The Cost of Craft

Get as many people together as possible and write down/agree to the principles that drive your product decision making. It’s easier to push back on bad ideas when you can point to something in writing.

This is certainly not unique to Instagram. Since you have chosen to read this particular note, I’m going to assume that maybe you have also noticed a downward trend in quality over the past few years. It appears inevitable that all digital products must eventually trade craft for scale.

When the balance skews towards  Compete , it is easy to lose sight of the big picture. The vision for the future devolves into questions like, "what if we had more users?" and "what if we just did more stuff?" This mindset drives products to become big, complex messes of features, leaving you wondering, "who asked for all this?" You end up wit

(person = any IC product manager, engineer or designer)

Early at Instagram, I noticed a lot of value was placed on simplicity. One way that manifested was through a strong aversion to creating new surfaces. When you build a new surface, you force users to expand their mental model of your product. These new surfaces will also require additional entry points to help users find them. When you have a smal

Dedicate a block of time every year where you don’t ship a single new feature and just focus on improving what you already have. Establish foundation teams and ensure they grow at the same rate as the rest of your company.

Instead of focusing on what is good for the product, people start focusing more on easy ways to move the numbers. Perhaps a couple of big, expensive  Innovate  projects didn't produce "angle-changing" impact on their metric fast enough. Suddenly,  Compete  projects start to look like an attractive shortcut to success.

It’s simply so much easier to keep 10 people in sync than 10,000. Each additional person makes it harder for everyone to stay focused and in sync.

It is really hard to keep things simple, especially if you have a product that people really like. When you do things well, people will always ask you to do more. Your features will multiply and expand as you try to make them happy. Soon, new competitors will emerge that will tempt you to stretch your product in new directions. The more you say yes