Ancestry
- Deb Liu is the president and CEO of Ancestry.
- Liu likes to launch products in a timely fashion because it allows for immediate customer feedback.
- Liu's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership series, "Looking Ahead 2024."
Who are you? What's your family's history? What's your family's story?
During the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, many families lost older relatives, reminding them of the importance of passing on family stories, Deb Liu, Ancestry's CEO and president, told Business Insider.
She said a family member's death pushed her to ask her uncle to recall a story about her family's history. "That story is precious to me because it's something I never knew," she said. "I realized that nobody else will know that story. Was it urgent? No. But at the same time, will I have ever gotten the chance to capture that?"
Liu said that while much of genealogy involves documents and records, it's really "about the stories and journeys people made," such as "how our parents came to America, how our great-grandparents traveled from there to here."
Ancestry is designed to help people determine their family's origins through free and subscription genealogy services and DNA testing. Liu said she's excited about new offerings to allow several members of a family to work on their history together.
Liu said that while she knows Ancestry isn't a necessity, especially for people feeling uncertain about their finances, she wants to meet customers where they are.
Liu's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership package, "Looking Ahead 2024," digging into vision, strategy, and challenges across corporate America.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are you looking forward to in 2024?
Two things really stand out: global expansion and furthering DEI efforts. We're continuously working to bring our product to new regions across the world. We're also looking to further our DEI efforts internally and within our platform. Bringing diverse voices and stories to the table will only strengthen our business and product.
How do we actually make it possible for people who are like you and me [Editor's note: Both the reporter and Liu are of East Asian descent] who might not have the rich experience you have with the records we have, say, from a parish of Cornwall?
We're continuing to make the product more inclusive so that it serves everybody equally across different ethnicities and backgrounds. They all care about their family history.
What is your biggest concern for 2024?
My biggest concern is continued uncertainty in the economy. Ancestry is a subscription business, and, naturally, we rely on our customers' stability and confidence in committing to our service. But considering rising geopolitical instabilities and financial challenges such as household and credit-card debt, we're not always sure where our consumers will be.
What is one thing you got right in 2023?
Ruthless prioritization is so important. You're seeing that tech companies are cutting off the things that aren't working — we're no different. We just said: "Hey, we did a lot of things. Let's figure out what's going to work and let's invest in those. Let's understand them."
In the latter half of this year, we put together a scorecard. We looked at that scorecard every day. I think that that level of focus gives you a lot of momentum because once you get version one out the door, you get customer feedback.
If it takes you 18 months to build something, then when you get out there, you get feedback, and suddenly you have to iterate. We said let's get it out in six months and figure out what the feedback is so we can build versions two and three.
We have a much clearer 2024 road map as a result of the work we did this year.
What's one thing you got wrong in 2023?
It's easy to try to do too much. I wish we had done "ruthless prioritization" earlier in the year.
We got to a place where we just had to make a call because we needed the 2024 road map, but I wish we didn't wait to do that. It's easy to let things slide because you say, "We can just manually do X for a while."
But the longer you wait, the harder it is, and it never gets easier. One of the things I asked my team was "What does the future you wish you'd done today?" As a leadership team, it's easy to say, "Next year we want to do X," but I said: "Imagine this same group of people are sitting here for five years. What do they wish we wanted to do?"
It's easy to trade short-term delivery or short-term growth for long-term success. That's constantly our touchstone — saying, "Let's ask our future selves what they wish we did today," and that's what we should do.