Nickey Skarstad (Airbnb, Etsy, Shopify, Duolingo) on translating vision into goals, operationalizing product quality, second-order decisions, brainstorming, influence, and much more

Nickey Skarstad is a product leader who has worked at Etsy, Airbnb (experiences), a co-working startup, Shopify, and is currently director of product management at Duolingo. The conversation covers her path into product, how she has operationalized product quality with balancing metrics, structuring product orgs, setting vision and turning it into OKRs, making one-way versus two-way door decisions, product review processes, and remote product leadership.

01Key learnings

• Pick a quality metric, such as review rate or first sale within a set window, as a balancing top-line goal alongside growth so the team protects customer experience.
• Dogfood your own product regularly; Skarstad notes that using the product yourself reveals quality problems immediately and motivates teams to fix them.
• Involve your team in strategy-setting rather than writing it alone, but recognize that one clear leader should own the final decision.
• Use a simple vision, mission, strategy, objectives pyramid to cascade long-term vision into quarterly goals the team can act on.
• Classify decisions as one-way or two-way doors: spend deliberate time on hard-to-reverse ones and give teams autonomy on reversible ones to move fast.
• Practice second-order thinking by mapping how a change ripples through the wider system, and write first principles into specs to surface debate early.
• Hold cross-functional product reviews at defined checkpoints (first principles, approach, ready-to-ship) so design, engineering, and leadership feedback reaches the whole team.
• Track your own energy: Skarstad color-coded calendar meetings red, yellow, or green to find out which work energizes you and use that to choose your next role.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.