search for a replacement.
In the interim, Etsy’s Chief Operations and Strategy Officer, Raina Moskowitz assumed the role of general manager. At the same time, fellow senior cross-functional leads from product management and engineering and I took on day-to-day leadership responsibilities, keeping squads aligned and productive while minimizing disruption from the leadership gap. As Design Lead for the Payments organization, I was responsible for ensuring continuity in product strategy, discovery, and delivery, while driving design leadership across squads.
Together, we maintained squad velocity and devised short-term roadmaps to cover the current and upcoming quarter.
While this stopgap approach kept the organization running, its limitations quickly became clear. Without a unifying vision or long-term strategy, teams began operating with misaligned priorities. Decision-making fragmented, particularly for cross-functional initiatives requiring coordination across teams. Meanwhile, uncertainty about incoming leadership—potential reorganizations, shifting roadmaps—created anxiety amongst admin, fostering a short-term mindset that threatened to derail the organization’s contributions to Etsy’s broader strategic goals.
The Strategic Importance of Etsy Payments
Etsy Payments is the flywheel of the marketplace, powering 93% of Gross Merchandise Sales (GMS) and contributing 27% of Etsy’s consolidated revenue and 14% of its gross profit. It is built on a flexible and secure payments infrastructure that has evolved since its introduction in 2012. Over the years, Etsy expanded Etsy Payments to sellers in more than 40 countries.
For Buyers, Etsy Payments ensures trust and confidence by offering local payment methods such as PayPal, credit and debit cards, Etsy Gift Cards, and Etsy Credits, depending on the market. For Sellers, Etsy Payments reduces friction at checkout, increasing conversion rates while simplifying how sellers receive payouts. To date, the system has successfully processed over 1 billion payment transactions between 6.4 million Sellers and 91 million Buyers.
The Risk of Fragmentation Without Leadership
With no executive leadership in place to define strategic ownership, squads from across Etsy began making competing claims over areas historically managed by Payments. The Cart squad, for example, proposed taking over Checkout, citing its proximity to the Buyer journey. But this approach failed to account for the complexity of Etsy’s Payments infrastructure—including fraud detection, compliance, and risk management—systems they didn’t have deep knowledge of. Similarly, Seller squads made parallel arguments for managing components of the payments experience at scale.
This territorial friction signaled a growing misalignment—and a real risk that Payments would be excluded from Etsy’s annual planning process, where each org submits its strategy to influence company-wide priorities. As the mechanism facilitating every transaction on the platform, I believed Payments couldn’t afford to be sidelined.
To address this, I approached Moskowitz with a proposal to lead a cross-functional working group to develop a long-term strategy for Payments. I led the group and authored the strategy in close partnership with a senior Strategy & Operations leader, who ensured alignment with Etsy’s evolving company-wide goals and facilitated reviews with the Executive Team and Board. Together, we brought in senior leaders from across the business—including Product, Engineering, Risk, Finance, Tax, and International—as well as our cross-functional squads, to co-create a forward-looking, actionable plan for Etsy Payments.
My argument rested on three key points:
1. Payments’ Central Role in Etsy’s Strategy
While smaller, less critical organizations might weather a lack of participation in company-wide annual planning, Payments was too pivotal to be left out. Having designed both Buyer and Seller experiences before joining Payments, I understood that Payments’ strategy wasn’t just about Payments—it provided essential guidance for product teams across Etsy. Without a clear Payments roadmap, teams building customer-facing experiences lacked the strategic direction needed to align their work with Etsy’s business goals.
2. Reinforcing Confidence in Leadership
Developing a strategy would signal to the Payments team that its leadership remained focused on advancing their work and the organization’s mission, despite the absence of a permanent executive. Without a defined strategy, even fundamental operational needs—such as forecasting budgets and headcount for the upcoming year—would be left uncertain.
3. Setting Up the Incoming Leader for Success
While the incoming VP would inevitably shape their own vision for Payments, presenting a fully developed, executive-backed strategy aligned with interdependent product squads would provide a valuable starting point. Even if they chose to discard or revise parts of it, having a clear articulation of what not to do could be just as critical as defining what to pursue. A turnkey strategy would signal that the organization was capable, forward-thinking, and prepared for a smooth leadership transition.
