How Data, Tech, and Teams Are Coming Together – An Interview With Ianina Lucca, SVP, Growth at Depop

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking to Ianina Lucca, who has recently taken on the SVP, Growth role at peer-to-peer marketplace Depop. As a startup set on empowering the next generation to transform fashion, 90% of Depop’s audience is under the age of 26—and these consumers expect seamless, personalized, in the moment marketing engagement. During our chat, Ianina talked about how her teams use collaboration, technology, and data to deliver brilliant experiences and build stronger relationships. Here are some of her key insights:

1. Genuine cross-team functionality is best

At Depop, we really come together and support each other on initiatives regardless of which team we belong to. Pretty much everything we do is cross-functional, and we are still at that great size where we can really collaborate effectively in an agile way. The best thing is that this is not coming from the top, but from the teams really collaborating and supporting each other.

2. Great teams start with great hires

For me, it comes down to finding the right people and the right chemistry within the team. I always try to focus on finding smart, data-driven, customer-centric thinkers who have a passion for solving problems. If you have the right mindset, you can learn and tackle anything. It’s worth investing the time in finding the right mix of people—and prioritizing talent is always the activity that delivers the best return.

3. Process is important—but so is creativity

Process is an area where I think we could do more. Being a startup, we have been growing super-fast and I think that for the majority of companies, processes don’t grow at the same pace as people. There’s a happy medium between having too much process—killing creativity and not being able to make the most of opportunities when they present—and having too little process and failing on the execution for that same reason.

4. Effective teams need flexible, agile tech

When you think about older legacy stacks vs. new stacks, flexibility and agility are top of mind. The advantage of partnering with newer technologies is that they are much more agile and are not only listening to their customers but are also in touch with their use cases to understand what they need [to do] to be able to react to evolving customer needs.

5. When investing in new systems, think teams, not just tech

Personally, I also look at the quality of the teams you will work with during the integration and operational phase. Ensuring that you have an aligned philosophy and a two-way relationship goes a really long way. You want to end up in a situation when you are really partnering up and that is one of the things that I admire the most about the Braze model.

6. To create a data-driven culture, you need to prove benefits

I’ve personally tried to always be very data-driven and [to] lay down the framework on how we want to think about an opportunity. If you show people the benefits of being structured in your thinking by using a framework and letting data lead the way, others will start seeing the impact and embrace that change.

7. The customer still—always—comes first

Doing right by your customer is probably the most powerful retention strategy you can deploy—and the most authentic one, too. At Depop, everything we do is in support of our customers and our community as a whole, whether it’s business as usual or in a time of need. We must evolve with our community, constantly innovating on their behalf, making them the focal point of every business decision in order to fulfill their needs, wants, and desires.

For more insights on how to build strong relationships through cross-channel personalization—including exclusive data on the ideal outreach frequency for each major channel—read our Brilliant Experiences, Channel by Channel report.