The Story of Add Yours, Vol. 1

A few weeks ago, in a conversation with a friend who knows a lot more about tech than I ever will, I told him about what I actually did at Instagram. Not because he doesn't know what user research is, or because he was unfamiliar with the companies where I'd worked, but because what I did—what I still do, and would like to continue doing if I can—needs explaining. No one else did it, not at any of the companies I worked for and not, according to my coworkers, at any of the other companies they'd worked for. Which led me to realize: I should probably explain it to you, too.

Is it obnoxious of me to start this newsletter (the first one after my birthday!) by bragging like that? Is it obnoxious of me to mention my birthday so you get distracted and forget I'm bragging? Or is it even bragging at all? Let's get through the story, and then you can be the judge.

Now, I know I've talked about user research in past newsletters, as well as some of the products and features I worked on. But I've never laid out the full tale of the feature I'm most proud of, or why that work matters so much. So today, I would like to begin telling you the story of Add Yours.

This will take a few installments. Hopefully I'll get through them in order over the next few weeks, but if something important comes up that I must write about, I'll pause and then come back to it. But I will finish, so I hope you'll stick with me and enjoy the tale. There's a lot in here for people who build products, but a lot for people who use them too.

Do you remember 2020? Of course you do. Who could forget 2020? But also, of course you don't. Who can remember anything about 2020. March 2020 was 180 days long. Then suddenly the year was over, after a centrifugal summer of protests, tensions building, and endless (I do mean endless) fireworks and a fall/winter that, when I try to look back at it, is just a faint smudge.

I left Spotify in 2020 and went to Instagram. I'd interviewed at Facebook and WhatsApp the year before, where two different teams wanted to hire me, because those were the days when there were jobs and people could actually get them. I'd turned them down, but when this opportunity arose, I couldn't say no. Why? Well, partly the money, but partly because the hiring manager said to me:

"Do you want to help reimagine the future of Stories?"

What a question! Yes, please, I want to do that! On every level! Obviously she meant Instagram Stories, but I heard so much more: Do you want to help reimagine the future of how people share stories on one of the planet's biggest and most widely used communication tools? Are you fucking kidding me?

When I joined Instagram in August of 2020, it instantly became clear to me that everything was a mess. I mean, I'd known it would be, because by that point in my career I'd learned that everywhere was a mess. Tech is probably similar to other industries in this way. For a while in your career, you look around at other companies from whatever chaos you're mired in and think, I bet this bullshit doesn't happen there. Maybe it doesn't, but some other bullshit does. Eventually you stop falling for it when people tell you it's different wherever they're hiring, it's special, the culture is great, the company truly cares about people. As Tolstoy wrote, happy companies don't exist; every unhappy company is unhappy in its own way.

Something you may not know, if you've never worked on products, is that it's hard to innovate in highly structured organizations with lots of management layers. Innovation requires—and this is a highly technical concept I'm about to introduce—a certain amount of dicking around. You need to be able to think up ideas, play with them, experiment, see if they've got potential. You want to have easy access to decision makers who will decide if your idea lives or dies, but you also don't want to have to go through constant approvals and discussions with people who aren't actually working on the idea. This is a major reason that startups "pivot" quickly, while large institutions turn around like a tanker full of shipping containers in the Panama Canal.

When I got to Instagram, the team I was on was buried under layers of management. Instagram, at least when I was there and the company was still called Facebook, operated sort of as its own separate company, with Adam Mosseri at the helm. We were technically part of Facebook, eventually Meta, and Mosseri reported to Zuckerberg, but Instagram was its own 5000-ish person entity within the much larger 100,000+ mothership company. But when I started, there were probably more layers of management between me and Mosseri than there would have been between me and Zuck if I'd worked on a different product at the company, which is ridiculous. And, as often is the case with Way Too Many Managers, everyone's favorite adventure series, work was like an endless game of Telephone in which people keep getting up to go to the bathroom or get a snack and then sitting down in a totally different place. No one really had the complete idea of what was going on. If your team was lucky enough to be better situated, management-wise, you were okay. If you weren't, like the team I was on, you were miserable.

One thing about me that I'm sure will come as a surprise to all of you is: When I see an obvious problem, I point it out and I offer to help fix it. This hasn't always made me popular, so I have learned to rein in this tendency quite a lot, particularly in my personal life (if we are friends, either I'm sorry, or you're welcome I've stopped doing that so much). But the problem at IG was a big problem, and it was one that could be fixed. I went to my manager repeatedly and told her: Leadership keeps asking us to innovate, but how can we possibly do that when we're working on big miserable projects that clearly aren't going well and when we have zero autonomy? We're all so bound to what leadership wants us to do, and we have so many layers of management between us and the people who can actually give us the go-ahead. If you want us to come up with actual new ideas, you need to give us the freedom to do that, a little more autonomy, and regular access to whoever can say yes.

Here's the wildest thing: They listened.

Obviously, this wasn't just my doing. It was clear that something needed to change, and other people had brought it up. But my manager told me that what happened next was, in large part, because I'd been so persuasive and persistent (complimentary).

Toward the end of 2020, the larger organization in which my team was located did a bit of a reorg. There had already been a big reorg a few months earlier, actually on my very first day (an incredible way to start). They announced the introduction of a team called Instagram Studios, which would be "incubating big bets for Stories." In regular English, this meant we were not going to work on a predetermined project roadmap. Instead, we'd spend our time coming up with ideas, dick around in a semi-structured way, and hopefully come up with a feature or two into which the company would being willing to invest real resources and eventually ship, aka release to the public. I guess this is the positive version of "your job is to fuck around and find out."

And so, in January 2021, Instagram Studios met as a team for the first time. We were comprised of a product manager (PM), a few software engineers (SWEs), an engineering manager, two data scientists (DS), two designers, two user researchers (UXRs), a content designer, and a marketing manager. The other UXR was on maternity leave for the entire first half of the year, so it was just me on research. One of the engineers left pretty quickly, after they realized that innovation work is actually not for everyone. This happens more than you might realize. People think they want to work on the fun stuff and come up with cool new ideas, but that kind of work means you have to be very comfortable with uncertainty and a certain level of chaos. More than one person who worked on the Studio team discovered they much preferred more traditional product work, projects that built on previous work, had clear roadmaps, and had obvious outcomes they could point to in performance reviews.

Me? I loved it. It was occasionally annoying, but everything is occasionally annoying, and my brain was so happy making sense of all these disparate ideas and insights, while not having to constantly update my plodding progress in a dumb spreadsheet. The team had a somewhat rocky start when the year began, because we were all new to one another, that one person was kind of miserable before they left, and we were trying to get on the same page while certain leaders asked for work and then, when said work was presented to them in a large meeting, called that work stupid and a waste of time. (If I sound angry after all these years, it's only at myself. Like an idiot, I spent most of the Christmas and New Year weeks alone toiling on this thing, got publicly told it was unnecessary by the person who specifically asked for it, and then felt awful when the team stayed silent despite having told me in our own meeting how valuable they'd found it. I should have known better!)

Luckily the turbulence lasted only a few short weeks. One brainstorm session and, more importantly, one week of talking to users lifted us out of it. We'll get to that in the next installment. Until next Wednesday!

Lx