🎨 Zofia Ciechowska, VP, Strategy & Operations at Etsy
Embrace curiosity and courage to create systems and make an impact
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In This Edition
A conversation with Zofia Ciechowska, VP, Strategy & Operations at Etsy. Key takeaways:
💡The power of a Strategy and Operations team
🔍 The importance of curiosity and courage
✅ Why systems thinking matters
What sparked your passion for working in your field?
I come from a family focused on serving others. My mother is a teacher. From a young age, I was able to observe my mother at work, which I think had a big impact on how I have decided to develop my own leadership. By watching her, I learned how to communicate, educate, uplift people and be of service to those around me.
I enjoy being in Strategy and Ops because it is all of those things. I also love multidisciplinary work and maintaining a very broad view of business models and organizations, which this career offers in spades.
As you look at your career, what is one project you are proud of creating over the years?
At Spotify:
The first highlight – From 2015-2018, Spotify was going through its hyper-growth phase and vying with the likes of YouTube, Apple Music, Amazon, Pandora, and others. During my time there, I was part of and then managed Spotify's Strategy Operations team. There was no ampersand between “Strategy Operations” because we were a team specifically dedicated to operationalizing the company’s strategy. It was a unique team.
We were creating and running Spotify Rhythm — the company's engine for strategic planning and execution. Spotify’s CEO and CPO still call it a key ingredient of their secret sauce for staying ahead of the competition. It was designed to balance alignment and autonomy and increase coordination and speed between teams and functions that were generally encouraged to be independent. From balancing this healthy tension came a lot of innovation.
As we kept growing, we needed to create a thin layer of alignment and coordination to make sure the teams were all pulling in the same direction. That was Spotify Rhythm. It was scrappy and elegant at the same time. The work was tough and inspiring.
At Etsy:
The second highlight – Later in 2018, I joined Etsy and became a key member of the team that got to revitalize the marketplace experience, and the strategy, internal operations, and culture underpinning it. When I arrived, I quickly focused on creating strategic alignment to improve coordination and deployment of resources. If everyone knows what matters and why it's important, it's so much easier to move faster as a team. Building that level of strategic alignment was where my efforts were directed in my early days at the company.
As part of this early experience at Etsy, I got to completely overhaul the company’s long-term strategy – how we express what we stand for and what differentiates the business. Today, much of our strategy work is available on our external investor pages for external audiences. We also spend a lot of time communicating our strategy internally. While our strategy is built to last, we make a point of pressure-testing and fortifying it every year. Since 2019, I’ve led our yearly ritual of refreshing our long-term company strategy. It’s this ritual that then propels our annual planning and delivery cycles. Both of these career highlights from Spotify and Etsy are interlinked. I would not be where I am without the learning that both opportunities offered me.
What are the skills needed to succeed in Strategy and Operations?
You need both curiosity and courage. Be a voracious learner who listens, analyzes, debates and writes daily. Learn faster than others. Have a bias for action. Your goal is to become encyclopedic about your customers, the business, your product and key metrics. You need to be eager to discover root causes, never settle for the first answer, and know how to think in systems and see all of the parts connect. Curiosity is key.
Next, courage is key because you must be able to influence a wide range of roles and levels, find what appeals to them and learn how to activate them around common goals. Courage is also about helping others face the fact that failure is an option. Be prepared to catch them when they start falling, or help pick them up after the fact.
Courage is about being proactive about finding and clarifying the ambiguous areas that lurk in your organization. Often, strategy, goals, owners of work are unclear and create inertia. It can be really uncomfortable calling it out, but you need to be brave, bring it up respectfully, and find a path forward.
How does your work intersect with internal communications?
My team is also the home for our Internal Communications function. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if it's not well communicated and understood, it won’t matter. This is why the function is contained within the Strategy and Operations team at Etsy. We have a big stake in setting and executing our strategy, but also communicating it.
Internal communications is the function that keeps up a steady drumbeat of information flow across the company. We strive to inspire, inform and engage our employees around the mission of: Keep Commerce Human. We also support them in feeling included and impactful in their roles. We look after a range of proactive and reactive communications for the business. We have key employee audiences that we reach through channels such as company and org all hands, newsletters, keynotes, and livestreams. We also have the tough job of assessing when and how to respond to external crises that affect our employees. Finally, we build strong bridges with many departments across the company to ensure we’re reflecting the business’ strategic priorities and the voices of our customers in how we connect with each other internally.
How do you continue your professional learning journey?
I try to say yes more often than no when it comes to learning about new things or meeting new people, even if it feels a little scary at first. I encourage others to do the same, as long as it doesn’t contribute to an erosion of boundaries and burnout.
I'm part of the 2023 Aspen Institute's First Movers Fellowship, which is a significant professional learning opportunity for me this year. I get to learn from so many other smart Fellows in the program, and the design team has been really great about investing in growing our leadership and innovation capabilities.
There are two books that I refer to time and again — Thinking In Systems for solving problems at scale and Thinking In Bets which teaches about decision making.
There’s a consultancy that I enjoy following RawSignalGroup. Their newsletter series about management is refreshing.
About Zofia
Zofia Ciechowska is VP, Strategy & Operations at Etsy. She specializes in simplifying how companies set and execute strategy during key inflection points in their growth.
Since 2018, Zofia has overseen Etsy’s strategy and operations, employee communications, and program management functions during Etsy’s reascension as the global marketplace for vintage and handmade goods. Today, she works across Etsy’s three marketplaces and their executive teams to increase their strategic alignment, deliberate execution, and innovation capabilities. Before Etsy, Zofia led Spotify’s Strategy Operations team during the company’s preparation to go public. Her earlier career began in organizational design and product strategy consulting, where she helped Fortune 500s incubate new online products and adopt new ways of working to grow them. Zofia engages in DEI initiatives through mentorship, public speaking and advocacy. The values guiding her work are: prioritizing people over process, encouraging candid reflection and improvement, and promoting sustainability and equity in business.
Zofia holds two degrees with distinction from University College London, a Master’s in Digital Humanities and a Bachelor’s in Dutch and French. Since her teens she’s grown her own freelance journalism practice, writing about music, art, fashion and film for publications large and small. Zofia is based in Brooklyn, NY.
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“I try to say yes more often than no when it comes to learning about new things or meeting new people, even if it feels a little scary at first.” Sound advice for all of us in so many walks of life.