 If you're live with us, please comment on the chat, what's your name, where you're from, and what specific questions do you have for our speaker, Sean Kim. And now today, quick announcement, what we're going to cover today. Today we'll talk about specifically how our speaker, Sean, was able to grow his career from IC, working for startup, and Amazon, TikTok, and all to become the chief product officer at Kajabi, which is a leading ad tech platform. And so glad to have Sean join us today. How are you, Sean? I'm great. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us. So let me do a quick introduction regarding what we do today with our podcast. I have a quick introduction here. And then for everyone who joined us live, just comment on the chat. And if you can see us live, I can see many different messages here. Yeah, we're streaming live from both places. Congrats, congrats. I can read everyone's messages live as well. Awesome. Great. Cool. All right. So now quick introduction regarding what we do today, the product insider podcast. Hey, guys. I am Dr. Nian C.D. I'm passionate about all things product, career goals, and nonprofit. I'm on a mission to help people create amazing product that impact millions people's lives while getting the work by balance you deserve. Welcome to product insider. Shall I away from the real talk? No way. Covering everything from imposter syndrome, people management, and barriers facing the part leaders of tomorrow were joined by fine level providers to get the low down on what's hot right now. And I'm your host, Dr. Nian C.D. I moved to US with $800 in my pocket and became a director product in four years. Now I ran product manager accelerator courses that make product management careers accessible to everyone. Are you ready? Welcome to product insider. Awesome. So, and Sean, let's do like a quick intro and through my research of your background. Here is what my understanding of your very impressive career path. And so Sean Kim is a president and the chief product officer at Kajabi, responsible for expanding the growth of businesses and its value to customer globally. Previously, Sean was had a product at TikTok, the destination for mobile videos and most visited website in 2021, where he said the strategy direction and lead teams responsible for developing and growing the company's product. Prior to TikTok, he was a global head of product at Amazon Prime, where he played an instrumental role in driving customer retention for the Prime membership. Welcome to podcast, Sean. Thank you for having me. Looking forward to this podcast. Awesome. So Sean, through my very high level, like introduction of you, can you just give up the overview regarding your career path? As we know, we joined like big tech company, Amazon, and then fast growing company like TikTok, who almost take over met us place in the social media space. And then you joined another amazing, which is also my favorite product, which is Kajabi is a course platform, which all of our students in PM service using Kajabi right now. Can you give an overview regarding your career girls? Yeah, sure. I'll start from the very, very beginning. I moved to New York with $500 to my name. Like I didn't have a lot of money, but I felt like, Hey, if I can make it in New York, I can make it anywhere. Right. That was the mentality that I had. And when I got there, the only job I could get was in sales. So I was actually doing a hundred phone calls a day, selling websites to restaurants. This was like early 2000s, by the way. That's a cold cause, right? Yeah, cold cause. That's right. Calling restaurants all day long. Hey, my name is, and by the way, back then, my name was Soulmate Kim. It wasn't Sean Kim. It was Soulmate. That's my real name. My still, my legal name. And, and, you know, I learned so much to that process. And, you know, with selling, it's not really, it's really a lot of asking questions, not just like telling people about the features. And what's really amazing about this website versus that website is like, Hey, what can I, what problems can I solve for you? You know, what are the problems you're having with your website? It's very, very different than, you know, with different restaurants. It's like, you know, I, we just opened any people to know about it, or I just got a new chef or, you know, I just changed my menu, whatever it might be. So, you know, it's really just asking a lot of questions, understand what we could do to help solve their problems. Coincidentally, though, during that time, I actually changed my name to Sean because every single phone call is doing, I was saying Soulmate. My name is Soulmate. And they're like, what, what, what's your name? And that took up like 30 seconds. And eventually I'm like, Hey, you know what, I didn't need to change my name to make this more efficient. And I was watching a 007 back in the day, Sean Connery. And I thought, Oh, he has a really cool name. I don't have to change my initials. So that's why I changed my name to Sean. I love this. The reason it was me, Dark Knight City is not Nancy. As you know, my Chinese name is Rang Sheen. I have American friends call me Rock Sheen. Many, many, many versions you can ever imagine. The most funny way Rock Sheen was like, well, sounds like Rocky's movies. You know, let me pick something easier and I pick Nancy. And later on, I realized that Nancy was like more like grandma, generation name, but I didn't know. Too late not to love it anymore, but I've been using it for awhile until the only person or most of people that have the same Nancy name, they are literally grandma level. But anyway, I'm the youngest Nancy. It's a classic name. I like it. I love it. Cool. So you started doing sales and decided to change your name. Did you get those sales training when you get started or just picked up how to do a cold cause? Just throwing the water and just, and, and through that experience, you started learning what works, right? And I thought like I just don't jump on the web, on the, on the phone call and just say, Hey, I have this website. I have all these features. And I definitely wasn't as successful doing that versus, Hey, you know, asking questions around what are the problems that you're having that I can potentially solve for you. So it was really a customer focused asking a lot of questions to, and that was really sales, at least through my experience. And I've also, and I felt like, you know, that, that do that process, I, it was so critical to, to learn sales. And, and, and I would encourage that for everyone else like, Hey, business of sales, you have to really know what sells and, and how that process works and what really resonates with customers. And so I would have definitely encouraged a lot of people to, to try that, if they haven't had that experience that fast. After that, I worked at a company called Experian Cheetah Mail. And this is where I actually taught myself to code. I was teaching myself, you know, HTML, CSS, like front end stuff, like JavaScript, you know, eventually media queries, building email for a lot of Fortune 500 companies. And I was a dedicated account manager and basically had to like learn the nuances and details of how email works. And that was also fascinating because I learned a lot about digital marketing and, and how to, you know, also work with these big, large companies as well and how they operate internally and what we can do to service them. But I remember one. Hey, Sean, remind me a little bit. What year was it? Oh man, this was a, I'm trying to remember, like 2004, five, six. I can't, one of those years, I think it's 2005. The early, the early years of all the tech. