sometimes you make a decision and it's not the right decision sometimes mistakes are made when you think about kind of a up or two that happened in the process yeah are there any that stand out to you yeah definitely I mean look you got to make mistakes I will say I like so the the biggest blow up was the press cycle the summer before last around what was called externally Panavision which actually meant something different internally and it was a Confluence of a bunch of different changes that were happening at once so it ended up
being one of those words that people just projected onto it whatever they didn't like and so it kind of took on a left foot zone so we were introducing recommendations into feed so content that you it's not from accounts you follow very controversial we were leaning into video and you know our heritage as photos also controversial creators were frustrated with their reach and I think some of that was for good reason some of it's because people always want more reach and we were also experimenting with a pretty radically new design for the main tab it
just all was a little bit too much too fast and it all kind of blew up in our face and there was an interaction between the Creator community and the media and it kind of ping-ponged and then um I did a video explaining what we're doing and then I became a meme for a week which was fun The Daily Show did a pretty pretty funny actually but biting impression of me was it funny at the time were you like oh no so I was trying to get I was trying I was trying to calibrate uh
because on one hand like I do think that if you're not making mistakes you're not trying big enough things so if I had no big painful moments in the last couple years that would mean that we were being too conservative so I'm glad even though it was not fun uh on the specific like all the memes of like a banana I was wearing a yellow sweater in the video so there was like a lot of banana a lot of Mini-Me memes like a lot of stuff so I was like sending stuff to some friends being
like is this mean or is this funny because it's hard for me to tell and like my brother's like this is just funny but the best I sent a bunch to my wife and she didn't respond to any of it and she just didn't like she just wasn't interested I guess and so like this was all happened for a whole week and then a week later she's like hey what happened again this week you said something was going on and I was like don't even worry about it can I ask a wave on me she's
like when you have the controversial elements like I I love the recommendations actually that are in my feed they're all highly personalized according to what I have already it's a great addition I mostly follow new people because of the recommendations yeah but it's controversial when you have two opposing kind of not teams but ideologies almost internally how do you resolve that I think the key thing is you make sure both sides are heard then you make it very clear who's the decision maker and you make it very clear when there's a decision and you have
to remind people that it's important to disagree and commit because if you're just going to question a decision Upstream Downstream over and over again you're just going to do everything poorly that one is tough though um because obviously people always not always but there's a bias a lot of us have to want things to return to the way they were even though that's not possible yeah I totally agree with you I always think about it was like the iPhone remember when they removed the home button yeah and they did the swipe I was like this
is this yeah total crap yeah now I'm like what the yeah at the bottom but I mean but these are hard product decisions in the moment yeah when you think back over the time on Instagram well it's been the hardest product decision for you that one was that was really leaning into recommendations and feed that was the hardest and why was that for you because I just knew there was going to be so much backlash it wasn't because I questioned if it was the right thing it was so clearly the right thing to do basically
what people don't realize is they think of Instagram as a feed of square photos sometimes in chronological order and if you look at how people share all of the growth has been in in stories and in DMS over the last five years or so and to the degree there is growth and feed it's all on video it's not in photos in a lot of ways at least in terms of what people consume and you know if you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram they spend more time in DMS than they do in
stories and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed yet people think of Instagram as a feed and it's the third most important surface at best maybe fourth now for teens with some of the most important people communities on the on the platform plus all the friends sharing is moving in that direction but you don't share personal moments and feed today the way you did five or ten years ago you share them in stories or in messages more so and so feet had to evolve otherwise it would just slowly you know die
or Decay exactly and so recommendations are a way to tap into this huge rich repertoire of amazing content that exists on the platform that you might not even know about yet and continue to make sure that feed is alive and well and people they say like well you don't you don't show enough of my friends posts it's because your friends don't post that much to feed um but it's easier to think it's the algorithm yeah so it was so clear the right thing to do but it was so clear that everyone was going to get
it was so good it was going to become a scapegoat for anything you didn't like about Instagram you would just blame the Rex practice Rex is what we call recommendations for short internally what does that mean for you internally when you see that DMS and messages is number one do you then go we should move up resources towards messaging do you then think we're a messaging application how does that change how you think with the recognition that DMS and messaging is one it definitely made me shift more resources towards messaging actually at one point a
couple years ago I think I put the entire storage team on messaging wow um why because it was where take out all the text there were more there were more photos and videos shared in DMS than there are shared in stories and there's way more Sheridan stories than there is in feed so just forget about the text for a second just the photos and videos just the media the rich media it's a bigger deal in growing faster in DMS anywhere else wow but the thing is really not a messaging app if I was going to
