5 Practical Tips to Define A Compelling Product Strategy with LinkedIn Co-founder Allen Blue

Welcome to the latest issue of the Product Management Learning Series - a series of live streaming events and newsletter articles to help you level up your product career! ??

In our 22nd installment, our speaker was Allen Blue . Allen Blue is a co-founder of LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, and currently serves as Vice President of Product Management, where he directs overall product strategy. His areas of focus include Equity Products, Climate Products, and LinkedIn’s Economic Graph, working with governments and institutions in the United States and worldwide to share economic data and improve education and workforce policy.??????????????????????????????

If you missed the event, you can watch the full event recording here.?

Allen learned three important lessons in the early days of founding LinkedIn: the importance of profiles, social network virality, and getting more proficient? at building startups after having done it a few times.

Allen shared three lessons learned during the early days of building LinkedIn. The first was the importance of profiles, and how people represent themselves online. This was something that Allen had exposure to while working with Reid Hoffman for the first time and founding a dating site. The second was the value in virality. Allen learned a lot about the importance of virality while working at PayPal. Profiles and virality became the core of LinkedIn in the early days. The third piece of advice that Allen shared was that you're way better at doing startups after you've done it a couple of times. Allen urged founders to not feel defeated if the startup didn’t work out the first time, and encouraged them to try again. Because the things you learned the first time around become the foundation of the things you do next.?

The key to building successful marketplaces is to understand how value is generated and think of ways to balance supply and demand while improving efficiency.???

Allen shared that LinkedIn is a marketplace business that consists of 3 marketplaces: the talent marketplace where recruiters connect with job seekers, the product & services marketplace where B2B advertisers connect with individual professionals and decision makers, and finally, the knowledge marketplace where professionals come together to share news, information, and opinions about professional topics.?

The basic motion that keeps people coming together to these marketplaces is to exchange value. Value is defined as how we make an individual user more successful. Take the talent marketplace for example; the first thing to think about is to balance supply (job seekers) and demand (hirers/recruiters). If you are trying to hire marketing professionals in Germany, but Germans aren’t looking for marketing jobs, then the marketplace is broken. One way to address this imbalance is to bring more people who might be interested in marketing jobs in Germany - perhaps there are Austrian market professionals, Swiss marketing professionals, or marketing professionals from all around the world who might want to travel and relocate, to work in Berlin.

The second thing to think about is marketplace efficiency and how value is measured. For talent marketplace, this means measuring how many InMails it takes to get a job seeker to respond and get a hire. If the number is very large, then the system isn’t working. How do you make sure the people getting the InMails are well matched with the jobs to increase the likelihood that they are interested in actually getting the jobs? Allen emphasized that it’s important to be crystal clear on what the unique dynamics and structures for building supply and demand are for building your marketplace products.?

Work backwards from the goals you want to achieve to create a compelling strategy.?

Allen shared that he thinks of strategy as a combination of a big vision and a set of concrete steps to get people excited and believe that you and the team will be able to get there. During the early days of founding LinkedIn, there were talks about different businesses: recruiting, sales, marketing (and learning), all with huge revenue potential, but it was hard to believe in such a gigantic vision without knowing how to actually get there.?

What Allen and the team did at LinkedIn was to work backwards from the goals they had, to make LinkedIn the primary place where professionals undertake activities to create economic opportunities for themselves and for each other. Take LinkedIn’s talent marketplace for example; the goal was to enable a recruiter to be successful. To do so, recruiters needed to be able to reach out and hire from all the professionals in the world. In order to do that, recruiters needed to be able to search all the professionals directly from LinkedIn. To get to a place where recruiters could do their search effectively (vs. returning with blank results), LinkedIn needed to put all the professionals in the world into the network. The team realized after this exercise that the only thing that really mattered was growth: getting more members to join the network.

To get buy-in for your strategy, break it down into achievable steps and get others to think about the problem differently.

Allen shared that a mantra at the beginning of LinkedIn was Growth > Usage > Revenue, and in that order specifically. The step between Usage and Revenue was short and so was the step between Growth and Usage. Everybody believed LinkedIn could do it. The question between zero and Growth was hard, and that was the step LinkedIn had to convince people that it could actually achieve.?

To make your strategy compelling and get buy-in, Allen shared that one key is to break it down into achievable steps, so key stakeholders can be brought along for your strategy. The second key is understanding that people don’t always think about the problem the same way you do. So making sure you understand how they think about the problem, and then telling a story that allows them to think about it in a new way that aligns with your way of thinking, is a big step towards making your strategy influential within your organization.

Allen shared an example of how to get investors excited about LinkedIn’s growth strategy. While many might have thought that the way to grow LinkedIn’s member base was to advertise aggressively, the founding team took a different approach: enable viral spreads from professionals to professionals, inviting people to come use the product. So the team built a collection of professionals in the network by providing value to each one of them independently so that they would invite the people whom they know to join. Allen and the team presented that this product-led growth approach was cheaper and more sustainable than advertising.

The future of work is constantly changing, and it is our job to proactively set the values that we care about from our economy.?

Allen mentioned that he thinks there are a lot of things relating to the future of work to be excited about, including the recent launch of Chat GPT 3, a chatbot capable of generating human-like text. Allen shared some of the positives of this recent technology, including that Chat GPT has the potential to help people present their ideas more effectively. This is really useful to all professionals because not everyone is good at expressing what they want to talk about, and can facilitate a boom in this area of communication, allowing individuals to achieve new things.?

But on the other hand, Allen shared that it’s really easy to imagine the possible replacement or displacement effects which can come from the development of Chat GPT. Allen discussed that technological change is happening very, very quickly which is what makes it so different than previous revolutions, as previous revolutions in technology happened over decades, and now they are happening over months. He stressed that it’s a lot of change for the system that we all live in to absorb and in a very, very short time that our systems aren't designed for. To be able to operate in this new fast paced environment of technological change, Allen mentioned that we need to have our values set in terms of the things we care about, and that the economy should serve individuals, understanding what kinds of responsibilities we as a group of humans have to each other.

Additional gems from Allen:

?? Allen’s favorite product is Midjourney, it is a new AI tool that generates art.???

?? Reid Hoffman , Allen’s co-founder at LinkedIn, is Allen’s product role model and stated that he learned so much working alongside him, across his entire career.?

?? Allen’s final piece of advice was the importance of diversity of perspectives. Allen shared that innovation comes from the ability to think about things in different ways than what is expected.?

?? Special kudos to Andrew Altschuler for writing this article.

?Next up,

• December 16: Take Back Your Power & Special Afterparty with Ancestry CEO Deb Liu
• January 13: Making Smart Career Decisions to Accelerate Growth with Nikita Miller
• January 20: Define a Winning Product Strategy & Make Your Competition Irrelevant with Moe Ali
• January 27: Developing a Strong Product & Design Sense with Bob Baxley
• February 3: Building Great Products with Data and Analytics with Justin Bauer
• February 10: Better Product-Led Onboarding with Pulkit Agrawal
• February 17: Charting Your Product Career Paths with Tricia Lee
• February 24: Building Enterprise Products & Scaling in Emerging Markets with Karan Anand

More sessions coming… subscribe to stay tuned!?

Learn more about the Product Management Learning Series and view past recordings here.