Securing Executive Sponsorship
The executive team agreed. To ensure alignment with Etsy’s corporate goals and secure explicit executive sponsorship, I established a structured feedback loop with the Executive Team.
I shared strategy drafts for review, incorporated their input into subsequent iterations, and ensured ongoing collaboration. This approach not only aligned the Payments strategy with Etsy’s overarching vision but also secured executive endorsement.
By involving the executive team early and often, we reinforced trust in Payments’ leadership, underscored the strategy’s importance across the company, and demonstrated our ability to operate cohesively during a pivotal moment.
A Bottoms-Up Approach to Strategy
At Etsy, product squads are given business and customer problems to solve and are empowered to determine the best way to address them. This approach contrasts sharply with traditional «command and control» leadership, where leaders dictate a roadmap of features and projects. Instead, Etsy’s squads operate with real autonomy—held accountable for results while being entrusted with the responsibility to innovate.
«There are essentially two main ways that you can lead a product organization. You can lead by ‹command and control,› which means explicitly telling your people what to do, usually by assigning them a roadmap of features and projects. The alternative is empowering teams—assigning them customer problems to solve and letting the teams determine the best way to solve them.»
—Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group
This autonomy fosters two key outcomes: first, squads rise to the challenge and develop innovative solutions, and second, leadership can leverage squad-led initiatives to shape Etsy’s strategic trajectory. By examining past work, ongoing efforts, and emerging opportunities, leadership can curate a portfolio of initiatives—refining and expanding existing ones to increase their impact while identifying new «whitespace» opportunities that create fresh value and drive long-term growth.
Applying the AmEx Way of Strategy Development
There are many ways to devise a strategy. When I was a member of the Strategy & Operations team, I learned an approach from my former manager, Moskowitz, who previously served as VP of Strategy & Business Operations at American Express (AmEx).
This approach—I’ve come to think of as the AmEx Way—is rooted in the Socratic Method, a process of disciplined questioning that uncovers knowledge, challenges assumptions, and generates insights that form the foundation of strategy. At its core, the Socratic Method helps pressure-test ideas by distinguishing what we think we know from what we truly understand. By asking seemingly simple questions, teams can uncover inconsistencies or contradictions in their thinking, revealing gaps that might otherwise go unnoticed.
At AmEx, this approach was applied in a structured, methodical way through a strategic questioning framework. A large working group of domain experts was assembled from across the company, including employees closest to the customer—such as cross-functional members from product squads, researchers, and frontline support teams. The group was then broken into smaller working groups of 2–3 people, each responsible for answering key strategic questions within a specific topic area.
Once each working group had developed responses to their assigned questions, they reconvened to share their findings. This process served as the first step in establishing a shared strategic direction, ensuring that insights came from employees, not top-down mandates. This approach reinforced organizational alignment, leveraging expertise from those closest to the business to shape high-level decision-making.
The AmEx framework followed a structured sequence of five key topics, with a broader set of guiding questions under each. The examples in the figure below represent a sample of the types of questions used in the process.
The AmEx Way is a bottoms-up strategy approach rooted in the Socratic Method—using structured, collaborative inquiry to align teams and uncover strategic insights. By organizing cross-functional experts into small groups to answer foundational questions about the market, customers, and product, this method surfaces deep knowledge from those closest to the business and helps shape informed, organization-wide direction.
Using the AmEx Framework to Shape Etsy’s Strategy
My time on the Strategy & Operations team began when Moskowitz asked me join a high-stakes strategic initiative at the behest of Etsy’s CEO, Josh Silverman. Soon after taking the helm, Silverman sought to establish a «SWAT team»—a rapid-response group deployed across Etsy to tackle complex, cross-functional challenges. Our approach was simple: diagnose the problem, implement a solution, ensure knowledge transfer, and move on to the next challenge.
What began as a tactical initiative quickly became indispensable. Over time, the original 3-person SWAT team evolved into a 40-member team responsible for company-wide strategic planning, operational improvements, and high-impact initiatives that shaped Etsy’s long-term trajectory.
Since both Silverman and Moskowitz came from American Express, Etsy’s approach to strategy naturally reflected their backgrounds. The AmEx Way—with its rigorous questioning framework, deep analytical approach, and cross-functional collaboration—became my blueprint for tackling problems at scale.
