Robby Stein: preference

Transcript context

…Something else I want to talk about is you came into two products that were already doing really well, Instagram and Google. And on the Instagram side, a transformative growth and improvement. Google is happening, we're in the middle of the improvement and growth you're driving. Not a lot of people get to do this where they go into an existing product, make it grow significantly. A lot of people want to do this. They have a product that's been around for a long time. Hey, how do we make this grow and be more successful? Is there anything specifically that you've learned about just coming into an existing product, figuring out where the big opportunities are and then just hockey-sticking growth? Because this is what everyone wants to do. There's a couple lessons here. And I think, by the way, the first lesson is to be humble always because it's extremely incredible to be able to work on products that have such impact on people. I view product like golf, you're always one stroke away from shanking. And as soon as you think you're good, you're not, you don't know anything. The world changes quickly. You have to always be a servant to your user base and the people that are out there and learn from them. The first thing I always do and think about is you get in touch in terms of why are people using this product, and where are the areas of growth? And so usually even in a big product or a mature in a complex system, there's a part of it that's growing. There's a part of it that's mature, there could be a part of it that's declining or isn't growing as much. Certainly in Instagram, there's been a big shift over the years of sharing into public very large broadcast posts and feed into these more lightweight formats like Stories and DM actually private sharing as well. And so you have to observe that because every month, every year, the world changes, people's needs change. First thing you do is you get a sense of what do people want out of this product? What's its true essence? I think a lot about this job to be done framework, which is one of the things that I'm a big fan of and Clayton Christensen's book on Competing Against Luck is one of my favorite books on this topic where you have to really be a student of causation. Why is someone using this product? What are they doing with it and what are they trying to get done with it? And that usually leads you to do bigger next stage ideas, and it removes this belief that you need to solve the problem with the current tools. In the Instagram version, it was like you have to make a square photo do more for people. That would be how you increment the product. Or in Google's example, there's something very specific with the core search experience that needs to change, it's a subtle tweak. You have to think, well, what's the big thing? Someone's trying to ask a really hard question out of Google? What's the best way to do that for them? And so it makes you think more first principled and that's the first basis of this. And then once from first principles, you're like, "Oh, this newer thing." And it could be a shift, it could be a new form. In many ways, the AI version of Google and Stories and Reels, they're all similar in that they're new formats in the world that people are expecting and wanting more of. And by adding them, it becomes complementary, not replacement. And in both cases, Stories didn't replace Instagram, it expanded in the same way we're seeing for AI. And so what's interesting is then you think, well, how do I bring that into my world? You have this big mature product. ories didn't replace Instagram, it expanded in the same way we're seeing for AI. And so what's interesting is then you think, well, how do I bring that into my world? You have this big mature product. The best way I've seen is by making it complimentary, having it be a core part of the experience, but clearly defined as a distinctive thing that has its own attributes associated with it because people think spatially. So if you have a feed and you have holes with pictures, they expect those holes to do things. And so if you make one of those holes with a little clock and that one goes away the next day or you can't like it or it operates differently than the other parts of your feed, it's going to be super confusing for people. It sucks. And so you have to add product carefully, but it needs to feel coherent but different. Stories, it has similar aesthetic. It obviously uses your camera roll in the same way it works that you can share it in DM, it works in the system, but it has a different primitive in the same way Google AI, it's a full page experience that you can pop out now. You can have follow up conversation with it. People have a set of expectations you need to snap to for those use cases. And then you are constantly learning how to best make these new products work within your world. You never just want to snap in something that's working, you have to make it work for your users, your expectations, and what people are trying to do with your product. It's actually one of the things I see people fail on the most is they assume something working for one system will work in your world, but someone else's system is on totally the types of users they have with the consumer expectation of that product, that's totally different set of expectations. You have to respect that and say, "What can we learn from that," and bring it here. I guess if you were to talk about the method that I've seen now or twice, I guess that's how these products have developed.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.