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Sourcery · 3 min · Oct 19, 2026

Yahoo balances product data with judgment, not endless tests

Jim Lanzone

CEO, Yahoo

Leads Yahoo since 2021, running its turnaround under Apollo; previously CEO of Tinder and CBS Interactive.

  • Molly O'SheaHost · Founder, Sourcery

    Ex-Upfront Ventures investor; has interviewed Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey.

About this segment

Lanzone starts with user data, then combines testing with product judgment. Yahoo's scale enables experiments, but he warns against letting tests replace conviction.

From “Apollo’s Yahoo Playbook, 5 Years After the $5B Deal”, Oct 19, 2026. Watch the full episode

“you can't do that. You have to have some passion for what you think the product should be and lead with that.”
Jim Lanzoneat 26:24 · Sourcery26:24

Takeaways

  1. Use data to understand user behavior at scale.
  2. Run tests, but avoid testing everything at once.
  3. Product leaders still need a clear point of view.
Watch 3:02 from 25:01

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 16:57Yahoo cut ad tech costs and unlocked better ad yield2:52
  2. 30:18Yahoo Scout grounds answers in its own data3:32
  3. 9:26Yahoo gave each brand its own entrepreneurial GM3:07
  4. 40:24Yahoo's logged-in audience adds value for advertisers2:32
  5. 21:15Yahoo had to fix its core products before launching new ones3:46

  6. 25:01Yahoo balances product data with judgment, not endless tests3:02

  7. 12:31Yahoo outsourced search when it was treated as a cost center2:41Up next
  8. 33:57Yahoo chose personal-life products over enterprise software3:31

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 25:07

    process yeah I mean that's that's art and science so it's going to start with with data and understanding your user base and what which again you never really understand from the outside you know it's funny I have a bunch of my UCLA college friends we to help me get to know this college product I got a bunch of them on it and they beat me up all day long for things that they're finding in the product and when you when then i when i then go talk to the actual product team on the sports team what you know what's really driving things behind the scenes or whether something's really wrong or it's particular to one person's opinion it's just different right take that across search where what happens on the other side of that search box is so complicated compared to especially now with with ai but even going back to the old days of of ten blue links

  2. 25:50

    like you know you enter that query but what we have to do on the other side to like capture that and understand what to do with it is incredibly complicated. And how to do that for hundreds of millions of people and move the needle forward is different than what it might just be for one user. So data is going to lead you the way forward. After that, it is creativity and people who have a sensibility for users.

  3. 26:12

    One of the benefits of having a huge audience is that you can A-B test your way to things. So you can have a hunch, especially now with AI, we can do it even more. We can experiment more. I do think product teams can get a little too addicted to that or become too cautious and want to do 200 tests at one time, you can't do that. You have to have some passion for what you think the product should be and lead with that.

  4. 26:36

    But the thing that Yahoo had that I had experienced at prior companies was this huge audience. And that is just so hard. If you go look at the top internet companies in Comscore or SimilarWeb or others, it is incredible how many are from the 90s. it's amazing how many are from the early 2000s youtube and facebook i mean we're all we're 30 years old but yeah or google is almost 28 years old um you know youtube i think is 21 years old facebook 22 i mean we all are kind of in the same dating range or whatever i mean it's all you know we're all about the same age interestingly at this point and new brands that get added to that really only happen once every three to five years right chat youtube was the latest before that, it was probably TikTok, you know, Snap, Instagram, it just doesn't happen very often.

  5. 27:26

    So I think, you know, I hesitate to call it a moat, because you can lose it so easily if you don't treat it right. But this level of distribution allows you to improve the products and have it work, right, versus trying to light the wet log from scratch, which is what entrepreneurs have to do, you know, which is why so many of the biggest consumer internet companies were happened by accident you know they really weren't the thing that they intended to be a lot of the time so we don't have we don't you know we we have a great platform to be able to to build great products on that's just we're lucky to have that of the other