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The Cost of Craft
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 with a
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What happens when you succeed? If you feel like you’re focusing more on growth than creating great work, it might be time to figure out a new vision for the future.
George Kedenburg III • The Cost of Craft
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.
George Kedenburg III • The Cost of Craft
The cost of craft rises with each additional person .
(person = any IC product manager, engineer or designer)
George Kedenburg III • The Cost of Craft
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.
George Kedenburg III • The Cost of Craft
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.
George Kedenburg III • The Cost of Craft
Small teams have a good reason to stay focused, since there's usually not enough people to do much beyond whatever is absolutely essential to the vision. This focus reinforces a shared drive for simplicity, and teams inherently build components thoughtfully in an attempt to save other people’s time.
George Kedenburg III • The Cost of Craft
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
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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.