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. You, you look way younger than that. That's why I was, I was confused. Okay. I was confused. So what year was the technology sounds old, but you look way too young. But good for you. I think Asians look kind of young in general. So that's good to keep. Yeah. So, so yeah, experientially they offered email marketing solutions for Fortune 500 companies. And I remember when I was applying to that job, they're like, you know, you need to know how to do front end code. And I was like, yeah, of course I know how to do front end code. And then I just like read a lot of books and taught myself before the interview and came in and like took the tests and, you know, and did well enough to get a job there. And yeah, I was there for like five years and learned a lot. It was a really amazing experience working on the client services side. Right. And what it takes to actually be successful and help customer, help our clients with their digital marketing. And then, yeah, I actually was really interested in the technical aspects when I was there. Like I was, you know, working on building out like custom API solutions for clients, how to move their migratory database from one place to our database. And it was just that whole part was really fascinating. So that was my training in terms of getting the technical background that I needed for my future careers. Right. And then so I definitely, you know, also encourage people today. I'll ask them to learn how to get back in works and, you know, let me talk myself code. These experiences were really, really valuable in terms of how you think as a PM longterm, at least for me. So after that, I worked at a quick introduction here. You said you taught yourself how to code. You know, lots of people are trying to do this right now. Would you still do that again to teach yourself how to code and knowing it's so much challenges? Or at the time it was easy because it's very intuitive. I can pick up easy, easily how to code. To me, I don't think I'm capable of doing that myself. I just like so impressive. I think it's valuable. I think it, I do think because fundamentally it teaches you the the foundations of how things work. And for me, at the time, I was teaching myself to code for email, but this also applied to websites in general. So we were like, you know, separately, I started a startup helping, you know, small businesses get their website up, getting their email services up and so on as a side business. And in that process, I was teaching myself how do servers work and how do I actually get an HTML file uploaded to get, you know, their website up and running and just going through the whole process of getting there, you know, buying a domain and actually from the beginning of that process to getting a site up and running, that whole experience was, you know, really important for me to understand. So it's not, you're just not, you're not just like looking at, you know, software and just seeing it work, but like you actually know how it works. So that was a really good foundation for me to understand. And it gives you, at least for me, it made me a better PM because I can make better recommendations on like what is possible and, you know, from a software perspective. This is awesome. And then you said you continue to start your own company and then when did you start to jump to Beaker Tech later on? Yeah, so this, so I had to start on the side that was doing quite well. I mean, we actually made some decent money, like we were, me and another founder were just offering website services and email marketing services to a lot of smaller businesses. And we kept that going while then I separately worked at a company called Direct TV. And Direct TV was also a really, really amazing company to work for. When at the time there were basically the experts in marketing, digital marketing, like just hands down experts learn so much from the leaders there. And what I learned working at Direct TV was that when you're early in your career, it's so, so important to have a really good manager. I would actually, when I meet with, you know, mentees or people that ask for advice, I always like, they're starting all their career. I say, Hey, you know what, find a company that you're going to have a really amazing manager. I would actually prefer that over the company that you choose. Because the manager can provide you so much really valuable insights. They help you build your confidence. They identify your strengths and weaknesses to coach you. They open new opportunities for you. They even like, you know, point you in a different career direction. Right. And say, Hey, this is actually a better career direction. And when I was at Direct TV, I had this really amazing manager at the time. Her name's Karen Lever, and she went on to be president of Discovery. And she was the one that really gave me the confidence and said, Hey, you know, you're really good at building product. You came here for marketing, but you're really good at building product. And like, gave me these opportunities to like flex that muscle. And I realized I do love product. What? Right. So that was that's just so important to have someone early in your career. I would also encourage people to get a mentor to like separately. I think they just give you a lot of context and insights. And luckily she was my mentoring manager. I, you know, when I, when I eventually left to go to Amazon, I continued to keep in touch with her. I still send her bottles of wine every single year, you know, even now to this day. So someone that I still keep in touch with. And she's helped me make a lot of good decisions throughout my career. That's amazing. Yeah. Going to Amazon, she was like, yeah, you know, I, of course, I want you to stay, of course, but it was such an amazing experience. At the time, it was like, you know, I think the stock was only $300. And this was like back in 2007 or something like that, right? Or really early on. So she was like, this is a really amazing opportunity, Sean. You should definitely take it. Wow. Even if she knows you're leaving like the company, she's managing, she's, she's giving away good talent, but she's thinking for you for your long term career growth. That's right. That's right. She's thinking about me. She wasn't thinking about, you know, keeping me around and like, you know, being upset about that. She's like, no, no, no, this is, I think this is a really amazing company. This could be good for your career. And she gave me a lot of amazing advice even after I joined, right? So I think that's the kind of manager you want to find. Yeah. So, so quick notes. How would you know who could be your good manager, your good mentor before you even joined the company? Yeah. That's, that's a good question. You know, like I, I, I do, it's important to do a little bit of research and background on the person, right? Like, see if you could meet potentially people that reported them. And ask questions around like, hey, what, what, you know, do they care about your career growth and what does it like to work on this team? What's the culture like? But I think that that is really, really, really important in your early stage of your career is just finding that right person that's going to take you all the way, right? And just give you the the guidance and the open the opportunities for you to to really expand your career. So that's that's definitely something I would recommend for everyone that's listening. This is this is amazing. Can also do a quick summary for you. This means that the mentor doesn't level the doesn't matter the level. Doesn't have to see your mentor you as long as someone who is a little bit senior than you could be direct manager or maybe one or two levels above you, it doesn't matter the level. It's more about the person care