I follow the unfolding Twitter story with great curiosity. I am shocked there’s this many layoffs, and many people that helped grow the company and the social platform were let go. I won’t go into detail, but I am not buying the narrative that all those that were let go were “bloat” or “unessential” or slackers that didn’t provide any value. But hey, this is an outside view based on stuff that’s reported – don’t take my word for it or my opinion on this too seriously.
There is an interesting challenge there though, a thought experiment of sorts, that drives my curiosity, through all layoffs in this holiday season: a significant amount of people have gone, there’s a lot of talk about code reviews and going hardcore and coding and all – and I am wondering: is this engineers only, that are left at Twitter – or are there product managers, product owners or business analysts, or whatever you want to call them.
I see a few dangers in a setup where one person alone, possibly also the CEO, owns all of the decisions around the product and pretends to know and understand all of the nuances and user wishes, in all of the facets of a large, grown product. Twitter is more than simply a website you post short messages to and read other’s short messages. Your customers aren’t simply end users, but also advertising partners, other commercial partners that sell through your platform, you have users from governments and law enforcement, you may need to provide third parties you pay to review content tools and access to your systems. For all of these different user personas, there’s tools, features and capabilities to write, maintain and operate, and you can’t simply know and learn all of the use cases by heart in a few days or weeks.
Your advertising partners don’t just upload their ads to your platform. They may want to plan and schedule campaigns, may have different ads for different user audiences for different times of the day. You may want to give them the option to also be present in certain geographies and be associated with or next to specific tags or posts. In order to be successful, you also want to give your advertiser the telemetry they need, to see how efficient, good, well-seen their ad was on your platform. And how many impressions it generated.
And for that all, you need to have the data basis to build it all up on.
That’s what you have (orgs of) PMs for. They specialize on specific use cases, work through them, analyze the dependencies, work with the user personas and specific customers to observe their needs and demands, and feed that into designs that Engineers pick up and turn into reality.
With mostly Engineers left, you still have people who build code for you and who can make very good decisions what to build and how to build it. But you may have lost the power to build the thing that customers, partners and stakeholders need the most, in the way they can use your platform best through. And not all of your engineers will feel comfortable or even want to spend time with user audiences and hear them out on scenarios, requirements and priorities.
A social media platform works because it works for the users in the first place – everything else helps generate money, continuity and making it a business. But that’s all nothing if your users aren’t satisfied or the product can’t be used.
There’s also a chance that there’s a lot of focus on beautifully crafted architecture, code and designs for multi-tiered systems, optimized beyond what users and target audiences would experience.
FRICKELSOFT 