Building community products across cultures

Cookpad is one of Japan’s most successful consumer products, helping millions of people discover, save and share recipes. Replicating that success internationally proved to be a much harder challenge.

I joined Cookpad’s international product team at a time when the company was trying to answer an important question.

Could the success of the Japanese product be repeated elsewhere?

The product already had a passionate community and a proven model in Japan. But products don’t exist in isolation. They’re shaped by the people, cultures and habits around them, and what works brilliantly in one market doesn’t always translate to another.

Over the next two years I worked across several product teams, all connected by one theme: helping people build stronger communities around food.

Some projects focused on making it easier for people to discover and share recipes. Others improved the tools used by moderators supporting communities of millions of users each month. While the problems looked different on the surface, they all came back to the same challenge: understanding how people interacted with one another and designing products that encouraged those behaviours.

Two projects from that time still stand out.

One explored how paving the cow path—making an existing behaviour easier rather than trying to create a new one—resulted in a tenfold increase in recipe sharing through WhatsApp.

The other involved redesigning the moderation tools used by community managers, releasing the new experience as a live beta alongside the existing one so moderators could adopt it at their own pace while giving us rapid feedback.

If you’re interested, I’ve written about both projects in more detail:

How paving a cow path resulted in a 10x increase in the number of people sharing content

How we redesigned tools used to manage a community of 100 million users a month as a live beta

Working at Cookpad left me with a healthy respect for context. Understanding why something works can be every bit as difficult as building it in the first place.

Curious how experiences like this shaped the way I think about product?

Working across different products, markets and organisations has reinforced a handful of principles that I keep coming back to.