about your personal growth and that. Am I right? That's that's right. That's absolutely right. And, and, you know, it's even better to have multiple mentors, right? So I have meant I had mentors that were career focused. I have mentors that are really amazing at building culture, had mentors for personal life. Like it's just good to be around people that have this amazing experience to share that knowledge with you. Right. And when you're going through these big decisions in life, like don't just, you know, assume that you can make those decisions like just like without consulting anyone else. It's just important to like, especially if it's a big important business decision or life changing decision or career decision, like just get, you know, having someone else to go have that have gone through that. Give you their perspective. And it's not, it's not like you have to always listen to exactly what they say. It's just they give you that different perspective. Like here, have you thought about these things? Right? You're like, oh, I didn't think about that. Right. How would you know if you have never gone through that experience? So it's just so important to have someone there to like just give you that perspective. So this is awesome. And I also have a theory, a personal theory for great mentor to select the right mentee. You also need the outstanding yourself as well. Being able to quickly implement what they said and also grow your career based on their guidance as well. Or it may not be exactly what they want to do, but you grow in different ways. Because my personal belief that will be if you're a great mentor, they're probably a 10 people want to mentor them, right? You have 10 mentees probably will specialize in focusing on your time on top three mentees or somebody cannot do our 10 or our 20. So you must be the one who is already a great like implement and grow your career and no wonder your career become even more fascinating later on. So let's talk about you jumping to Amazon. This is just the beginning. Hey guys, it's just the beginning. Come on the chat if you find Sean's story very inspiring. Come on the chat. Okay. So Sean, so let's talk about you tell your best mentors and hey, I got a great opportunity to join a company called Amazon in 2007. Right around the time. So somewhere on there. Yeah, I come up with the second updates. But it was like, it was a while back. Maybe it was like a little later in 2007. What was one of those years? But it was such an amazing opportunity because what's interesting was with Amazon. I remember the day I decided to apply was I was watching a TV commercial about Amazon, which there's not that many. But I was watching a TV commercial and they had this. They just, I think they just launched like it was fired tablets. And in the fire tablet, you can push a button and have a customer service agent interact with you to show you how to use a tablet and like and walk through that whole process. And it was just that one-to-one interaction. I was like, whoa, that's amazing. Like the tech as well as the fact that you're willing to spend your resources to help people get trained to use the tablet one-to-one experience. It's not super scalable. But then I maybe realized like, wow, there's a really customer obsessed company to build a feature like that, invest in a feature like that to help people like walk through the product and so on. And so I thought to myself, like, that's an amazing company. And, you know, the questions I would ask, like when you're thinking about switching companies is like, you know, what is the, you know, is the company solving the like a really big problem for customers, right? And is the work going to keep you challenged, right? Because that was what helps you keep you motivated, right? And of course, are you going to get along with your manager? And ultimately, you have to go with your gut, right? And in the day, you have to go with your gut. And so I think that that's really important to like kind of think through those when you're picking companies to work for. And, you know, and again, I don't encourage people to like look for new companies to work for every single year. I don't think that's also good for your career. Like, and I'll kind of get to why later. But it's it's important that like, you know, that when you make that decision to decide to leave a company and apply somewhere else, you do ask those questions like, yeah, how, how big of a problem are they trying to solve? And is this is this going to challenge you as a company to work for? So in 2007, what big problem Amazon is trying to solve? Are they starting to sell books or starting to work on AWS? Remind me at the time that you felt like, wow, they are literally going towards really big market. Back then it was they were basically, I think they were focused. I mean, so they had devices. I joined the device team and that was the that was the big thing. They had Kindle, they had tablets. I remember they were also focusing on lots of different opportunities in terms of the types of devices that were going to roll out. So as soon as I joined, it was fire TV. They had the fire phone. They had dash buttons that also I mean, echo all sorts of different devices that they were launching. And I and I felt like this was a really amazing opportunity to join the company at the time. I'm actually looking like looking at, I think, yeah, it was it was back in, actually, no, it was a little later. It was like 2014, I think is when I joined. So it was a little later. Yeah, I see. And then you started prime. Chow has more regarding a prime. Yes, I was at I was at I was at the device team for about two years. And then I joined, I think, yeah, Amazon Prime is is when I joined that company and and the prime team was absolutely amazing. Because I I I, you know, also wanted to really understand what it meant to or for subscription business. Right. And, you know, the Direct TV was a subscription business, but this was like subscription business for delivering, you know, in two days as well as all the different benefits that we're offering. And I thought like this is a really amazing opportunity to join that team. And they were scaling that offering across multiple countries when I was there. So like the US, then Canada, then like Australia and like Europe. And so I felt like this was like a really opportunity to like learn about how to expand a business internationally and all the different challenges that it comes with. And of course, the team, of course, you know, the really smart people, the, you know, amazing managers, ultimately, like one of the reasons that I joined Amazon overall was I wanted to see how I stack up as a, you know, as a PM slash marketer. Like, you know, working with the best of the best in the world, right? Like, how do I stack up against everyone else? And there was like a challenge for myself, right? Like, I want to see shoulder to shoulder. Like if I were to work with them, am I able to be just as good? And, you know, am I also able to get promoted there? And it was a kind of a personal challenge for me because, you know, I wasn't I'm not coming from Ivy League school. Like, I think I was everyone there at the time was like some from somewhere I believe that all I had is it's crazy. Yeah, they always had the best time. Yeah, I heard they really love those MBAs. Is the MBA get in from top schools? There's like, even they still do it today. Yeah. So basically the the talent pool immediately became much more competitive at the time. And so how did you manage to become the head of product and really launch something so amazing? Everyone using Primes right now, you won't be subscribed. Yeah, the promotion. I mean, like, man, I remember that promotion process was