Twitter's Revival, Pt. 1

Interview source with Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/22319527/twitter-kayvon-beykpour-interview-consumer-product-decoder

Kayvon Beykpour's impressive CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayvon-beykpour-2b264b4/

The growth of Topics

So health, conversations, and interests have been our big rocks for the last two and a half years. We’ve been taking bigger and bigger swings in each of those areas. At our Analyst Day event, we went in-depth on a few of them. Within “interest,” for example, last year we launched a product called Topics, which we got started — very nascent with our work there, but we’ve really accelerated. Today there’s 6,000 topics that people can follow. And it’s very simple. Rather than just following people on Twitter, you can follow a specific topic, and Twitter does the work of recommending the best content or tweets about that topic. So you don’t have to know exactly who to search for.

Again, we didn’t release that at our Analyst Day event, we just gave an update on it and shared some of the substantial progress. In Q3 of this last year, we announced that there are 70 million people that have followed topics. And then just yesterday, we announced that there now are over 100 million people that have followed topics. So a pretty good clip of growth. And we’re seeing really promising signs that Topics is a really useful way for people to connect to their interests.

Reticence Taking Big Bets

This won’t be in any particular order, but when I joined the company, one of the first things that I felt was a reticence and an uneasiness around taking big bets. And I think there’s a lot of reasons for that. It’s hard to pinpoint one. Certainly, churn in leadership is one. After a revolving door of heads of product, people stop taking any product strategy particularly seriously, because it’s like, okay, well, let’s wait until that strategy changes. And so I think there was a little bit... while no one would say that explicitly, there was this reticence to commit to long-term speculative bets, because it was rare for them to be able to be seen through.

So that’s one that I think was somewhat ingrained in the culture. Which is difficult. It’s difficult for PMs, engineers, designers who really want to push and evolve the product to come up against an organizational resistance that is not tuned to take big, speculative bets.

And really, unwinding that, I think, has been the biggest unlock that we’ve had as a company. Today, when we contemplate solving more ambitious customer problems and in turn, postulating more ambitious product solutions, we don’t get the “no, but” as much. Every once in a while, there’s pessimism around, “oh, can we pull that off?” But we get way more of a “yes, and” vibe, and a willingness, and a patience for terrifying, ambitious bets. Whereas three years ago, any idea you would come up with, there was just a lot of pessimism around — that’s going to take a long time to build. Which is true, we’ve got a lot of infrastructure debt to work through. And also like: that’ll never ship, that would never get approved, our customers will freak out.

Product velocity during Pandemic

I do think our pace of development has sped up. I’m trying to think about how the pandemic specifically could have impacted that. I think of it more — and this is obviously just through the lens of Twitter, not comparing it to other companies who’ve probably had their own formula here — but we have been on a multi-year journey to speed up our development. And so I would like to think that... we’ve had our own hiccups, obviously, but we’re reaping the rewards of that investment over the last few years in our process, our culture, our hiring, our infrastructure work. And so the pandemic, I would probably say it slowed us down, it slowed that journey down for a little bit, as everyone was adjusting to the new normal. I wouldn’t say that it was a net accelerant by any means.

People, our team included, but people even outside of Twitter, have a lot on their minds, and it’s really stressful when you’re trying to do your job with your kids at home without child care. It’s been a taxing time for everyone, so I don’t think it was a net accelerant. What we’ve done through the pandemic, beyond just continuing to accelerate, obviously, is we did make some focusing decisions around, “Hey, these two projects that were kind of in our periphery and articulated as part of our long-term strategy” [shifted to] “this is the forefront now and all this other shit’s going to pause.” We made a bunch of those decisions that I think helped narrow the aperture, which accelerated some projects and paused or slowed down other projects.

And frankly, energy and momentum is infectious, right? As you see the company and other teams build quickly and you see customers noticing that, it inspires and motivates everyone else to want to live up to that. And so we’ve seen a bunch of that, I think, and we’re seeing it right now with Spaces.

Spaces, we love that our customers love it, but there’s a real kind of energy and movement internally at the company. I’ve been at Twitter for six years now, and I’ve never seen the level of energy and embrace around any singular project at Twitter, ever, in my time, at the risk of hyperbole. We’ve had a few of those moments with these big projects — Topics being another one in the last year — that have, I think, helped the team get through the intensity of what’s going on in the world, especially when we see that the product continues to be used and be really instrumental at a time where the world needs to communicate and learn from others about what’s happening.