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1/ Why is it so hard to incubate entirely new capabilities within mature products? It’s a feature-level Innovator’s Dilemma at play. A few strategy lessons distilled from product histories at Instagram, Twitter, and Foursquare:
2/ Scaled Product Challenge #1: How can we make high upside, riskier bets while keeping stable a core product with hundreds of millions of users?
3/ Scaled Product Challenge #2: How do we optimize for learning with incremental experiments without frustrating all our users?
4/ Scaled Product Challenge #3: How do we justify building features that only a subset of customers will love without worrying whether everyone will like it — at least to start?
5/ There’s a 3-part strategy dozens of tech companies have used to safely incubate new capabilities, iterate on them with real usage and, if successful, deeply integrate into the core experience to scale impact.
6/ Although this feature laddering up approach sounds deceptively straightforward, in reality it can take years of challenging work. When pulled off well, with hindsight it looks like the product evolution was inevitable.
7/ Strategy #1: Incubate new features in a separate product space where they can provide value to a small subset of customers. The space needs to be inconspicuous to the majority but discoverable to the relevant minority.
8/ Strategy #2: Iterate on the underlying functionality, algorithms, data, curation, etc. — powered by real usage — until it’s proven useful to a large portion of users. Disclaimer: this can take many years.
9/ Strategy #3: Integrate the now high quality and de-risked feature prominently throughout the core product experience.
10/ These examples focus on building ML-driven features into existing products, because this is even more complex given data/algorithm quality uncertainty. 3 stories from Instagram, Twitter, & Foursquare:
11/ (a) Instagram evolved from a “Popular” tab to a personalized photo feed: cl.ly/3Z2b0N3g2W1g
12/ Instagram’s Incubate: Launched “Popular” tab in 2012 to surface popular photos from people you don’t follow for the first time. wired.com/2017/05/instag…
13/ Instagram’s Iterate: Upgraded to “Explore tab” in 2014, powered by a collaborative filtering model along with trending in 2015 & personalized video collections in 2016.
14/ Instagram’s Integrate: After 4+ years of building ranking models, Instagram took the plunge to move to a ranked feed model powered by the Explore tab models: nytimes.com/2016/03/16/tec…
15/ (b) Twitter evolved from a “Discover” tab with globally popular tweets to a ranked timeline with personalized alerts: cl.ly/3F0X2n2i0o3F
16/ (c) Foursquare evolved from an “Explore” local search tab to dedicated discovery app with passive location powered contextual notifications: cl.ly/0e0o2a1d200i
17/ Recap for building an entirely new feature (set) into a mature product/company: Incubate, Iterate, then Integrate. Carve out the product space — and time — to take big swings and avoid the siren song of incrementalism.
New Medium post on an approach for Making Big, New Feature Bets in Mature Products: medium.com/@noah_weiss/ma…