pretty tough. Like getting to all seven there is like it was incredibly challenging. All right. And so you're you're you're in the promo process with many other candidates. You have to have launched something pretty big or work on some really complex initiative. And of course, you're going to have conversations with your manager and say, hey, like, I want to get promoted. Like, you know, I want to get to this new role. Like, I want to have a responsibility like what can I do? And that they again, they give you a guidance. I'm like, oh, here's the areas you can work on to be promoted. Here's what you're going to deliver, et cetera. And I didn't actually get promoted the first time around. It was a it was a that didn't went to the promo cycle. And, you know, I think the directors and managers, et cetera, have to actually say approve it and didn't go through. I was like, oh, sad, man. I was like, whoa, man, that was like a big, big hit to me. And and yeah, how did you learn from it and recover? Oh, yeah, I could have quit. I could have been like, hey, man, am I not good enough? Right. I could have quit. But me for me, it was like it was a. Challenge for me like, hey, I can do this. I can get promoted. I know what it takes now. And here's what I got to do to make it. So so let me let me let me ask you this question. What is it to get promoted in Amazon? First of all, how many is a one year each time does the cycle for you to get promoted? So what's those top three things for them to look for people to get promoted in Amazon? It will vary from level to level. You know, I think like when you're when you're going from L six to seven for us, and they're looking for a lot of different factors, right? It's it's the complexity of the product that you're working on. It's you have to be able to build a. Business case from ground up, right? So we do have something called the OP one process and you're like basically writing the whole thing yourself, which is the plan for the business, right? For the prime business, like, hey, here's the plan. And then getting stakeholders to buy in on this like across the board and which is, you know, like a multi-billions of dollar business that you're actually writing the entire plan for. You say, here's the plan. Do you buy it on it or not? So you have to have been able to do that. Obviously, presentation skills, you know, how you carry yourself with leadership is also really important because it is like becoming an executive to some extent, right? Beginning of becoming an executive. It's also being able to, you know, like be that person that you can go to with any kind of problem. Like if you say, hey, here's what we're going to work on. And you're the person that says, don't worry about it, I can take care of it, right? You come in and just like execute and deliver results in the end. Like that's like so valuable as an employee anywhere, right? So there are a lot of these different factors that take in and I think like, yeah, it's, I would say Amazon definitely has trained me the best of what I've become as a product manager leader. It's, you know, they give people so much responsibility. Right? You know, even when I was on the device team, I was the one that was able to schedule campaigns on the homepage of Amazon, right? They gave you the option. Here we go, here's, let's go start scheduling things and like, imagine all the traffic you get, right? That you have, you know, and so forth. So like you're, yeah, so they give you a lot of responsibilities when you're at the company and you have crime. It's like here, you write the plan for the business, right? For the retention component of the business. So I think that's, and then of course you're trained, you're presenting in front of like Jeff Wilkie and like the entire leadership team and like stressful. So people like can look, they're like looking so far ahead and they're like, and I'll say like, hey, why did, why did this one metric change like 50 bips? I remember last week it was like 2.4, now I went up 2.9 and you're like, wait, why did you even remember that stuff? And so it's like, this is the next level in terms of like attention to detail and like being able to handle such complexity of a business at any given time. So I think that's the kind of stuff. I mean, it trains you so well to like be able to handle that kind of, you know, that kind of stuff. So I think like culturally like how I operate now was it's all kind of like the foundations from Amazon. No wonder you mentioned that now you as a head of product or CPO chief product officer and president, Kajabi, you brought lots of people from Amazon, different kind of fan company work for you guys because they're probably getting trained the same way as you did in the past. Now did you say, boom, run at the tier one companies? Am I right? Yeah, because, I mean, at least for Amazon, the employees that worked there were super scrappy. All right, like you had to wear multiple hats as a PM. Like you weren't just writing feature requirements and then someone else has all the work to actually like launch it. Like no, no, no, no, no, you were doing the business case. You were doing the financial ops. You were doing the digital marketing. Like, hey, here's how we should speak to it. You're doing like the copywriting at some degree. Like literally everything. You were like basically mini CEO. Like that was the job as a PM. So there wasn't really ever a scenario where like, oh, that's not my job. Right? Like that's what a PM is at Amazon. You're in charge of everything, right? So, and so I think like that was also really important. I don't think that's the case for other companies, even fan companies. I don't think like they give that much responsibility to PMs, but I think it's just the way that the culture and the company works there as a PM. Like you're just like, hey, like, you know, we're really scrappy here, right? So that means that you're gonna have to roll up your sleeve and like literally do everything until eventually this business grows more and they're gonna put you to hire somebody and hire someone under you, whatever it might be, but ultimately you are responsible for everything. That trains you in like to be really resilient and understand the business like... Yeah, totally. But you were right regarding the differences of Amazon among other fan company. It's very true. We had the VP of product from Google, Rob Latham, speaking on podcasts like a few episodes ago. He was talking about Google, that he used Google and Amazon as a contrast. He's talking about in Google, the product manager's success was measured by number of product you launched. It's not measured by is the product you launched successful not making lots of revenue, having lots of users, but he, in contrast, he was like, Amazon's culture was very straightforward. You launched something, is it successful? Did you generate revenue business impact very end-to-end, product management in Google is different. That's why he's talking about different kind of culture differences. Yeah, huge differences regarding different cultures. So in summary, how did you eventually become the head of product? Head of, yeah, head of product for Amazon Prime. What changes you made? Yeah, so basically like it was, ultimately it's your ownership of responsibilities, right? Like so you have multiple dev teams at the time, I think I have like seven or eight dev teams. Each dev team had seven or eight, up to 10, 20 people and working across the entire organization, right? So in our central, I was in Seattle, so I was ultimately responsible for driving prime retention for global. So whatever we built here was ultimately what we scaled everywhere else, right? So the prime cancellation experience, that's one of the