In this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast, host Melissa Perri sits down with Sean Kim, former Head of Product at TikTok and a key figure behind the platform’s innovative features, including the popular Stitch functionality. Sean shares his insights on product management gleaned from his extensive experience at both Amazon and TikTok, emphasizing the importance of customer behavior in guiding product development.

Sean discusses how his team at Amazon optimized customer retention through data-driven strategies, ultimately increasing Prime subscriptions by honing in on customer benefits and by automating messaging. Transitioning to TikTok, he reveals how he leveraged similar principles to foster a culture of empowerment among product managers, enabling them to own their projects and drive impactful results. He highlights the need for clarity in vision and metrics, ensuring that teams are aligned and able to innovate freely within a structured framework.

Whether you're a product manager, leader, or simply interested in the tech industry's evolution, this episode offers invaluable lessons on creating meaningful products that resonate with users and sustain growth in an ever-changing landscape.

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Sean’s success in improving Amazon Prime retention relied on identifying and promoting high-value actions—specific behaviors that correlated strongly with long-term retention. These actions included things like taking advantage of Prime shipping, streaming Prime Video, or using Prime Music within the first few days of membership. Through data analysis and cohort studies, Sean’s team learned that customers who used multiple benefits early in their membership had much higher retention rates.

His approach was deeply data-driven, utilizing machine learning to analyze customer behaviors and run tests across different markets. The team automated processes to test various hypotheses, such as which benefits to promote to specific demographic groups, and then used those insights to optimize the customer experience. This level of personalization and testing at scale helped Amazon Prime develop a highly effective strategy for improving customer retention through tailored engagement.

Sean shared insights into how both Amazon and TikTok foster a sense of ownership among product managers (PMs), which empowers them to make decisions and execute on company goals. At both companies, PMs were responsible for identifying the problems they wanted to solve in alignment with key business objectives like improving retention or daily active users (DAUs). Sean highlighted the autonomy given to PMs, noting that no one dictated specific actions, but rather, PMs were expected to create their own strategies and negotiate the resources needed for execution.

Sean’s development of the Stitch feature at TikTok provides an example of how great products can emerge from observing user behavior. The feature wasn’t initially part of TikTok’s product roadmap; instead, it came about after noticing that users were downloading videos, adding their reactions via third-party software, and re-uploading them. Recognizing this clunky process, Sean’s team worked on integrating the behavior directly into the app, thus making it much easier for users to create content by stitching their reactions with other videos.

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Previous guests include: Shruti Patel of US Bank, Steve Wilson of Contrast Security, Bethany Lyons of KAWA Analytics, Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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