A Structured Approach to Etsy’s First Long-Term Strategy
Working alongside Moskowitz and the two other founding members of Etsy’s Strategy & Operations team, we applied the AmEx framework firsthand to help formulate Etsy’s first long-term company strategy under Silverman’s leadership. This wasn’t just theory—it was a structured, proven approach for identifying opportunities, pressure-testing ideas, and aligning initiatives with Etsy’s broader vision.
Keep Commerce Human isn't just a slogan—it emerged from Etsy’s first long-term strategy setting process as a reflection of what truly sets the marketplace apart. It recognized that Etsy’s strength lies in its Sellers—their creativity, individuality, and craft are why Buyers come. It celebrates the people behind the products and put them at the heart of Etsy’s mission.
This process helped Silverman and the Executive Team define Etsy’s strategic foundation:
Mission: Keep Commerce Human, reinforcing Etsy’s identity as a marketplace built on real people and creative entrepreneurship.
Value Proposition: A shift from handmade to special, positioning Etsy not just as a platform for handcrafted goods but as the destination for unique, meaningful items—a distinction that set it apart from mass-market competitors.
Competitive Moat: A marketplace at scale with powerful network effects, ensuring that Etsy’s competitive advantage was reinforced by its growing ecosystem of Buyers and Sellers.
By applying the AmEx strategic questioning framework, we didn’t just draft a strategy—we helped crystallize Etsy’s long-term identity and market positioning, shaping how the company would define, communicate, and defend its role in e-commerce. The strategy’s major components are illustrated in the figure below. To view the webcast of Silverman unveiling Etsy’s long-term strategy to investors, visit the Etsy Investor Relations site.
The AmEx framework helped align strategy with execution by connecting high-level business goals to day-to-day product development. Etsy’s executive team set a clear north star—$10B in GMS—and invested in initiatives and squads based on the company’s mission, vision, and strategic pillars. Execution was guided by a regular cadence of reviews at both the initiative and squad levels, allowing leadership to monitor progress, adjust plans, and ensure all work remained aligned with long-term strategy.
Bringing the AmEx Framework to Etsy’s Payments Strategy
Years later, when I led the development of the Etsy Payments Strategy, the AmEx framework was a natural fit. I knew that when my work reached Moskowitz and Silverman, they would recognize its strategic discipline—because it drew from the same structured approach we had used to reshape Etsy’s business at large.
Key slides from the Payments Strategy deck—developed using the same AmEx framework that informed Etsy’s company-wide vision—outline our mission, long-term goals, and strategic focus areas. These were shared with the Executive Team and board, and later presented at All Hands to align the Payments organization and Etsy Admin at large.
To support Etsy’s long-term growth, the Payments team introduced its first medium- and long-range strategy (2025–2030), marking a shift from short-term tactics to a bold, mission- and vision-driven approach. The new mission, Turn money into joy, reframed Payments from a utility into a strategic growth engine capable of empowering both Buyers and Sellers. Supporting this is a renewed vision centered on trust, seamless experiences, and delivering value—especially to the millions of Sellers who rely on Etsy to start, manage, and grow their creative business.
Discovery as a Tool for Strategy Development
At Etsy, product discovery is the process of identifying valuable new products, features, or improvements that customers are willing to exchange time, money, or attention for. Our approach combines a Lean and Agile mindset, Marty Cagan’s four product risks (value, usability, feasibility, and viability), and practical tools like Google’s Design Sprint. Together, these methods help teams identify real customer problems and develop the right solutions—what Cagan calls «the fundamental principle of all modern product development.»
The process begins with divergent thinking, then narrows through research, exploratory design, and feasibility analysis. Discovery ultimately yields tangible artifacts—insights, prototypes, impact projections—that shape product vision and accelerate alignment.
Planning, facilitating, and synthesizing discovery outcomes became a cornerstone of strategy development for Payments. As a design leader, I find this work especially fulfilling when it unblocks teams and leads to breakthrough innovation. To learn more about how Etsy applies product discovery at scale, read my case study: Leading Etsy’s Product Revolution.
Product discovery is a collaborative process—but not in the shallow sense. True breakthroughs happen when designers, product managers, and engineers come together to exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, and spark creative collisions. As much as executives, marketers, or designers might believe they’re the source of the best ideas, Marty Cagan reminds us: «Some of the best product ideas come from the engineers.» D.I.W.O. (Do It With Others) is a mindset I’ve practiced throughout my career—from co-designing with engineers to facilitating workshops with executives. When we create space for creative collisions, we unlock solutions no one could reach alone.