features I worked on that we improved and then optimized and then said, hey, this is gonna be scaled out to every other country in the world, right? And so there's a lot of, so it just comes with ultimately a lot of responsibilities and of course you have PMs that manage different dev teams and so on. So while I was at Amazon, this is like, I think six years into Amazon, I got a phone call from a recruiter that said, hey, by the way, there's this really cool company called TikTok. You should come work here. And I was like, what's TikTok? This is 2019, no one really knew TikTok at the time. And I remember downloading the app and I opened it, I saw a bunch of kids dancing and lip syncing and I'm like, what the hell is this? So I actually called the recruiter, I was like, no, thank you, right? I just like, phew, I didn't even consider it. Exactly, the TikTok branding 2019 is very different from what it's looked like right now. Yeah, it's all like, not even just like kids dancing. Personally speaking, I think a little bit too towards the other end of dancing, which I don't wanna get exposed to, especially for my kids in the future. I was like, oh, people are really doing crazy stuff on TikTok, yeah. How did you make decision to really join TikTok and create Amazon, especially you're doing exceptionally well. And Amazon now is like joining the like kids teenager dancing app. Yeah, so they actually initially reached out for a head of marketing role. And because I had a marketing experience too, right? And I also like said, like, no, I'm not interested in marketing. And also like, what is this app? Like I'm not, I don't get it. And so I remember, so I had a friend that worked in Beijing at Bite Dance. And he was like, hey, you should work here. And I'm actually gonna have Alex to reach out to you. Who's the founder of TikTok? Wow. So hey, just come to LA, let's have a conversation. I'm like, of course, like, you know, I'm always open to talk to community people and listen to the opportunity and so on. And I remember I flew down with him. Brilliant guy, by the way, this guy is just like next level, just amazing at design and user experience and customer centric. You're probably one of the best product people have ever met in my life. And so I was having just a simple conversation with him, he's like, yeah, the app content isn't that great today, you know? And I was like, yeah, dancing lip-syncing. Like check out this dancing video that I had up of my kid. And I was like, he was just kind of like, oh, okay, yeah. He wasn't very impressed with this video I made of my kid. But the content will get better, it will get better. And we figured out something that no company has figured out. I'm like, what, what did you figure out? He's like, we figured out the discovery. And I was like, huh. And I was like, that's interesting because yes, most people do just search, right? You go to Google, you search. You go to Amazon, you search. You go to Amazon, you search. And then you find everything, right? It's all search-based. And I was like, what do you mean you figured out the discovery? He's like, well, just open this version of the app. And this is the Chinese version of the app that had, this was like three years ahead. Yeah. I opened the app and I saw the content was so rich of information education. They had everything about like where to eat, where to travel, what foods to, you know, what books to read, what movies to watch, latest fashion trends, like I was just flipping through and I was like, well, this is absolutely amazing. And this is all user-generated? He's like, yeah, user-generated content. I'm like, okay, so the tech for the camera was better. Like it was like the content experience was better. Like everything. And it was like very diverse content. And then he's like, yeah, just click on any one of those people on the video. I clicked on it, opened the window and I can buy what they were wearing and have it delivered in 30 minutes. And I was like, oh, this is the future. This is the future. I knew at that moment I had to join the company. That was like, I watched that company and within 30 seconds I knew I had to join this company. That was the future. And so, quick question. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So when you explore the Chinese app, do you understand Chinese at all? And also heard in the TikTok culture in the US, they're doing bilingual for many different teams. How did you quickly really capture Chinese element of the content and knowing the culture combination between US and China? Given, I assume based on your Korean. Yeah. I didn't speak Chinese. I mean, I knew some words here and they're probably just bad words. I didn't know a lot of Chinese. Learn from TikTok. Yeah, yeah, I learned from you. But it was definitely like, I could see this content being, or the tech and the experience being global, right? So it was the Chinese version of the app. And I said, basically it's like an app that's like three years ahead in the future. And I was like, this could be an app that could be something that, if they got this right, if we got this right, it could be global. And that's how I knew. Like I was like, this is the company to join. And yeah, I mean, there's a whole other story there too, by the way, when I first joined. But I remember it was a gut calling, right? Like it's a pretty risky decision. Called my wife and said, hey, so we have to move to LA. And I'm gonna join the startup called TikTok. From Seattle to LA. Yeah, so the dance app? And I was like, yes, I'll explain why. And so I had to convince her and I was like, hey, worst case scenario, I'll just go back to Amazon, whatever, right? But it's a gut calling. It makes sometimes you have to go with your gut and make a decision. And it wasn't like I was betting the house, right? Like, it was a risky decision, but like, you have backups. If things don't work out, you can always go back to work somewhere else, right? So, and I knew this was gonna be a challenge. It was working with the China teams. There was no engineering team at the time in the US, I think. It was basically have to work with everybody in China. And I remember, I don't think I've ever said this, pulled this publicly, but like, I remember two days before I started, it was like, Alex, I think they called me and said, hey, come to China. I'm like, what, like in two days? And they're like, yeah. I'm like, okay, how long should I stay there? Like, what should be the flight? She's like, well, just, you know, like, how do I pack? Right? How do I pack my clothes? Two weeks a month? And I think, I kid you not, the response was like, just pack some clothes. If you run out of clothes, buy more clothes. Problem solved. And I was like, what? So I went to China and I don't know when I'm gonna be back. And they're like, she was like, wait, what do you mean? Like, yeah, in two days I'm leaving for China and I don't know when I'll be back. And she was like, okay. Oh my goodness. Yeah, so it was interesting. I remember when I went, like, obviously it was like, it was more to like understand how the business works and meet all the players. And I met like literally everybody, talked down. And it was an absolutely amazing experience. All the meetings were in Chinese. I had to have someone help translate. And I was like, oh my God, this is very different. But it was, yeah. And you also have very supportive wife. I gotta give your wife some credit. This is amazing. She said, oh, go in two days, if my husband pulls this on me. How a different reaction. Oh, you're good. Your wife is amazing. I'd love to meet her someday. Awesome. And we had a kid too. So how long did you end? Said what? And we had a kid, so that was not easy. We also had one daughter. So I was