Kayvon Beykpour: evaluation

Transcript context

…re. But I think my takeaway there is you can't change culture without having alignment from the top. It's difficult to change culture when you have a pocket of a company trying to advocate for change. So I think we got there in the end. We didn't move as much urgency as I think we drove. We were not fast enough, we were not bold enough. I was consistently dissatisfied with what I was achieving and what our team was achieving. But I think we did make a change. Twitter was an organization that had a lot of sacred cows and became very [inaudible 00:25:24] in its ways. Literally the first two years I was at the company, the stated product strategy for Twitter was refine the core. It was like, we're not making any big bets here, team. Our goal is to keep turning the knobs that are working. And listen, as much as I was kind of throwing stones from the sidelines through that period when I was in Periscope land in our separate office a few blocks away from the mothership, that focus actually did help the company for some period. The reason why Twitter went from stagnant to declining DAU growth to growing DAU again is because they refined the core. This is when they went from the reverse chronological timeline to the ranked timeline, and the year after that was a lot of knob turning. It was like, how do we make these recommendations better? How do we make our push notifications more relevant? Now, that is not an inspiring product strategy. That does not result in the product feeling materially different or adding new capabilities, but it did return the company to user growth. And I think that the fact that it did actually calcified the organization's reticence to take any risky bets even more. So it was a very interesting predicament because when I got into the role, the goal wasn't to change that progress. We wanted to continue reaping the benefits of refining the things about the product that were working really well. What we wanted to change was a lack of ambition, the lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product was changed at all. Because you would hear people, I mean, one of the beautiful things about working on Twitter as a product is that you have literally customers being injected into your veins. Every single day, whatever you change about a product or whatever you don't change, they're telling you what they love and what they hate. And it is both exhausting and exhilarating. It is one of the most ridiculous luxuries of product development, is working on a product that many people use and therefore you get that much feedback around. And it was a very common thing for us to hear people say, "What are you all doing over there? The product hasn't changed in eight years." And that was horrible to hear, and I felt it too, as a critic on the sidelines, as a user who wasn't an employee who eventually became an employee, I had the same feedback. And so that was my mission. I was like, I am somehow ridiculously in this fortunate position that I've been entrusted some responsibility here. I might flame out completely, but hell if I don't try. And so that was both fun and exhausting, like I said. ridiculously in this fortunate position that I've been entrusted some responsibility here. I might flame out completely, but hell if I don't try. And so that was both fun and exhausting, like I said. But it was as simple as starting with we are voracious users of the product ourselves, and if we aren't, by the way, that's its own problem. I think that in order to build something wonderful, you have to be a customer of the product. And sure, I'm sure you could point to businesses and products where that's not the case, and I'm sure there's a flaw in that philosophy somewhere, but I've always believed that one of the best ways to build products is to be a customer yourself and to find your own pain points and to build a product that you want to use. And so that's actually not that hard to do if you're a user of Twitter and you can think critically. It was ripe with opportunity. And so it was actually really fun and amazing to be able to craft a plan that started to take a swing at some of these things. And the other thing I'll add to this is that there were so many sacred cows at Twitter that the sacred cows are their own roadmap. It's like a built-in free roadmap of like, all right, what are all the things that you think we're not allowed to change? Let's start there. Everything from moving from reverse chron to a ranked feed, that was a sacred cow. Text and 140 characters, that's a sacred cow. Not letting anyone control any tweets that they see on the platform. The notion of Lenny owning his reply space was anathema at Twitter. It's just like if a tweet gets, if you get an at mention and you don't like it or it's abusive, we're not touching that. We can't annotate tweets with [inaudible 00:29:30], all that stuff, those are all sacred cows. And the process of starting to address those one by one reveals a lot of the cultural hesitations that existed. So yeah, I'll never forget one of the first features, and this is such a tiny feature that we worked on after I started the role, we were building this feature called hide replies. It still exists in the product today. If someone replies to one of your tweets, in the tweet details area as a reply to one of your conversations, before you had no ability, the only way you could address unwanted content was reporting it. So that was like Twitter acting as policemen and policewoman, completely unscalable and challenging, especially in the context of someone replying to one of your tweets. And so we wanted to add a feature that let you hide a reply to one of your tweets, and it's not impacting what people say. It's not impacting free speech in the sense of you can still broadcast whatever you want, but if you're going to come into my reply space and say some shit that I don't want to see in my feed, I should be able to hide that. Tweet what you want, but don't at mention. You can't scream in my face basically. And I remember we had a PM on our team who was leading this feature who a few weeks into this project mentioned to me that she had had a conversation with someone on the engineering team that told them, "Don't work on this feature. This is bad for your career. feature who a few weeks into this project mentioned to me that she had had a conversation with someone on the engineering team that told them, "Don't work on this feature. This is bad for your career. This is not going to launch, and you don't want to work on this. You don't want to be seen as having worked on this." Because it was so kind of anathema to we can't let people hide replies to their tweets. And I just remember hearing that and my blood was boiling. That is the most, it was such an interesting representation of the culture, not just hesitation to try new things, which by the way, that product might've failed. And that's fine, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't try. But to go so far as to dissuade someone else who was excited about experimenting with a hypothesis to see if it could help customers on the platform and telling them, "Don't work on this. It's bad for your career." As a microcosm for some of the cultural challenge we had around trying big, bold bets, which by the way, this wasn't even a big, bold bet. It was such an innocuous thing to try. But there was a lot of that and it made it very difficult without some sheer force of will and also just a lot of effort. So there was a lot of that.…

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