Tag: Tech

Invisible asymptotes, a recent blog post from Eugene Wei dissecting social networks, product design philosophy, and the celling for Amazon, is tremendous. I spent 7 years in Vietnam growing multiple social networks to millions of users, and thus developed a philosophy about how people engage with each other changes generationally and how new social networks emerge. Wei’s insights are spot-on (it’s true that I say this because his opinions largely match mine, but his are much better articulated and detailed).

It’s an incredibly long article, but well worth reading. Some of my highlights:

Defining invisible asymptote:

For me, in strategic planning, the question in building my forecast was to flush out what I call the invisible asymptote: a ceiling that our growth curve would bump its head against if we continued down our current path. It’s an important concept to understand for many people in a company, whether a CEO, a product person, or, as I was back then, a planner in finance.

On Twitter:

In the case of Twitter, I think the theory is wrong. Given the current configuration of the product, I don’t think any more meaningful user growth is possible, and tweaking the product as it is now won’t unlock any more growth. The longer they don’t acknowledge this, the longer they’ll be stuck in a Red Queen loop of their own making.

On Snapchat and generational communication preferences:

I’ve written before about selfies as a second language. At the root of that phenomenon is the idea that a generation of kids raised with smartphones with a camera front and back have found the most efficient way to communicate is with the camera, not the keyboard. That’s not the case for an older cohort of users who almost never send selfies as a first resort. The very default of Snapchat to the camera screen is such a bold choice that it will probably never be the messaging app of choice for old folks, no matter how Snapchat moves around and re-arranges its other panes.

More than that, I suspect every generation needs spaces of its own, places to try on and leave behind identities at low cost and on short, finite time horizons. That applies to social virtual spaces as much as it does to physical spaces.

On Facebook:

This is one of the diseconomies of scale for social networks that Facebook is first to run into because of its unprecedented size. Imagine you’re in a room with all your family, friends, coworkers, casual acquaintances, and a lot of people you met just once but felt guilty about rejecting a friend request from. It’s hundreds, maybe even thousands of people. What would you say to them? We know people maintain multiple identities for different audiences in their lives. Very few of us have to cultivate an identity for that entire blob of everyone we know. It’s a situation one might encounter in the real world only a few times in life, perhaps at one’s wedding, and later one’s funeral. Online, though? It happens to be the default mode on Facebook’s News Feed.

On Instagram:

There is a purity about Instagram which makes even its ads perfectly native: everything on the service is an audio-visual advertisement. I see people complain about the ad load in Instagram, but if you really look at your feed, it’s always had an ad load of 100%.

I just opened my feed and looked through the first twenty posts, and I’d classify them all as ads: about how great my meal was, for beautiful travel destinations, for the exquisite craft of various photographers and cinematographers, for an actor’s upcoming film, for Rihanna’s new lingerie line or makeup drop, for an elaborate dish a friend cooked, for a current concert tour, for how funny someone is, for someone’s gorgeous new headshot, and for a few sporting events and teams. And yes, a few of them were official Instagram ads.

On understanding the root customer need from data and feedback:

True, it’s often difficult for customers to articulate what they want. But what’s missed is that they’re often much better at pinpointing what they don’t want or like. What you should hear when customers say they want a faster horse is not the literal but instead that they find travel by horse to be too slow. The savvy product person can generalize that to the broader need of traveling more quickly, and that problem can be solved any number of ways that don’t involve cloning Secretariat or shooting their current horse up with steroids.

Intuition “genius” vs data – no one you know is a genius, but a bunch of people you know think they are:

Lastly, though I hesitate to share this, it is possible to avoid invisible asymptotes through sheer genius of product intuition. I balk for the same reason I cringe when I meet CEO’s in the valley who idolize Steve Jobs. In many ways, a product intuition that is consistently accurate across time is, like Steve Jobs, a unicorn. It’s so rare an ability that to lean entirely on it is far more dangerous and high risk than blending it with a whole suite of more accessible strategies.

Just like athletes, there is a prime in one’s professional life. Michael Jordan can’t play in the NBA right now at aged 55  – just because someone had great product insight ten years ago, this doesn’t mean they have it today:

The reason I recommend a healthy mix of intuition informed by data and feedback is that most product people I know have a product view that is slower moving than the world itself. If they’ve achieved any measure of success, it’s often because their view of some consumer need was the right one at the right time. Product-market fit as tautology. Selection bias in looking at these people might confuse some measure of luck with some enduring product intuition.

However, just as a VC might have gotten lucky once with some investment and be seen as a genius for life (and the returns to a single buff of a VC brand name is shockingly durable), just because a given person’s product intuition might hit on the right moment at the right point in history to create a smash hit, it’s rare that a single person’s frame will move in lock step with that of the world. How many creatives are relevant for a lifetime?

Jeff Bezos talks about how every day is day one – every new day, there is a baseline to move forward and redefine what you can do. Continually win customers, don’t defend (lock them in) them from competitors.

You can’t overserve on user experience, Thompson argues; as a product person, I’d argue, in parallel, that it is difficult and likely impossible to understand your customer too deeply. Amazon’s mission to the be the world’s most customer-centric company is inherently a long-term strategy because it is a one with an infinite time scale and no asymptote to its slope. …

By discovering their own limitations early, they are also quicker to discover vectors on which they’re personally unbounded. Product development will always be a multi-dimensional problem, often frustratingly so, but the value of reducing that dimensionality often costs so little that it should be more widely employed.