Bangaly Kaba: preference

Transcript context

…Wow. I'm curious, what's the most impactful thing you've shipped/led to in terms of impact and experiment launch? At Instagram, we saw this big problem where people were logging out and not being able to get back into their account. It was crazy. Hundreds of thousands of people a day could not get back into their account. It was because ... And when I say could not get back into the account, I mean they literally would try and 28 days later, we would never see them again. And we thought it was a problem because they didn't remember where their email was, which email they signed up with or what their actual handle was or what their password was. We were losing 10, 12 million people a year from what we called account access churn. So we worked on this problem and we had spent a lot of time in South Asia and Southeast Asia trying to understand how to grow the product. And from that time we realized that it's important actually for people to be able to log out. We don't want to restrict people's ability to log out because there are many people in the world who don't want to use background data because they're on prepaid phone plans or they don't have a lot of money and they want to share their phone with a sibling and so they log out. And so it's really important. And so we don't want to take away that behavior, but we did have to do a better job of helping them get back in. So we did two things. One was there used to be a time, and you can probably find it on Google if you did an archive search where if you wanted to log into your Instagram account, there would be a tab for your email and then there would be a tab for your handle. And we didn't really make it easy for you to log in with your phone number either. You had to get to the right tab and the right place to get the right thing. And so we did this omnibox experience where it was just like email, phone handle, put it all in one place and we made it super simple for you. And the second time, if you tried it twice and it didn't work, if we knew that you were on a trusted device, we would just send you a text message and say, Hey, are you trying to log in? That solved half the problem. And then the other half, what we did, and this still exists today on Instagram. When you log out we say, Hey Lenny, it looks like you're going to log out, do you want us to save your credentials on your advice so you don't have to worry about your password? And then we later added an ability to have a password. And that's all basically the other half. And so just being really thoughtful around what is actually the core job that people are trying to do because a bad experience would've been like, Hey, let's make it really hard for people to walk out. And then how do we ... One or two experiments really help people to get back into the experience. do because a bad experience would've been like, Hey, let's make it really hard for people to walk out. And then how do we ... One or two experiments really help people to get back into the experience. And so what was interesting was that we were able to solve this ... And this actually helped drive public 15, 20 million extra month active users a year, but what was also super interesting was that it helped us to realize that getting people back into their account more drove more account content creation on incident in ways that we didn't expect. And so because we were getting people back into the account, people getting into the second account and getting into the third account and they were going into their finsta account and creating content more. And so that actually led to the creation of a multiple accounts team, which is what has made it easy for you to navigate between accounts on Instagram today. And so that was understandable actually coming to life. It was, Hey, we're going to do the understand work to figure out how to solve account access issues and we're going to solve it. And solving it, when we looked at the data, we're like, Hey, why is all this account, why is all this content creation happening? That was not what we were expecting and where is it happening? And it was happening from second and third accounts. And so that made us realize that oh, people were not only getting locked out of their first accounts, but they were actually creating a lot on the second and third accounts. How can we make it easy for them to get and navigate between their first account, whether it's your account and a business account or your account and [inaudible 01:24:19] account or a bakery account, you know what I mean? And so that created a multiple accounts team, which I ended up owning and that ended up even becoming a bigger effort after I left. So that's an example of understand work, solve a real problem, real-solve and solving massive solution, massive impact, creating new data that you didn't expect that drives new understand work, which creates a whole new team to allow you to move around your Instagram account more seamlessly. And you can see this now when you go to post, you can decide, okay, I want to post as Lenny, I want to post as this other thing, or when I want to write a story, you can change anywhere. And that was all an effort that originally came out of this realization.…

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