Building Products for Loyal Audiences w/ Dheerja Kaur, Chief Product Officer at theSkimm

Hey everybody, this is Mike DelSito, co-founder of Product Collective, and we're back for another Industry Interview. I am excited to be here. I hope everybody is having a great Wednesday. We're halfway through the week, so that's an awesome thing. I want to get to our guest pretty quickly, but first, for those of you that haven't been to an Industry Interview before, first of all, welcome. I'm glad that you're here, but I also want to give you a little bit of a taste of what you might expect. These sessions, these are 30-minute sessions that we have with product leaders from really all over. We have a couple coming up that you could check out at the main page, but these are a lot of fun. Actually, you know, I have a lot of questions here for our guests, but really I hope that you have some questions too. And if you do, there's a section, you should see it probably at the bottom, it says, "Ask a question." So anytime you have a question, it could be right now that you want to tee up for later on, feel free to put your question there. And during the conversation, at the end of the conversation, really throughout all parts, I'm monitoring that and will do my best to get to as many audience questions as I can. I love taking your questions even more so than mine because usually they're better than mine. So anyway, please keep questions coming there. There is a chat also. That's a great place to just introduce yourself, let people know where you're from, what product you're working on. So you could say hello there and also maybe let me know if you can hear and see us okay, because that's always reassuring to know. But anyway, yeah, so that's everything to share about industry interviews. If you aren't a part of Product Collective, definitely encourage you to join Product Collective. It's free to do that. Product Collective is just the organization that brings industry interviews to you. So you could go to productcollective.com. It's a community for product people. So we invite you to these chats every so often. We do them twice a month usually. We also have a newsletter that goes out every week, very active Slack channel. We have about 7,000 people in the Slack community. And then we also put a conference on twice a year, once in Europe, which actually is 4 weeks from yesterday. So I am getting ready for that. And then that's in Dublin, Ireland, by the way. And then we also have our global edition of Industry. That's the name of the conference. In Cleveland, Ohio in the fall. So you could check that out at industryconference.com. And actually there should be a button that will link right to Industry Conference. And if you use the code this week, DeirjaIsAwesome, you'll save 20% off of any pass you choose. So something for you there. And speaking of DeirjaIsAwesome, Deirja is awesome, by the way. I wanna introduce you to our guest, Deirja Kaur, who's the Chief Product Officer at The Skimm. How's it going, Derya?

Hey, so excited.

It's awesome to see you again. I know we got to hang out at Industry a couple months back, but I'm glad to have you on for this. And I know a lot of people are huge fans of The Skimm, and I know you've been there for a little bit now. And I don't know, I think of The Skimm as one of those products that has this like intense following. So that's why I thought, you know, the whole topic of building products for, you know, people that are loyal to that product. I thought that might be a good session for us to focus in on.

Sounds great, let's do it.

Awesome. Well, let's start. Maybe you could just share a little bit more about you and also your role at The Skimm. And just, I know, you know, some people might think The Skimm and they think newsletter, but it's a lot more than that. So maybe you could just start there if you don't mind.

Yeah, totally. So super excited to be doing this. Mike is awesome and so is Industry. So I'll do my version of the plug that you should totally sign up and join one of their events. It's a truly fantastic experience. But the skim. So my background is I've always been in digital product development. I started out in engineering, moved into product, worked at ESPN for a while. Actually moved into product when product was first created at ESPN. So saw that grow and build when from a place where PMs weren't a thing to an org of like 35 PMs. But I joined The Skimm, it was 10 people writing a newsletter. We have grown a lot over the years. We're now at almost 100 employees, but more importantly, we have really evolved the brand the products and what we do here. The Skimm's mission is help female millennials live smarter lives. So that started with our kind of anchor product, which is a morning daily Skimm newsletter. But from there, we've built out our product suite. We have an app that's actually a subscription offering that brings you a few other utilities to help you kind of live smarter in terms of what's happening in the world. We now have audio and video products. We've done a lot around the elections. And then what I like to say is we sort of built out a suite of products and content offerings that help you throughout throughout your day, throughout your week, throughout your life, really, and making sure you're just on top of what's happening.

Awesome. Well, and I said before, it's much more than the newsletter, but I do appreciate the newsletter because it's a great product. Daily newsletter that I am, like, paying attention to every single day. So I appreciate that.