like, for sure, yeah, yeah. I was there for two weeks. Yeah, exactly. This is, oh, two weeks. So you were there for two weeks. You met all the big players. Yeah, I met all the big players. I remember after two weeks, I, actually, sorry, sorry, before I get to there, I remember the very first meeting I had. I went into what you would call like a QBR, you know, quarterly business review. Everybody was there, like literally everybody, talked down, you meeting everybody. And, you know, amazing. Like, I mean, they'll go to that app, the core metrics and what's worked, what didn't work, what we're doing next, like very similar to how Amazon would operate, right? I remember right after the meeting, Yiming walked up to me, the founder of Bite Dance. And I'm like, oh, nice to meet you. And he's like, you're from Amazon? I'm like, yeah, I'm from Amazon. And he's like, nice to meet you. And he's like, what are you gonna work on? I'm like, I have no idea. I just got here. And he was like, and then Alex was like, oh, yeah, we just hired him. He's gonna work on the app and et cetera, a TikTok app, and I just thought it was so humbling because he actually knew who I was, came up to me and shook my hand and welcomed me, even though he's like the founder of this big company. So, yeah, it was a really, really nice project. Yeah, the two weeks went by and I remember I was having a meeting with Alex and I was like, hey, man, so can I go home? It's been two weeks. And he was like, I think he looked at his watch. And then he was like, how long has it been? Like two weeks. He's like, okay, you can go home. We'll come back next week. And I was like, next week? Oh man, so yeah, it was an interesting time for sure. Wow. So basically you almost qualify for Chinese citizen based on the number of days or time you spend time there. Yeah, I got a Chinese phone number, a big account, like all sorts of stuff. Yeah. Wow, well, well, cool. This is very different experience you would ever imagine. And then you grow your career in TikTok and somehow you decide to leave TikTok after you became the head of product there. So tell us, please tell us how you grow and why you all of a sudden want to jump again to a company new field. Very different industry. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, TikTok amazing, amazing experience and you know, rightfully pick the right company to work for when it was like an exponential growth went through a lot. I learned so much working with many different teams there and you know, we eventually built out a product team in the US, built up this big engineering team as well. Like it was awesome. You know, launched a lot of features and what's great about TikTok also is they're very similar to Amazon, like the core leadership principles, operations, how PMs think. So it was actually, and you know, very, very similar. And yeah, so I guess like I got along really pretty well there. I remember a lot of teams did use PowerPoint when I first came. And I was like, we're not doing PowerPoint, we're gonna do a docs, here's a doc, read this doc. And so the culture switched to writing docs and I shared like how you should write docs. The Amazon practice. Yeah, yeah. And so that was the practice after that. Like we started using docs for almost everything, which is really good. And so yeah, I mean, overall was a really, really good experience and learned so much there in terms of like, and the fact that like you were a lot of take risks, so important, right? Like similar to Amazon is like, hey, go try something and then see if it works. If it doesn't work, it's okay. We'll just pivot or shut it down and we'll try something else, right? That's just, that's so important. I love the culture. Yeah, that's so, so important. Versus like top's down, this is what you're gonna build. Like if that's the case, you just hire a bunch of like, you know, college grads and just do that, right? But if you need people to like go and be willing to take risks. So yeah, I mean, I've watched a lot of things that didn't work and a lot of things that did work. But each time we learned a lot, you know, learned so much. One of the things I launched there that didn't work was the learn feed. I don't know if, I don't know a lot of people actually even use this thing, but it was a, it was, there was a third tab on the homepage called learn. There was so much that went into getting that built. So. I have it. Oh yeah. I have it. Maybe disable it right now. I guess I'm sick of STEM, S-T-E-M, I guess STEM tab. There's three tabs. It's a normal for you tab, a popular tab. I have a STEM tab even today. And by the way, guys, follow me on TikTok. Even if I have 55 followers, you guys should follow me. So on TikTok, I have STEM tab myself. You guys figured out I'm into education big time. Only at 55 followers. You guys are very good stocking people, I guess. Yes. I have a STEM tab right now. Maybe they repivot your learn into STEM, I assume. Yeah, yeah. That was a lot of work that went into that building that learn tab. It was like, it was, I mean, if you think about it, it's like, how do you decide what content is educational, right? What about religious content? What do you do about that? Culturally in different countries, like some you would consider educational is not considered educational there. Once you determine what's educational, how do you target, I mean, there's a lot to think through operationally and from an angle perspective. And yeah, and so creating that type of content, there was a lot, it wasn't easy to get that built. I remember we launched it and we launched in, actually, we launched in Canada first and then tested it there for a while. But yeah, it wasn't, what's interesting is like, we do a lot of research and we asked a lot of customers, hey, what's missing from TikTok? At the time it was educational content. We're missing education. We want more useful content, okay. Well, let's create a way to watch educational content. Like, how would you want to watch it? And customers say, or users say, hey, I would want a separate tab. I just want to watch educational content in a separate tab. I'm like, okay, you built it. Even though users say this is how they want to interact, this is what they want and how type of content they want, the behavior is not what they say, right? Like they say it, they want to watch it in a separate tab, right? But then the way they behave, completely different. They're like, no, that's not, I'm not going to go to that other tab. I'm just going to watch in the for you feed. So it's another learning experience. Like, you know, like how, what people say they want versus how they behave, not always the same, right? Now, not exactly what they, not always, but you know, overall we got a lot of learning from that. A lot of learning. We were able to get a lot of educational content. We started to learn on TikTok, hashtag, like hundreds of billions of views, I think. Yeah, and we onboarded a lot of educational creators on the platform. Now it's like all over that. There's so much educational content about that. But that's what really started was our work to get that third tab built, so. Awesome, you started the movement. Yeah, this is amazing. I'm glad there's more content. At least to me, I get a lot of stand, education. I like way more than dancing videos and other things. Yeah, I love the initiative. So that helped you to become a head of product there. So tell me, actually the one of the biggest question I want to ask you is taking the risk, right? You always quit the company at the right time and joined the even better company at the right time as well. So how did you make decision? Yeah, so you always jump to better one. And the best growth, like you always pick the best time. So how