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Dive Brief:
Etsy has expanded the role of Rafe Colburn, the company’s chief technology officer, to chief product and technology officer, the artisans marketplace announced Thursday. Colburn, who remains a member of the executive team, began the position Monday.
In his new role, Colburn manages the engineering and product operations for the Etsy marketplace and reports to Kruti Patel Goyal, Etsy’s president and chief growth officer.
This move follows the departure of Nick Daniel, who was the company’s chief product officer until Friday. Daniel will advise the company until October, when he plans to leave to pursue other opportunities, according to the announcement.
Dive Insight:
Though Colburn has only served as Etsy’s CTO since May, his role is already being expanded. This new position will enable him to use technology to enhance the customer shopping experience and drive growth for the company, Goyal noted in a statement.
“We have a tremendous opportunity to harness AI and other emerging technologies to make the shopping experience even more personal, more intuitive, and more delightful—while staying true to what makes Etsy so special,” Colburn said in a statement.
While this role is new to Etsy, it’s one Colburn has held before, at sister company Depop. Prior to becoming CTO at Etsy, Colburn was chief product and technology officer at the secondhand goods marketplace, where he oversaw its end-to-end user experience and was responsible for “building a high-performing product organization.” Including his three-plus year stint at Depop, Colburn has been at Etsy for over a decade, leading the company’s engineering staff through multiple growth periods.
Daniel, who is leaving in the fall, first took on the chief product officer role in 2022. He replaced Goyal, who at the time was stepping in as Depop CEO after the departure of Maria Raga. Goyal changed roles again last year and Peter Semple is now Depop CEO.
As Etsy combines its product and technology teams under one leader, the marketplace has leaned heavily into artificial intelligence. In April, the platform debuted its new browseable search experience on the app, which uses AI and human intelligence to curate collections for shoppers. Executives on an earnings call that month said the company is also harnessing AI to shape push notifications, emails and personalized homepages.
On an earnings call in July, Goyal said the company also aims to rework its platform to use LLMs in generative AI, which will let the company “understand our listings, users and their activity much more deeply as we work to deliver better search results.” The marketplace in Q2 saw gross merchandise sales decline 5.4% year over year to $2.4 billion. Its active buyers also dipped 4.6% from a year earlier to 87.3 million.