One particularly compelling initiative to emerge from discovery was a reimagining of Etsy’s gift card experience—introducing physical gift cards and revamping the digital purchase, gifting, and redemption flow. Sparked by data, validated through user research, and shaped by customer needs, the initiative is now live and driving incremental revenue.
The Strategic Opportunity in Gift Cards
The idea stemmed from a surprising analytics insight: only 0.54% of Buyers redeemed an Etsy digital gift card the previous year.
Discovering insights like this is often the key to breakthroughs. The ability to spot a buried data point—hidden within an 80-slide research report—and recognize its potential is a skill in itself. For me, uncovering such an insight always sparks a desire to dig deeper.
We tasked two product designers with auditing the current gift card experience and hypothesizing why redemption rates were so low. Their findings were striking:
Etsy gift cards were not redeemable in the Buy on Etsy apps—a major opportunity, given that 68% of GMS in 2023 came from mobile.
No single squad «owned» the gift card redemption experience, leaving it without a dedicated team responsible for ensuring a seamless, end-to-end journey. As a result, critical usability gaps emerged.
Buyers couldn’t schedule delivery dates for gift cards, which meant they were sent immediately—removing the ability to time a purchase for a birthday or holiday.
These friction points effectively halted users in their tracks.
We hypothesized that addressing these usability issues could unlock significant value. To validate the opportunity, we partnered with an analyst to estimate the potential impact, which confirmed that gift cards represented a major growth opportunity.
Given its potential, refining the digital gift card experience—and introducing physical gift cards—became a core initiative within the Payments Strategy.
An audit of the existing customer experience uncovered a major strategic opportunity: Etsy gift cards couldn’t be redeemed in the Buy on Etsy app. By identifying this overlooked gap and addressing key usability issues—like delivery timing—we transformed a neglected feature into a core strategic initiative. Left: Insight uncovered in a CX audit conducted by Payments Product Designers. Right: Redesigned mobile experience for gift card discovery, purchase, and redemption.
By applying a bottoms-up approach—leveraging squad-driven insights, structured strategic questioning, and rigorous discovery—we ensured that the Payments Strategy wasn’t dictated from the top-down, but rather emerged from the teams closest to the work.
This approach not only made the strategy stronger and more actionable but also ensured alignment, buy-in, and enthusiasm from the teams responsible for bringing it to life.
Articulating Strategy Through Long-form Writing and Product Vision
Proposing new capabilities—like enabling gift card redemption—is the engine that propels strategy forward. But a rocket, no matter how powerful its engine or sleek its fuselage, cannot lift off without a clear trajectory. Vision provides that trajectory—ensuring that individual capabilities align with a broader strategic direction, guiding the Payments organization toward achieving its goals.
To convey the vision and ensure the strategy was accessible to everyone—from managers overseeing customer support to board members pressure-testing its foundations—I created both a long-form narrative and a visual presentation deck. The narrative was designed for executives who not only needed to understand what we were proposing but why. Prose allows for the depth and nuance necessary to explain rationale, which slides alone cannot achieve.
This tradition of long-form writing as a tool for articulating corporate strategy is well established. Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard, wrote Let My People Go Surfing to outline the company’s values and sustainability mission, connecting them to its long-term business strategy. Similarly, Jeff Bezos used Amazon’s annual shareholder letters to express not just performance, but philosophy—laying out the company’s priorities, values, and strategic direction in a clear and comprehensive narrative that aligned both employees and investors.
Bezos’s commitment to writing runs deeper than annual letters. At Amazon, he famously banned slide presentations in favor of six-page, narratively structured memos—read silently at the beginning of meetings. As he wrote in a shareholder letter, «Slide decks can hide shallow thinking. Narratively structured memos are harder to write because they require better thinking. It’s worth it.» These memos, often co-written but always written with clarity, are not just documentation—they’re tools for better decision-making. Sometimes they include imagined future press releases to help teams clarify the value of a proposed initiative. As Bezos puts it: «Even in the example of writing a six-page memo, that’s teamwork. Someone on the team needs to have the skill.»
«Slide decks can hide shallow thinking. Narratively structured memos are harder to write because they require better thinking. It’s worth it.»
—Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon
This belief—that clarity of writing is clarity of thought—has deeply influenced how many modern product and strategy leaders operate, including Etsy’s Silverman and Moskowitz. Under their leadership, long-form writing became a critical part of Etsy’s strategic culture. It wasn’t just a communication artifact—it was how we shaped thinking, surfaced insights, aligned teams, and ultimately, made decisions that scaled.
Etsy’s long-form Payments Strategy focused on two key elements:
A Reflective «Look Back»: The long-form document began by examining the impact of past efforts on customers’ lives and Etsy’s business. As my former manager, Moskowitz, liked to say: «We need to look back in order to look forward.» Reviewing past successes and failures helped clarify which mistakes to avoid, which failures warranted revisiting with fresh perspectives, and how previous wins were achieved.
A Product Vision to Inspire and Align: Long-form narratives outline why we are pursuing a strategy, but product vision illustrates the outcome we are working to achieve. Marty Cagan defines product vision as «the future we are trying to create, typically somewhere between two to five years out. Its primary purpose is to inspire the teams to want to help make this vision a reality.»
I see product vision as both a strategic and leadership tool:
Strategically, it clarifies the customer problems we aim to solve in the future, not just those we see today.
As a leadership tool, it aligns teams around a shared understanding of success—if we can achieve this vision, we will have fulfilled the goals set forth in the strategy.
Product Vision in Practice: Learning from Amazon and Apple
Tech companies have long used product vision to set strategic direction. One of my favorite examples comes from Amazon. In 2014, Amazon shared a vision for Prime Air, its drone delivery service. The short film showcased how customers would interact with the service in complex physical and digital environments, while also revealing the «backstage» orchestration of systems and workers needed to make it possible. Prime Air wasn’t an immediate product launch; rather, the vision rallied teams around a long-term ambition, setting the stage for future development. Famously, just two years after publishing the vision, Bezos announced Amazon’s first successful drone delivery on Twitter.
Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator was a bold product vision designed to inspire, align, and provoke critical questions about the future of computing. Like Amazon’s Prime Air, it illustrated how integrated technology could serve real human needs, decades before the tech was ready. Vision, as this video shows, isn’t about predicting the future—it’s about imagining the one worth building.
A second example comes from Apple’s 1987 product vision, Knowledge Navigator. This short film depicted a professor using voice commands to interact with a networked database of hypertext information, aided by software agents. Apple’s creative team described it as a «science-fiction video» designed to explore how disparate technologies could be integrated into a coherent user experience. This vision wasn’t just an internal exercise—it sparked widespread discussion, both inside and outside of Apple, about the future of computing. It asked a fundamental question: Is this the way we want to use technology?
In both cases, product vision served as the first step toward strategy—providing the context necessary for product development. As former Apple employee Greg McCandless put it:
«So here we sit, 25 years later, and much of what is portrayed in this video is real. It should remind all of us that vision is the first step toward making something happen, and without vision, people cling with an iron fist to what they have, no matter how ugly it happens to be.»
—Greg McCandless, Apple
Marty Cagan defines product vision as a depiction of the future we’re trying to create—one that inspires teams to help bring it to life. Above: A vision for the future of Etsy Payments, built on trust. In this future, Etsy has earned the right to offer Buyers and Sellers greater convenience and flexibility through new products and services—such as working capital (e.g., cash advances and loans) for Sellers, and co-branded credit cards with rewards for Buyers.
How I Lead Through Strategy Setting
Writing long-form strategy documents and developing product vision are not just artifacts of the strategy process—they are practical leadership tools. They make strategy tangible, align teams around a shared future, and ensure that individual initiatives fit into a cohesive, long-term vision.
I believe creating product vision isn’t just about providing clarity—it’s a catalyst for change. While other parts of Etsy’s marketplace evolved at a rapid pace, Payments had largely remained untouched, a reality I surfaced in the Optimizing Etsy’s Checkout case study. Unlike the Buyer and Seller teams, which had a strong track record of shipping new features, Payments lacked the muscle memory for product innovation. This inertia was due in part to the complexity of the system—where risk, compliance, and financial regulations made change feel daunting.
To break that cycle, we didn’t start from scratch. Instead, we looked across the organization and surfaced the exploratory work product designers had already produced. Over the years, Etsy product squads had crafted a rich body of discovery provocations—sketches, prototypes, and speculative concepts. Many of these already reflected the ambitions outlined in our Payments strategy. What they lacked wasn’t imagination, but positioning: a clear articulation of how these ideas fit together, and why the time was right to invest in them now.