I can check that. So I can fact-check you on that. But that's great. Just kidding.

No, so I do have a question for you, though. I said before, The Skimm seems like one of those brands where, again, it has fans and those fans are pretty loyal to it. Do you agree with that? And why do you think that is the case?

100% agree. It was one of the biggest reasons why I even joined the company. I like to say that my job is the best because what I got to do was walk into a brand and a company that had built such an amazing, unique relationship with its audience. And then you just got to figure out what to build for them, which is not an easy challenge, but it's a fun one that we'll talk about later. When it comes to the Skimm and that loyal relationship, I think of it in two distinct ways. One is the brand as a whole, its mission of informing women, making them feel more confident, and helping them live their lives in a smarter way. There's something really special about that. And it almost is this je ne sais quoi. There's the voice and the actual editorial content and the way we speak to our audience that just automatically taps into this friendly, trusting relationship that you just don't see with a lot of brands and their readership and their audiences. I think it's also the mission, you know, the audience that we serve, we really genuinely help them, you know, whether it's our elections products where we help you register to vote in 2 clicks, or build your ballot for the midterms in 2 clicks, or getting that newsletter every single morning and going to work and feeling like you just know what you're talking about. Those are just like these kind of elements that make this a really, really special brand that has this deep, deep relationship with its readership, where they truly love us and they, they, we are their best friends. The second is also probably really relevant to this group, which is that that's not all a coincidence. Since day one, the founders, and to this day, we have this ruthless focus on making sure that everything we do is actually solving a problem and building value with an audience and having kind of a North Star behind that. And it's really easy to pivot away from that, get distracted get distracted from that and fall into the trap of, you know, kind of creating just content for the sake of creating content, you know, and just like kind of losing sight of the actual value that you're providing to somebody. And so what we like to say is that what the Skims brand and products do is merge information and utility. So every piece of content that we deliver, whether it's the newsletter, whether it's the calendar integration in our app, whether it's our midterm elections tools, those are like tools that help you actually take action and live smarter. That we're not just like shoving content in your face. And in today's world where your social feeds, like, you know, uh, you know, a lot of media companies, to be perfectly honest, are just like producing volumes of content to distract you with headlines. Um, us kind of cutting through that noise with our products has been really, really special to building that relationship.

Well, I, and I imagine to be able to do all that, like you have to have an amazing understanding of your users. Like how, how do you approach that at The Skimm?

Yeah. So, I mean, first and foremost, we made a pretty heavy investment in both analytics, but also user insights and research from a very early stage. I believe our insights lead was one of our 20th employees. You know, we really made a bet on that where we said that it's not just a nice to have, it's something that will make sure that the company is accountable to the audience that we have. So I like to say is that insights and analytics almost serve this like church and state function at The Skimm, where they hold the business accountable to what the audience is actually doing and saying. And so the product team, the marketing team, the sales team, editorial team, this team really holds all those groups accountable to that and says, you know, no, this is where the audience actually is. This is what their problems actually are. This is what your product is actually doing for them. And I think that's been huge for us because of that investment from an early stage. So the way they approach that is obviously, you know, the more traditional ways of kind of measuring what our products are currently doing, running qualitative feedback and all of that. But they also do a lot of pretty bigger picture market research to inform our future strategy. What I like to say is like, that is us having a pulse on our audience and how they are changing over time so that we're following that. So for example, millennials are really changing. Millennials today are very different from the millennial audience 5 years ago and 7 years ago when the company was first started. The problems that they have and the user needs that they have have really changed, especially our audience. They're becoming moms, they're getting married, you know, at this incredible stage in their careers, they're taking charge of their finances. So that research team is always like on top of that, you know, and always helping inform the next big thing that the skin builds as a result of that, which I think is so huge. And the tactics, like I mentioned, are anything from your traditional qualitative feedback sessions. We do run diary studies every once in a while where we'll have kind of a pool of users in our audience and have them kind of log their habits day to day to just figure out what they're doing on their phones, how they solve their problems today. And what— and all of these areas really ensure that the company basically lives and breathes our audience. Sounds a little creepy, it's not. Like, you can— we all just really fundamentally get our users at a deep level because of that, and that's been huge. The second is that we have a great culture around feedback and testing, and that's very much a great product culture. We're always testing everything, we're always talking to our audience, and again, they are so excited to talk to us that it makes it really easy and fun. So my favorite example example of this is that we send this newsletter out every morning and you would— oh, sorry, hold on. Okay, that might happen once in a while. Yeah, startups. Uh, no, so we send this newsletter out every morning. You would not believe how many readers just hit reply and tell us about their lives or give us feedback or just talk to us. Like, they really think that we're their friend, you know? And so that relationship and that like two-way street is just very naturally there and has helped build a lot of culture around how we're constantly testing and talking to our audience in all sorts of ways.

