Why product takes both optimism and paranoia
The best product people wear two hats: the naive optimist, and the paranoid realist.
When, why, and how to be optimistic
Building new things takes an irrational hubris. And the bigger the swing, the more foolish you have to be. When laying out a vision for the future, you have to believe that your version of reality will come to pass.
On the eve of the Threads launch, Adam Mosseri told The Verge, “Any time you build a new app from scratch, it is much less likely to succeed than to succeed.” He’s right. Meta’s track record of launching standalone apps can best be described as a graveyard.
And yet…
The Instagram team’s try at a standalone Twitter-style microblogging app became the fastest growing app of all time! This was only possible with the craziness to try something that’d never worked and believe that this time would be different. And it was.
I think about this as we build anything audacious. We need a vision so compelling, so inevitable that we might just bring it into existence. We need to provide concrete examples of the real value we can create for people and the world. We must manifest optimism.
When, why, and how to be realistic
Of course, believing something will work is hardly sufficient to make it so. Your strategy and execution have to be perfect. This demands paranoia.
Good strategy is a sequence of investments, within realistic constraints, that achieves success. Emphasis on “realistic constraints.” You can’t pretend to have resources – be it time, people, money, reputation – that don’t exist. When establishing strategy, the more opinionated your tradeoffs, the more resilient you’ll be.
Executional paranoia is even more important. Murphy’s Law says that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Ironically, the best way to avoid this happening is to assume it will.
Forcing yourself to enumerate every risk and mitigate it will ensure that you’re executing with rigor. Create redundancies in case of missteps. Budget in the buffer that you’ll invariably need. Communicate bad news early to maintain as much optionality as possible.
I was thinking about an issue I faced on the Avatars team where we identified a series of launch-blocking bugs at the eleventh hour before a major release. To patch them, we put a plan together that addressed the issue. I thought it was a good plan! After walking through it with the team, I read a look of skepticism on a key team member. I asked her why she lacked confidence, and she told me plainly that she’d been doing this too long to believe things would end up going to plan. She advised caution. She was right.
From there, we focused on mitigations to our mitigations, back ups to our back up plans, and a “break glass” approach in case all our preferred options went bottom up. This embodies our commitment to professional paranoia.
Ultimately, it's this blend of bold vision and meticulous execution that propels our most remarkable achievements.