did you pick when it's the best time to join what company? Especially you decide, you literally decided to leave TikTok to join Kajabi, right? It's a very different company, very different industry. You joined the education industry. So tell me more how your decision-making process would look like. It's a good question. And I don't think I have a really solid playbook, like if X then Y, it's not that easy. So I'm the type that usually stays at company for a very long time until something happens. Until something says, hey, it's time to move on. Most of the time, it's usually because of two things. It's like a manager or I'm not challenging anymore. All right, now I got a new manager. Don't want the manager or something going on with the manager. Or it's boring. I'm not boring, but like it's not as stimulating for me. Then I start looking for other roles and opportunities. So that's essentially most of the time. That's generally how I've made decisions on how to go look even. After that is like, when I look at companies though, I do look at like, it's always stemmed on like, is it solving a really big problem? It always comes down to the customer problem. Is it solving a really big, hairy problem? And is it going to be a company that's going to challenge and motivate me? And then I look at like, hey, the manager, and then, so ultimately it does come down to a gut call. No matter how many data points you have around like, everything going to like be really successful, et cetera, et cetera. It comes down to a gut call. Now for startup, I would definitely also ask additional questions like, how much money in the bank do you have? You have to ask that question, because they're not going to share that unless you ask it. Great question. How much money you got? And so those are the questions I would definitely ask. Kajabi was a little different. Like I think like when I was at TikTok, one of the challenges was helping creators make money. And we tried everything to help them try to make money. We were like launch the tipping on the profile page and gifting in videos. We tried creator funds. We tried all sorts of stuff, like different types of funds and, you know, like features to help them make money. Now I would argue they weren't very successful at doing so for many reasons. And I don't think any social media platform or like that is successful at helping creators monetize. Now I don't think there are any of them out there that does it. YouTube is a little bit different, but like it's like a 1% that makes the money. So the first thing I did was I was talking to all the teams and said, hey, let's go find a startup that does it really well. I mean, find someone that does it really well and just copy it, right? There's no shame in the copy game. As a PM, by the way, no shame in the copy game. If you find someone else that does it really well, just do it better, right? That's a strategy I'm saying. So I... That's how you discover Kajabi. Yeah, that's how we discover Kajabi. And I found Kajabi at the time, I was like, what is this? Three point, at the time it was 50,000 customers that made 3.5 billion dollars. And I'm like, how is that even possible? It makes no sense, right? And so there was Kajabi. There's also another company that did really well. It was Onlyfans. I'm like, yeah, yeah, we're not gonna create Onlyfans over here. So we looked at Kajabi and saw they're offering valuable educational content that help people improve their quality of life. Valuable educational content. And these creators had direct relationships with their customers. They had exclusive community experiences. They offer exclusive content, structured content, solving broader or niche problems, right? Across many different spectrums, whether it's like, how to do your finances, how to get a better job, how to interview for tech company, how to sleep train your kid, how to pass a certain test. It was just like, yeah, it was valuable content. And if you think about it, people are willing to pay for valuable content or to improve their quality of life since the beginning of time, right? And it's like, so this is new. This is just a better way to scale yourself as someone that was offering your knowledge. And- Yeah, exactly, especially, yeah. And what's, go ahead. Yeah, no, it was just, and Kajabi was just very, very successful at doing that. Very successful at doing that. And so there were a lot of companies out there that do it, but then Kajabi was the one that figured it out. And- Yeah, exactly. They're very good at everything. Like branding, customer acquisition, and the lifetime value of customers is almost forever once you join them. They got me hooked. I don't say I'm going to be able to easily get up Kajabi for any time soon at all. And guess what, you're right. Even today, based on my knowledge, because TikTok reached out to me. TikTok trying to say, Nancy, can you grow on TikTok? Will help you to make money on TikTok? Will help you to sell courses on TikTok? That reached out to me. I'm gonna have 55 followers on TikTok. Hey guys, follow me. And then they say, all right, Nancy, wanna bring a brain, be created like you, to move to TikTok. But here are those kind of features, like the little doing customer interviews. What will it take for us to build for you to move to TikTok and help you to be a successful coach? They are still trying to figure out and trying to copy Kajabi's business model today. Even today, they literally just talk to me. All the tier one companies, and I have students working for those companies and I have connection there. And it literally reached out to me asking how they can just do certain features to move me to TikTok, but it's crazy. Yes, they are still working on this. That's how Kajabi figure, you're right. There are the very few company actually figure out and so well and still let the customers like hooked. This is amazing. Congratulations that you jumped to Kajabi and become the CPO there. Oh yeah, thank you. I mean, it's all leading up to it and with Kajabi too is jumping to a company where I was managing over 300 people, right? That's a whole nother challenge. I'm like, scary. But like, hey, this is a whole nother challenge I like to take on and get experience on and I'm still learning, right? I'm still trying to be a good leader and motivate people. And so I think it was and building a new culture here, right? There's a whole new set of challenges that I wanted to take on at Kajabi on top of like the fact that this is a winning product and it would be hard for other companies like social to copy it because you're basically owning your business here versus like if you're at social you're never gonna give you the email addresses to your followers and let you build a exclusive business where you actually own it and have direct relationship with your followers and also on top of that like platforms will take a big chunk like 30%, 50%. I think like, Apple takes 30%, then the platform takes 50%. So every dollar you make you're taking home like a small chain, 35 cents. Kajabi, you take home 100%. You make a dollar, a hundred million dollars you take home everything, right? So I think like it was very customer obsessed. The products that was been built in the last 10 years like it's like you started with courses then like, oh, we need, customers need the ability to have a landing page on the website. Okay, you offer landing pages websites. Oh, we need email, built the email. We need exclusive community. Here's exclusive community product. We need mobile branded exclusive apps and like, here's apps. We also now offer AI driven solutions to take all your videos to and build up the entire marketing funnel as well as the short videos from your course videos. Like we offer all the tools for one