Now that I know that those are being read, maybe I'll do that.

Oh yeah. I'll just hit reply. And we, and actually on that note, from day one, we have made a, taken a stand to say we will answer every single email. So every single email that comes into our inboxes, whether it's editorial feedback, product feedback, support issues, we answer every single one personally. And I think that's a really, big testament to the brand and how much we value that one-on-one relationship with our users.

That's awesome. That's very cool.

Yeah.

I have more questions for you, but I also, again, just another reminder to everybody, I'd love to ask your questions. So if you have questions for Dhirja, just go to the ask a question section, put it there, and I'll definitely be able to get to it. Well, hopefully I'll get to as many as I can. Hopefully I could get to all of them. That would be awesome. But I did want to, kind of rewind a little bit because you used to— you spent some time at ESPN, and that's another company that I feel like has this intense following. I mean, it's one of my most used apps on my phone for sure. And I actually remember meeting Ryan Spoon. Ryan spoke at Industry, one of the very first editions of Industry way back when. So I have to imagine, I don't know, being that that's another brand that has this loyal following, like, are there, are there some analogs between, you know, the time spent at ESPN and The Skimm?

Absolutely. What I will say first of all is Ryan taught me everything I know about product. So quick plug, great guy. But yeah, no, absolutely. And it's funny because I, when I think back to my decision to join The Skimm, it's not a coincidence. I think it is something that I'm really passionate about is like tapping into this fervor that a user has for your brand and your products. And ESPN was great because Let me tell you, if there is ever a set of users that will eat up anything you give them and have a lot of opinions on it, it's sports fans. Especially when you're talking about sports fans for certain areas, specific teams, followers of a certain personality. The feedback is endless, the opportunities are endless, and it's really fun. So my time at ESPN was definitely kind of laying the stage for a lot of what I ended up doing at The Skimm. My favorite time at ESPN though was when I, worked on this site called Grantland. I don't know if any of you remember it, but Bill Simmons is like this huge sports personality. He's like an OG sportswriter. I used to print out his columns in college and like read them on my walk to class. And he always had this like rabid following of sports fans, especially Boston sports fans. And ESPN decided to kind of spin him out and create its own kind of brand and its own set of products around Simmons called Grantland. And I worked with him on that and his team on that. And it was such a cool, interesting production and thinking about it's not just about the utility of the product. It's not just about the content that's being created. It's about kind of adding a wrapper to it, but also leaning into the brand and the relationship that you have with your audience and making sure the products like tap into that. I think a lot of companies fall into this trap of separating those things. Like there's the brand and the marketing stuff over here, and then there's the product stuff over here. And I think whether it was ESPN or Simmons or this Skim, there's something really special about product people sitting at the intersection of those things and recognizing the value that a brand or a personality can do to elevate the product that you're building.