run late to today's podcast the best way to let you know would probably be to text you on WhatsApp yeah that's it wouldn't be on Instagram but Instagram DMS are great for is they provide you an excuse to start a conversation we call them conversation starters a lot internally you can if you switch universities or you go you're going to Unity for the first time you switch high schools or you you have a crush you know replying to someone's stories socially acceptable in a way that a cold text is not sending them a funny reel
you found and feed or more recently notes notes are you know basically aim status but better looking at the top of the inbox anybody above 20 like doesn't use them very much unbelievable how much they've moved Instagram engagement overall app level engagement for teens and they're just an excuse to start a conversation yes what you're up to but maybe it's a question but they're just a reason to give someone a buzz how do you think because I think that's like a really fundamentally challenging product Paradigm to navigate through there which is like a large portion
of your audience doesn't want it won't use it but it will ignite a different segment that's really challenging because you've got this broad swathe respectfully and Jack snaps gonna kill me for this it's kind of easier for him because like it's he's getting rich on me but it's mostly just teams that is an isolated demographic for you you need to incorporate it for everyone knowing that only one segment will use it couple ways to deal with it the first though is you have to be okay I think it's super valuable to be willing to prioritize
certain segments over others and for us we care about we care about young people and we care about creators most because young people when they grow up but also they are where creators gravitate to over time and they set trends and they are they often serve as a bellwether and creators I just think are becoming more and more important over time for a bunch of reasons we can go into and so the first thing is to be willing to make that prioritization decision and be like look I'm going to eat some cost to overall app
engagement or even overall Revenue in the short term because I think this is going to be better and healthier for the company in the long term or for Instagram in this case in the long term because either will break out of a local maximum or will be more defensible or or you know whatever the argument might be and then two I think it's super important if you want to keep the experience simple and I don't think we've done a good enough job at this to embrace certain ideas like Progressive disclosure so an app should become
more complicated as it needs to be and not be complicated if you don't and so no it's a nice example because if none of your friend posted or no it's just the active now trade just shows you who's on right now and you might not even know that notes are a thing but if people start to share notes then it starts to show you both notes and active now next to each other that's relatively elegant because you can think of your node as a status and you're active now as a status and so it's sort
of seamless but then if you don't it kind of elegantly turns into something simpler it's simple always better in design Adam no and I'm gonna get crucified by a bunch of designers were saying so I have a strong bias towards Simplicity I think we've Instagram has benefited greatly from being simple it's one of the core values we have in our approach this is go back to the Mike and Kevin days and I I believe in it but I think to say it's always better as a mistake I think of Simplicity as a means to an
end and you have to be clear about what that end is if maybe it's usability maybe it's broad appeal but I think that it's possible there are instances where a more complicated thing is going to be a better means to that end there's one portion of Instagram where you need like eight clicks back to get back to main feed and I'm like for sake Adam like yeah no it's a thing it's not deliberate no it's to the app is too complicated I mean let's be serious they are the I think it's gotten more simple over
the last 12 months or so we Consolidated some of the design patterns and Primitives remove some of the tabs but we still have more to do it's just it's when you manage a large team and they get excited about a new idea they often want to just build a new thing and it's tougher and more work to extend an existing pattern or primitive for a new use case than to just invent your own new one because you have to coordinate and you have to maybe it's not quite as specialized for this thing that you guys
are so excited about but if you don't do that you um you just slowly add more and more complexity to the app in a way that I think Burns you over the long run sort of Death By A Thousand Cuts so we actually have like I was talking to our head of design and I'm one of our product leads two days ago about how do we carve out a certain percentage of the team's time to just unship things that aren't used that much or don't create that much value and proactively look for opportunities to consolidate
things to make them simpler and easier to use okay that's really unfair of me what do you think you should ownership that doesn't create which area do you think you haven't tapped you could or should you know if there's one I mean the one of the things that we did on ship was the activity feed so so activities like your notifications and there was a place you could go to see essentially like all the things your friends had liked and it was fun like it was a great way to discover new content but it's a
little bit a little bit creepy just be like I'm gonna check out it's like well it's Autumn line here Adam's liking a lot of this thing right now that seems that'll work uh I haven't told you about any fans before I got so much hate in my DMs about that it was used no no the activity feed I might sorry it was um it was probably it was less than one percent of the users who used it but that's still you know an idea amazing people oh you should see my DMs yeah really a lot
of DMS yeah I just got dick pics oh nice I just get it's my birthday all before my birthday is a blue check mark I get you disabled my account unfairly and I get a lot of just whatever the most recent changes usually complaints about it yeah yeah you did I like to go in once or twice a week and respond to a couple people they must be like incredibly impressed when you respond no yeah sometimes they think it's not me I get that actually I'm I'm on Reddit and I think my handle is just
Adam oh Siri and every once in a while I'll just go in and like respond to Instagram things and they no one has ever believed it was me before they're always like look at this white girl pretending to be mad like and they're just tell me to piss off and I was like no it's me I promise it's me it's a real-time picture of me exactly there's no way to prove it
