Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:52:38 · Adam Mosseri
[00:52:38] S0: It started on newsfeed. So I used to run newsfeed on Facebook, and my take was that the debate was going to happen with or without us, so we might as well participate. And so I started being really active on Twitter specifically, because that's where journalists really lived at the time, and I thought it would show some humility to show up on their turf, so to speak. My Twitter ended up being the darkest place in my life because I just followed all of our biggest critics. That's not a dig on Twitter. That was just what I did. And that's where it started, and it kind of slowly built from there. For better or for worse, we've become a really important part of daily life for a lot of people. We touch a lot of people, we have a lot of responsibility, and there's a lot of change. And with change means there's going to be anxiety and stress and scrutiny. We've made great decisions, we've made mistakes. We've been criticized for things that I think ... We've been criticized unfairly, we've been criticized fairly. And so we just need to accept that this debate is going to happen broadly. So I just think it's better for us to talk about it, and just be clear about what we're doing, why we're doing it, what the trade-offs are. If people disagree, that's okay. We're not necessarily winning over friends when we talk about what we do. But I think over the long run, people are fundamentally more afraid of things that they don't understand and about things where people are more secretive and less accessible. And so I've tried to show up in an accessible and authentic way, and I've made mistakes, and I have enjoyed it at times, and hated it at other times. But that's kind of how it started. There was also a fun debate in Mark's senior leadership team a long time ago, where we were just talking about how we're a social media company, but we had a very sort of conventional approach to communication and press releases, and say, "Why don't we just use our platform?" So I was not in that debate, but I stuck myself into that debate trying to mediate it. But that was also a reason why I ended up getting sucked in because Mark was like, "All right, well, let's see. Why don't you try and see how it goes?"
00:54:49 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:54:49] S1: What's something that helps you deal with the hate that flows at you every time you say something that people disagree with? [00:54:55] S0: You try to put it in perspective. So it started with ... I did the redesign of newsfeed in 2009. We launched it March of 2009 for Facebook. I was a designer, I was an IC designer, front entry-level designer. And the first comment that came in was something pretty derogatory. I think it was homophobic and antisemitic. Literally, we're all sitting there. We launched this thing, and we're just looking at the stream of comments, and it's the first one. And it was specifically about ... They don't know me, but it was like, "What exploitive expletive censor censor designed this shit?" And I was like, "Oh, it was me." And I was devastated. I was like a 25-year-old kid. And, I don't know, I thought about it, and I came to this idea that if you spent 30, 40, 50 minutes a day at your desk, and you organized your photos there, and you wrote letters to your friends there, and you read there, and then I just came, and I rearranged your desk, and I didn't tell you, I didn't warn you, I didn't even explain why, you would be pissed, and that would be reasonable. And that was what was happening just with millions of people. So I tried to put things in perspective, and then I tried to step away from it, get time with my kids, get time outside. There are months where it's really not hard at all and there are months where it really, really grinds on me.
00:54:55 · Adam Mosseri, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:54:55] S0: You try to put it in perspective. So it started with ... I did the redesign of newsfeed in 2009. We launched it March of 2009 for Facebook. I was a designer, I was an IC designer, front entry-level designer. And the first comment that came in was something pretty derogatory. I think it was homophobic and antisemitic. Literally, we're all sitting there. We launched this thing, and we're just looking at the stream of comments, and it's the first one. And it was specifically about ... They don't know me, but it was like, "What exploitive expletive censor censor designed this shit?" And I was like, "Oh, it was me." And I was devastated. I was like a 25-year-old kid. And, I don't know, I thought about it, and I came to this idea that if you spent 30, 40, 50 minutes a day at your desk, and you organized your photos there, and you wrote letters to your friends there, and you read there, and then I just came, and I rearranged your desk, and I didn't tell you, I didn't warn you, I didn't even explain why, you would be pissed, and that would be reasonable. And that was what was happening just with millions of people. So I tried to put things in perspective, and then I tried to step away from it, get time with my kids, get time outside. There are months where it's really not hard at all and there are months where it really, really grinds on me. [00:56:31] S1: Along those lines, there was a famous kind of reversal when you redesigned the feed into this kind of video scroll-y experience. There's this whole protest. The world protested.
00:56:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:56:31] S1: Along those lines, there was a famous kind of reversal when you redesigned the feed into this kind of video scroll-y experience. There's this whole protest. The world protested. [00:56:41] S0: Yeah, that was pretty rough. [00:56:44] S1: What was kind of like, "Okay, wow, we're actually not right, and we should go back."? What helped you decide, "Okay, let's change course."? [00:56:50] S0: So actually that one, three or four things got conflated. We had to redesign a feed that went to the video viewer. That was a test to 4% of users on iOS. It was not going to roll out. It was just an early test to get us some sense and feedback on the idea. We were also leaning into Reels a lot. We were also leaning into recommendations, so posts from accounts you don't follow, a lot. And there were also creators who were upset about the fact that their reach was going down, and they were blaming ranking changes on that. Those four things got all conflated. We had some pretty big-name creators publicly slap us. Then the press covered that creator sort of backlash, which then got more creators doing it. So we ended up with this little bit of like a multiplier effect or echo between the creator community and the press back and forth. But we were never going to launch that. That was an early test. We knew it needed to work. We actually have continued to grow video, and invest in creative tools, and invest in ranking, and invest in recommendations, and that's driven most of our growth in the years since. [00:58:03] S1: Showed them.
00:58:03 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:58:03] S1: Showed them. [00:58:03] S0: I think we were pushing ... Well, I don't know. It doesn't feel like ... I think my real takeaway wasn't that we should have not tested that design necessarily. I think we could have done a bunch of things better to explain, and maybe move a little slower. I think we were just pushing things a little bit too fast. And when you are responsible for a platform like Instagram, you need to be reasonable and realistic about how much you can evolve it. Now, I would much rather have backlashes like that every couple years, but continue to evolve and continue to stay relevant than the alternative, which would've been like we didn't have video, we didn't have DMs, we didn't have Stories, we didn't have ranking. And we wouldn't be having this podcast right now. But the cost of leaning in is that you're going to occasionally make a mistake and you're going to definitely pay for it. [00:58:58] S1: It's interesting how running experiments now is very risky for companies at your scale. One person spots it, and I go, "Shit."
00:58:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:58:58] S1: It's interesting how running experiments now is very risky for companies at your scale. One person spots it, and I go, "Shit." [00:59:04] S0: Kind of need to have a ... You don't need to be proactive about communicating it, but you need to have a comm strategy. For any design change or any test that could be controversial, we talk about it beforehand and be like, "Okay, not if it leaks, when it leaks, what are we saying? Should we talk about it proactively? Should we talk about it reactively? Either way, what's the message?" Because you can't launch something to three billion people and not test it first, but you can't test something at our scale and not expect people to cover it. And so you have to be ready to talk about it before you even know you want to launch it. So it makes the development cycle more complicated than it used to be. [00:59:54] S1: Yeah. The head of growth at Anthropic launched an experiment with pricing, and it just went crazy on Twitter. He's like, "It's rolled out to 1% of people. We're just [inaudible 01:00:02]." They're like, "No, Anthropic. Come on." [01:00:04] S0: Pricing particularly, that one is a real ... You got to be real careful with that one. We've all learned these lessons. We should all share notes more, that's what I think. [01:00:12] S1: "Here's not what to do." How to avoid the internet hating you for the day. [01:00:15] S0: Yeah. I'm happy to talk to that [inaudible 01:00:18] in Anthropic.