Awesome. Awesome. Um, I did— there was an audience question that came in, so I do want to go to that. And actually they're asking about, um, some of the qualitative methods that you use at The Skim to sort of live and breathe your users. They reference specifically implementing the diary study, and we're curious about that. So could you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, totally. So in terms of like broad strokes, qualitative tactics, I'll do my best to summarize what that team does without them being here. But, you know, we do kind of a lot of the traditional stuff. So whether it's like usertesting.com, or just bringing in people, you know, every month or so to kind of like live test things, it's, it's great to be able to just tap into a community and say, hey, tomorrow we need like 10 people and there's like 500 people who are excited to do it. You know, also, we're always running targeted surveys in our newsletter, NPS, all of that. The diary studies have been really interesting. It's not something that we do super often. Obviously, it's a pretty heavy investment. But the reasoning for it is to take— it is to really take a step back and have that inform like kind of our blue sky thinking, and thinking about if The Skims' mission is, let's help female millennials live smarter in all the areas in which information can, you know, really drive them to take action in smarter ways. There There are a lot of ways to do that. And so diary studies tend to be a really great way to kind of inform some of that blue sky brainstorming with actual user problems that come up innately throughout the course of somebody's day and week. So for example, we once did this study around just like mobile routines. So we spent about, I think it was almost 2 weeks, maybe a week, where we kind of recruited a group of people who are in our readership, and we asked them to basically send us a report of what they did on their phone every single day. And talk through like the literal usage of it. So not just what apps they're using, but how much time are you actually spending on them? And why are you doing it? And what problem is it solving? Or is it really just because you want to kill some time on Instagram? That kind of a thing. And we didn't have like an agenda for it, right? It was just going in to get a better understanding of like, what are the actual mobile routines that people have and how can the SKIM fit into those and hit you in the moment where you might need us? And then, well, then we'll do more specific ones. So like we did a lot on like news habits. You know, when do people feel like they're not informed? You know, are they— is it when they're going to a dinner conversation and they weren't caught up on the markets and suddenly they have talked to people who work in finance and they're like, I wish I just knew a little bit more about this one topic. And again, a lot of that is, you know, pretty basic fall stuff, like whether it's, you know, us just messaging back and forth with them every single day or in a Facebook group or something. But the goal of it is to really inform that bigger blue sky thinking.

I love that. No, like, yeah, getting— being able to put yourself like where they are actually throughout their day. Yeah, it's very cool.

Nice.

Well, so I, you know, we talked about, um, you know, the SKIM being, you know, your fans being so loyal. ESPN and some of its brands like Grantland, you know, people very loyal to it. I'm curious if you think about those, you know, brands and then maybe another type of, you know, if you were to be managing a product that maybe gets a ton of usage, but people aren't so loyal to it. Does it change as a product person? Like, do you have to manage things differently? And does it make things easier or harder? You know, just because, because of that, I'm just curious your take on that.

Yeah. I mean, the answer is both, right? So I'll lean more towards the easier because it's so much fun. Like I said earlier, I think the best job in the world is to say, you know, I have the audience and they want something from us and I just have to figure out which problems we should solve for them. You know, that is so awesome. So I would definitely lean towards easier, but it's both sides. So from it being easier, it's what I just said. You know, you've got something really sticky there that you're just constantly building on top of versus trying to create that stickiness from the onset. And then obviously, you know, like I mentioned, in terms of feedback, you learn super quickly because, you know, it's one thing to be doing your traditional user testing and, and MVPing and trying to kind of extract learnings. And it's another to say there's just a wealth of it. We're getting feedback from all angles every day because the audience loves you so much that they want you to succeed. They want you to build more for them. And I literally feel like we're just always sitting on this goldmine of information and we are able to learn so much faster as a result of it in terms of what our product development looks like. But yeah, it's also hard. I mean, the short answer is that The hardest thing in the world for a startup, but especially for a brand that has this type of an audience, is to keep your eye on that North Star and really make sure you're working towards the big bets you want to take, because you've got a lot of cool ideas coming your way. And for us, we kind of really put a stake in the ground and say, we're not just going to always listen to our audience in terms of what we do next. That, you know, it's more about unwrapping what the problems they have are and why those ideas are surfacing up and how we can be a lot more innovative about how to solve those problems instead of just doing doing the thing that they tell us they want. And that can be really hard when you have this two-way communication, when you're getting it from all angles all the time. It would be so easy for our roadmap over the course of a year to be a million little things that are iterations of our products. And you look, pick your head up at the end of the year and realize that you haven't really made, made like a big bet. One small example I'll actually give of this, of this like innovative kind of thinking based on the user problem versus just like, addressing the exact example that somebody sent to you is our app. So when we first decided to build a new product beyond the newsletter, we were talking, a lot of people were telling us, we want more newsletters, you know, we want an evening newsletter, we want a weekend newsletter, we want breaking news. And when you really start to unpack that stuff, what we kept hitting was that you don't really want more newsletters. You know, they've, they've got what they need in the morning. Uh, you know, breaking news is actually just really noisy for them. They don't want to be annoyed by that all the time, even if they think they do. And so instead, like, what are some unique problems that we can solve for them that would be something truly new to the market? And we had— we ended up coming up with this concept of the calendar, which is very simple. Like, when you subscribe to our app, as part of that, we integrate major zeitgeist events directly into your calendar app. So right in my iOS calendar app or my Google Cal, I'll have, you know, the UN General Assembly is on Friday with a whole skim of it in the description of the event. I guarantee you not a single user has ever told us to build a calendar, but instead it helped us like kind of get really innovative about how we wanted to solve this like overarching need of needing a little bit more information, wanting to be clued in without just reacting to what they said. So it can be really hard to like keep your eye on the prize in that sense, but it's, it's a fun challenge.

