Kajabi Chief Product Officer Sean Kim on What He Learned at TikTok and Amazon

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Sean Kim is the president and chief product officer at Kajabi, an all-in-one e-commerce platform for knowledge-based entrepreneurs and creators to build and sell their content products and services. He was previously the head of product at TikTok and the global head of product at Amazon Prime.

What is Kajabi?

[Kajabi] provide[s] everything you need to really own your business end to end… The platform provide[s] everything from building your own… brand… [a] personalized website and… marketing tools so you can nurture leads, capture those leads, and then, of course, host your content and then decide how much to charge.

There’s no take rate here… You make $1, you make a million, or you make a 100 million… you [can] keep your shirt unlike other platforms [that] take like 5%… It’s just a flat [software as a service] fee…

What does a product manager do?

The advice I give to product managers is to just 100% focus on the customer. I still meet with customers every week, every single one… I think that’s the best way.

I meet different types of customers because everyone has different kinds of problems that they want to solve… Meeting with customers really helps you understand what motivates them, what they’re really about, and then, you [can] start thinking about ways you can help them out.

Then, it’s more of the solutions… [how you] prioritize and build [them] out.

What should all product managers know how to do?

I would also suggest to product managers: You have to be willing to take those risks. I definitely wouldn’t [have] got to where I [am now] without taking some risks in my life in terms of the products launched and career decisions I [have] made.

Sometimes you fail. Sometimes, you hit a home run, but that’s just part of the [product management] process…

Also, you’ve got to be really decisive… Frankly… that means that you don’t have all the data to make the decision… I try to get to 50%, 60% of the data I need to make a decision.

Some people will spend way too much time trying to get as much data as possible… I think it’s moving too slowly.

What do product managers need to be successful?

You’ll make mistakes… but those mistakes provide a lot of insight and a lot [of] information that can [be] use[d] to then make [a] better decision to feature or pivot your product or whatever it might be. That’s all part of the game.

You don’t want to be working at a company that penalizes failure. That’s the fastest way to kill innovation.

You [have] got to work with a company or a manager that will encourage you to take those risks.

Do you have to know how to code to become a product manager?

Being technical definitely helps for sure, [but] I started in sales, and then got into marketing, and then got into product. Along the way, I taught myself to code and so on because I just enjoyed it…

But, you know, is it impossible? No, it’s not impossible… I see people switch over from [the] marketing department all the time.

How to become a product manager

If you talk to a product manager at work and say, hey, I want to learn… I want to understand exactly how this works, the process, and then eventually say… I want to help you with the PRD [product requirements document]. Just let me help you write a portion of it. Who’s going to say no?

… The person will say, sure, why not? We could offload work. And you get to learn from the job and so on.

Eventually, I think you [can] start learning the details of what it means to be a pure product manager. You’re putting in the effort and the time to see how they think, the requirements they write, working with the design team, and so on. Eventually, you can ask and say, hey, I want to switch over.

But you [have] got to put in [the] time and effort for sure… I’d be shocked if someone said no, I don’t want to give you a portion of my work…

A lot of people [at my] previous companies, Amazon, TikTok… were from other internal [teams] that we’re not PMs, like [the] marketing team [or] finance team. There were [also] some engineers. Lots of people switch over internally… It really comes down to, hey, do you really want it?

What I learned at TikTok

We heard from users that the content of TikTok was not useful… So we set out to onboard more useful content; we kicked off [a] $50 million creative learning fund and started this hashtag called Learn on TikTok.

We wanted to provide a dedicated place in the app where you could find this useful content… The direction I gave was to launch a third tab on the For You feed… called Learn.

It all seems simple enough… but it was actually a ton of work. I mean, it was not easy. There [were] a lot of problems to solve in order to just make this tab experience work. For instance, how do you find what learning content is? What type of content is learned versus not? Who decides that?

When we launched it, we saw that only a small percentage of users actually visited that tab daily. [The] majority of people still stayed on the For You feed, and the reason why is because it is a separate tab… The experience was great. It’s just that [when] people said I want this… their behaviors are not what they say they [are]…

I think it’s better to have the learning content intermixed with the… other content… versus just separating it out [in]to a whole separate section… That was a good learning for us.