Yup, this is another paid subscriber post, which tend to go out every other Thursday(ish) and are more stream of consciousness about what’s top of mind recently.
Product work is hard work. Even if you strip it down to “offer things that people will pay you money for, keep doing that”, juggling all the conflicting viewpoints, opinions, and requirements to make it happen successfully is a risky endeavor. This is why companies that are past the 2-person startup stage try to build processes and institutions to enable productive product work while minimizing the risks of doing so.
You’ve got the engineering people designing the code and infrastructure so that things can change to fit future needs at minimal risk, You have sales people bringing in feedback and feature requests from customers about what they care about. There’ll be research teams trying to understand all the motivations of users. There’ll be data scientists squeezing more money out of the system with their clever tricks. There’s product managers who are tasked with scanning the marketplace, synthesizing all the inputs, and then coming to a risky vision of where to go.
Teams are supposed to feel psychologically safe to maximize their productivity and creativity. Users have agendas for our product that no one in the room can even dream of, which is why we need to do research and listen to them.
None of that is put on display surrounding Twitter the past week.
Towards the beginning of the week while I was putting in the initial lines of this post, I was going to laugh at how a twitter poll was being used by EM as an “interesting” data point about how many people were willing to pay for a Blue checkmark. It was mostly going to be a bit about the huge gap between what people are willing to say they’ll pay in a survey, and what people actually pay when actually forced to pull out a credit card and spend money.
Then the news and craziness just kept ratcheting up day by day, hour by hour.
It’s utterly infuriating because if there were a frickin’ textbook about how to sustainably build product for people to buy, leading software teams, and not making an ass of yourself in public, all we’ve seen this week would represent a clear “don’t do this” list.
Rule by fear and threats
Make arbitrary deadlines
Imply mandatory overtime/crunch to reach deadlines
Do shitty market research put out as cringe-worthy trial balloons
Attempt to skirt paying severance by firing executives “for cause”
Announce 50% layoffs
All within a single week
And do much of this in public view
What touches a nerve about this fiasco is that for over 15 years, it’s been drilled into me from direct experience that none of what’s going on is going to lead to any positive outcomes. This feels like a slap in the face to every product professional I’ve worked with who earnestly did their best to make things work.
We’re just watching a car, fully committed and out of control, crash into an obstacle at frightening speed. The resulting explosion will be graphic and a lesson to us all.
That’s where all of this has left me… I’m now effectively taking notes on what is going to be the most hairbrained unraveling of the most overpriced leveraged buyout of the 21st century.
The ideas being floated around for monetization have been so tone deaf already, I’m honestly wondering whether they’ll dig up all the monetization tricks of the gaming industry. We’re inches away from buying cosmetic hats for our profiles, lootboxes, or weird impression boosts to posts. They are about as in-touch with the community at large as anything else that’s been suggested so far. If they manage to hire their first executive out of Electronic Arts or Zynga for their “experience in monetizing experiences”, I’m going to just keel over.
If all these antics actually resulted in a surprising outcome over time, then it’d be at least interesting to understand why as a case study. It’d be some sort of reputation of the base theory of good management and product work that exists in my mind. We are still so many weeks and months away from seeing if that is even possible right now.
Digg spent at least a couple of months coding up the redesign that would wind up destroying the whole site in under a month. I’m largely wondering where on the timeline things are this time around.