Yeah, no, yeah, I totally get that. Any company you work for, you're going to get so much feedback that You can't say yes to everything, I guess. Oh, and this actually was an audience question. What, you know, you could do all these user interviews, but there's all kinds of users, you know, you have millions of subscribers. How do you know, like, what, when you're doing these interviews, like which interviews where, you know, you should listen to them and which it's like, well, that piece of feedback is useful, but I don't know that we could do, like, how do you, how do you know what to, what to do with it?

Yeah. So one, I'll give a lot of credit to our research team. They're very good at parsing through that. I think, Again, I'll keep saying this, like that investment in that team from an early stage, I think really changed the game for us. Because especially if you're a PM, your incentives are to get confirmation bias around things. You just, you just have that, like, you want to hear certain things, and you don't want to hear certain things. And no matter how good we get at that, a researcher is really going to hold you to that sort of church and state mentality. But yeah, I mean, the short answer is they're really good at it. They're really good at parsing the context of what we're trying to of, you know, do the actual product and then the pieces of feedback that are super, that are actually relevant versus might be outliers. I will also say that we really believe in a close marriage of research and analytics. So it's two sides of the exact same story. And so that's where you get a much better assessment of is this an outlier, is this not, who is this user, is that user representative of the majority of our audience, is it representative of a new version of the audience that we want to go after, and really getting focused around like kind of the addressable market and what we're really trying to do here. So we tend to kind of merge those things. And one example of this that I, that we did last year was this loyalty exercise. We took both qual and quant data and looked at our audience of 7 million subscribers and we broke it out by tier 1 to 5 skimmers. And it was, again, it was a mix of what they're doing across all of our products, as well as what they say about the brand, what they love about the brand. And so a tier 1 skimmer might read our newsletter every single day, might pay for our app, might be in our Skin Master community and have engaged with our content on the site on an X number of times, and they also have, you know, an NPS score of the brand of X. And so like that assessment, and then every time we do research or we do forecasting or we're looking at a new market, we'll map that back to the way we look at our tiers of skimmers and say, okay, who are we really talking about here? So it's easier said than done, but it helps us kind of ground ourselves in perspective around research.

Yeah, that's great. One question that I did have down that I wanted to ask you is, you know, I know now your role, your Chief Product Officer, like I imagine, you know, you have a team and that's going to continue to grow. I, you know, we've been talking about product, but, you know, having the right product people on the team is important. What, knowing that you're managing this, this loyal, you know, product, or rather people are loyal to that product, what do you look for in team members when you are trying to build that team?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think first and foremost, the way I think about product teams is a jigsaw puzzle. You know, I think a lot of companies tend to, or have in the past at least, thought of like the archetype of a good PM, and it's this like prioritized A to Z list of skills, you know? And so some companies might say engineering background, design backgrounds. I've actually seen some companies even more recently look at consulting backgrounds, for example. And the Skimm, you know, we're like this weird company because we're not just media, we're not like pure technology, we're also very like audience-focused. And so I've always believed, especially the SCIM to build a PM team that really has a true complementary set of skills. And so, you know, for example, are they coming from that more design thinking background? Are they technical and are they thinking about systems? Are they actually more revenue-based? Are they thinking about subscription businesses, advertising revenue? And that's how I've always thought about crafting my team. But there are some core things that I think are universal to what is unique to a PM at the SCIM. This probably goes without saying, but But once they start here, really getting that deep understanding of the brand and the audience is super important because, you know, like I mentioned earlier, it's easy, it's weirdly easy for a product to operate in a product silo, you know, where you are like just building the thing in front of you and building the thing at hand and not thinking about like kind of the less tangible elements of it, like the brand and how the positioning is evolving, the content that's part of it, that's actually powering the product that you're building. And so really getting a deep understanding of the audience and the empathy for that is really important. And like I said, recognizing that relationship between brand, community, content, and actual product development, those things can't live without the other, especially at The Skimm. So for example, at The Skimm, we literally say content is our product. So at its core, our products are not apps, they're not newsletters or websites, it's content. And the way we deliver them in utilitarian ways, whether it's through an email, a calendar, a ballot tool, what have you, those are just the most beautiful intersection of these things. And so for here, especially the skin, PMs really need to understand, like, what does it mean to create, to be a newswriter? You know, what does it mean to really think about the brand and the community at that level and really kind of extend beyond more traditional product thinking?

