Robby Stein: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love that you just gave a master class on just how to prioritize and pick what to work on. I want to go on a quick tangent. Speaking of products that have done really well and become really big, Stories, you build and launched Stories at Instagram. It's quite an infamous product launch back in the day, it was quite controversial because it basically took what Snapchat was doing really well and then, "Hey, let's bring it to Instagram," and it was not great for Snapchat. Now that it was so long ago and just, it's so far in the past, I'm so curious just to hear about that time reflecting on just that decision, what you guys talked about, how you decided to go ahead with that and anything just, I don't know, you think about looking back at that. I think there's a couple of really important lessons from that launch. And I mean we went on afterwards to launch Reels, a bunch of updates to direct messaging, we had feed rank game. There was just a huge era there when I was there between 2016 and 2021 or so where just so many new products got built. I think an interesting lesson in all of those, and particularly in Stories was you have to really understand why someone uses your product and know when something is actually an existential question because there's just a better format or a different way of doing something that has worked and works and you need to figure out what that might mean for you, because not every great thing is going to be invented by you. But I think that a lot of these things are, they can become formats that you can make your own and you need to learn from the world and what's happening out there in order for your product to always give the best thing to its users. And so for Stories, we looked at Instagram like, what's the point of Instagram? It is sharing your life and connecting with people ultimately. And if there's a way to do that, that lowers the pressure because it doesn't have likes or it's just ephemeral format and it's optimized well for mobile because it's this full screen experience. It's a really great format and kudos to Snapchat for inventing it. We didn't think of that as a deterrent, that we had to go make Instagram photo clock. And actually, there were early versions of this idea where you try to take the core Instagram feed and make it ephemeral. And whenever you try to mix a core product that's very cemented in someone's mind and physically looks a specific way and you're trying to make, contort it to do something new, it's usually a bad recipe. And so we knew we needed to do something new and then it was so clearly was critical to the core essence of what the product could do, could fit in naturally. But the question was how do we make it our own? And how do we build on this? And so if you think, there were a bunch of things that we did that made it Instagram. For example, it had different creative tools and it had things like neon drawing and these really sophisticated filters that people loved. We also looked at this talk about being dissatisfied. People took, a lot of times they want their main camera to take a picture of something and then they want to upload it to Instagram because they want to save it and they want it to be in a very high quality, high resolution photo, because it's a memory. And Snapchat at the time didn't allow you to upload photos, it was like you have to use the Snap camera. And so we made a bunch of decisions like that where why don't you just let people upload their photo? This is back to the dissatisfied point, that's frustrating. Or there's another example where you couldn't pause if you were consuming a story. t where why don't you just let people upload their photo? This is back to the dissatisfied point, that's frustrating. Or there's another example where you couldn't pause if you were consuming a story. You couldn't pause it, it just would go through and be done because it was this ephemeral thing and you wanted to create safety. Why can't you just pause? It goes by too fast. So we added this pause, it's such a small thing, but you put your finger down to pause the story now. And so there were a whole set of those things that were shipped that made Stories feel Instagram. It wasn't like you just had some other thing. And then it turns out that worked incredibly well, and so much to the fact that someone on the team mentioned that they always felt like at the time, they didn't realize it, but it was almost like it was missing the story size holes at the top of the page and it completed the product in some weird way for them. And so that was, I think an important lesson.…

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