price, right? So I think that's been a winning strategy so far. Yeah, I can't wait to try out your AI strategies. This is amazing. Hey, Sean, last two questions and I really wanna touch up on decision making process internal product prioritization for the company. And also we do have private Q&A that we'd like to have you to join us as well. So let's figure out this. You actually, you mentioned as right now you manage team of 300 people, that's huge. Like there must be many different like product features or important product features on the roadmap that won't do to prioritize, right? So what specific product prioritization strategies and secret have used in the past that always leading to the great success based on your past successful track record? I would say that number one, you have to really understand your customer and your customer problem. Like you have to, that takes a lot of research. That's like talking to customers. I meet customers every single week, right? And we have voice of customer process to understand what are the problems that they're running into. We do surveys to understand what is the biggest customer problem that we can solve for. So it always starts with the customer problems. Now where you invest your time and where you optimize, it kind of depends on a few things. Like one is like, how big of a problem is it that you're trying to solve for? Is it existing problem that you've been trying to solve or is it a new one? It's also a cost of level of effort that goes into trying to solve these some of these problems, right? And is it core to your business or not? So, you know, there's always a need to ensure that you're improving your core product. Whatever the core product that you're offering it is, you have to constantly invest and ensure that it's getting better on an ongoing basis. So you can't just stop working on the core thing that everyone uses every single day, right? So you've got to constantly improve there. But then you also have to think about like long term, like, hey, if we only do incremental stuff, like we can't innovate. So what's the problem that we could solve for that all entrepreneurs are facing that we could potentially invest in, right? This is kind of your long-term innovative bets. And some of them won't work, some of them won't, right? But you have to be okay taking these bets, have to be okay taking these risks so that you can continually innovate as a company. So we have to invest some of your percentage of like your resources on those things. And not all of them, you know, it takes time for those some of those things to work. Like I rarely see products like work right at the bat, like boom, like it just takes off. Like just rarely see that it's always like, you know, and then you like do optimizations and pivots and so on and like eventually like, you know, it gets product market fit and takes off, right? So I think, but you have to invest some of the percentage of people there. And so, yeah, but it ultimately, again, it just kind of comes at it was like, what is the, what are the problems you can solve for? And then how close is it to the actual core, you know, core product that you're offering? So like if it's like completely far off, like that we have no, you know, skills in terms of offering, then we probably wouldn't work on it today. This like related to some extent to our core business that I probably will look into and invest in it. But yeah, I always have teams across multiple areas like investing in these areas as well as optimizing the core experience. This is awesome. So Sean, one last question. You know, regarding girls mindset investing in yourself, you're also in education industry now and also you have been trying to build this feature for TikTok for a very long time. So what's your opinion regarding like girls mindset investing in yourself? Because lots of people are always thinking about, let me just learn slowly, but there's different ways and definition of owning girls mindset and seriously investing yourself. So what's your opinion on that and how did you invest in yourself? I, when I'm in my car, I only listen to audio books that are related to my field. I don't listen to anything else. Like rarely, I mean, you know, when my kids in the car, she'll be like, hey, let's listen to BTS. I'm like, okay, we'll listen to some BTS. But as soon as she's outside the car, I turn my audible on and I have like, I just literally read you all the stuff I have here. I have like a master's of scale as a book that I'm listening to right now. There's the startup in you. Let's scaling the lean startup. I have super founders. Every startup probably have, listen to it or read at one point, the blue ocean strategy, like the habits of power, the power of habits. Yeah, so I invest a lot of my time listening to other people's experiences and the problems they run into and so on and how they solve for it. But because I actually enjoy it. That's like how what, that's my, it might be weird, but that's how I also relax. I'm like, oh, just like, you know, when I wake up, I think about problems to solve. When I wanna go to sleep, I wake up, go to sleep, talk about problems. And I talk to my wife about problems we could solve and she's like, dude, stop talking about work. But that's just how I just love, I just love it so much that I just think about it literally. You have the perfect, awesome. You have the perfect integration between work, life and learning. Among those three, perfect. I love learning as well. Whenever I wanna de-stress, I study. Made me de-stress. Surprisingly, this is what I do with my husband. I was like, oh, it's so stressful. Let me learn something. I feel much happier after doing that. It's very different. Yeah, very different mindset and also different ways people perceive the value of learning. Yeah. Awesome. So thank you for sharing your important wisdom with all of us today, Sean. I know this podcast went way over time the original schedule, but we do have quick Q&A with you for our audience who already pre-registered for private Q&A with you. So let's do this. Okay, so Sean, thank you so much for joining us and everybody who joined us live through our product insider podcast. Make sure to hit the like button and share this important learning and also tag Sean and me in any of your shareings. So that more people can receive this piece of important advice and wisdom from Sean and help more aspiring product managers and the existing senior product manager to grow their career just like all our podcast guests as well. This is Doc Nian City and good to see everyone and good to see you, Sean. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Awesome. Cool, great, cool. Okay, so Sean, I am going to end this podcast right here and then people who already registered for private Q&A, you should already receive the Zoom link. If you still want to join the private Q&A in the description of our live, there should be a link for you to request private Q&A. If you couldn't find the link, go to docniancity.com and there's a place dropdown, the inner circle. So inner circle is free. So you guys just hit inner circle and join us. We'll ultimately send out your Zoom link as well with Sean, okay? But people already registered. How many people registered already? So just get the Zoom link ready. It's already in your email and we'll also already have people on Zoom right now. So Sean, in your email and also meeting confirmation, this is Zoom link, I will send you again anyway. So join there, we'll have 10 minutes Q&A and then we're good to go. And thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Okay, so Sean quickly, don't close your tab for this one until it's 100% uploaded but you can join Zoom because two different windows.