Yeah.

Well, actually, one tactical thing I'll throw on that. Sorry. So we do the traditional squad model, right? Where you've got like cross-functional teams, PM, design, engineering. But what we've done from day one is make sure that editorial is embedded on on those squads too. So they're actually part of the product development process from day one. You know, our MVP of the calendar was actually just creating a private Google Calendar and sharing it with 50 people and seeing what they said, you know. And so we really believe that content, marketing, community are all really, really embedded in the product development process from day one, not just like the add-on at the end when you think about go-to-market.

Yeah, that's, that's great. That's awesome. Well, I, I'm looking at the clock. We probably have time for one more quick question, if you don't mind. And this is an audience question too. It was just, you know, they were kind of pointing out, um, you know, hey, you have these fans, but, you know, I, I have a product that it's more in the required software realm, you know, so it's probably a business product of some sort, but they're still really interested in engaging their user base, getting them to love the product. Do you have any advice for people that might be in that, you know, again, maybe they don't have a product that's so loyal, people aren't as loyal now, but they have to use it, they want people to love it, just what feedback would you have for them?

Yeah, I don't want to sound like a broken record, but like brand is important for every single company, not just a consumer-facing company or, you know, a media brand. Like, it's not— The Skimm is not the only company that needs to be thinking about brand in the way that it does. And what I I've really learned about brand here at The Skimm is authenticity, making your users really like feel like they're almost part of the company in a way and actually feel really invested in your success. And that is so special because then that leads to, you know, organic growth, your kind of referral programs, what have you, like then your marketing tactics can go to town. But like if you're, whether it's your voice, your kind of like your marketing language, your brand, but also the way they interact with your products, like you just need, you need to build that love, you know, and build that authenticity. Authenticity and kind of almost sometimes like go behind the curtain a little bit. You know, our founders are very much like a face to a lot of our users as like, you know, these entrepreneurs who have created this company that they love so much. I think another example of this is obviously Slack, right? You know, Slack is a great enterprise software tool, though maybe not enterprise, just, you know, a great software. But like, I love the brand, you know, the way they write their content for the actual product, the way they talk about the company. It is just, it just feels like your friend. And I think that like authenticity and love is something that anybody can do. And then the other thing I'll say is simplicity. I think as PMs and designers and engineers, you know, it's really easy to jump to like a technological solution to something versus thinking about the most simple way in which you can solve a problem for somebody. And I think the newsletter and the fact that it existed for years and had built up a readership of millions games before I even joined the company is a testament to that. You know, they solved a problem with— in the most simple way and built that relationship and loyalty in the most simple way. And so I really push that even as we're building new products now. Even, even though we now have a big engineering team, it doesn't mean that everything we do needs to be overthought. You know, we can, we can build that relationship and loyalty in these small intangible ways too.

Yeah, well, I love that. That's awesome. Well, I, I know we're out of time now, but thank you for taking the time for Yeah, no, loved having you on. And I know I didn't get to absolutely every single question, but maybe you could share with people just how they could keep tabs on what you're up to. Maybe if you're on Twitter or something like that.

Totally. I would love that. So my Twitter is Dierja. My name is very unique, so it tends to be Dierja for everything, which is great. So it's just @Dierja on Twitter.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, it was great catching up with you. And thanks, everybody, for joining us. And yeah, hope to have everybody soon for a future industry interview.

Thanks so much.

Have a good one, everybody.

Bye, everybody.