We didn’t invent the vision from scratch—we surfaced it. By curating exploratory concepts already developed by product squads, we created a unified product vision grounded in real discovery work. This bottoms-up approach elevated ideas from those closest to the customer, giving them strategic framing, executive visibility, and renewed momentum. Above: A vision for enabling checkout «anytime, anywhere»—in this case, directly within a Buyer–Seller conversation. By disentangling purchase from the traditional, cart-initiated flow, we hypothesize this experience could increase checkout completion rate—one of the most critical metrics for every Payments squad.
By curating this existing work into a unified product vision, we took a bottoms-up approach to vision-setting—elevating ideas from those closest to the customer and giving them strategic framing and executive visibility. This made the vision deeply credible to leadership and inspiring to teams.
One example was the introduction of a new loan product for Sellers. By aligning around a customer-centric product vision, we not only demonstrated what the experience could look like, but how it could meaningfully impact Etsy Sellers—helping them purchase inventory and grow sustainably. The vision resonated so strongly with Payments leadership that piloting the cash advance product became a fast follow to publishing the strategy—accelerating its path from concept to execution.
Much like Apple’s Knowledge Navigator or Amazon’s Prime Air, this product vision didn’t just describe the future—it helped shape it, giving the Payments organization the confidence and clarity to move forward.
A well-crafted product vision isn’t just aspirational—it’s a leadership tool that makes strategy tangible and inspires action. To help Etsy’s Payments organization overcome inertia and imagine a more customer-centered future, I created a vision for a Seller loan product that showed how access to capital could help sellers invest, grow, and thrive. The vision aligned stakeholders, energized leadership, and accelerated the launch of Etsy’s Cash Advance pilot—transforming a concept into execution.
Demonstrating Impact While Laying a Foundation for the Future
The Payments strategy I authored immediately began delivering tangible results, with its full impact expected to unfold in the coming years. Designed as a multi-year roadmap, the strategy positions Etsy to unlock new opportunities and maintain its competitive edge well into the next decade.
As a fast follow to publishing the strategy, we enhanced the digital gift card experience and introduced physical gift cards, making them available in major U.S. retailers such as Target, CVS, and Best Buy. Additionally, we launched a pilot for a cash advance product aimed at U.S. sellers. This initiative—designed to provide accessible capital without requiring a hard credit check—validated a key hypothesis from the strategy. Within two months, 192 sellers borrowed a total of $700,000, with the average advance totaling $3,750. Early results were promising: sellers who accessed capital through our partner YouLend saw their sales grow by an average of 8.4%—28% higher than similar shops without funding. This success reinforced confidence in the opportunity to invest further in financial products that empower sellers and diversify Etsy’s revenue streams.
In 2024, the year following the strategy’s publication, Etsy’s consolidated revenue hit $662.4 million—a 4.1% increase compared to 2023—driven by an additional $16 million in incremental Payments revenue. These gains are particularly notable given the macroeconomic headwinds: GMS had declined from $13.49 billion in 2021 to $13.32 billion in 2022, and further to $13.16 billion in 2023. In Q3 2024, consolidated GMS stood at $2.92 billion, a 4.1% decrease year-over-year. Despite this contraction, Payments initiatives demonstrated the ability to drive meaningful revenue growth, reinforcing its role as a key revenue driver even in a challenging market.
Looking ahead, the Payments strategy will continue to serve as a north star, guiding the organization’s initiatives and enabling cross-functional teams to deliver new capabilities and experiences. Its mission—Turn money into joy—and vision will ensure Etsy Payments remains a cornerstone of the marketplace, driving growth and innovation for years to come.
Conclusion
Throughout this work, my leadership was defined by bringing clarity to ambiguity, shaping a compelling vision, and driving strategic alignment across disciplines. By combining bottoms-up product discovery with top-down strategic framing, I ensured that Payments didn’t just react to immediate challenges but actively shaped its future.
At its core, this case study reflects my approach to strategic product leadership: aligning teams around a shared vision, ensuring that big ideas translate into tangible outcomes, and navigating complexity with a clear, customer-centered direction—even in the most ambiguous environments.
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