Bangaly Kaba, former head of growth at Instagram, shares experiment volume and success rate metrics achieved by his teams before leaving the company.
Insight
Declining cohort retention curves signal adjacent users adopting a product
“And one of the ways you start to see the adjacent users starting to adopt the product, especially with the data, is you start seeing cohort curves decline, right? You start seeing the people who sign up today Three or six months from now, they're signing up an…”
Insight
Strong communicators often outpace better executors in career advancement
“I think communication is the one that tends to be the most impactful, and you see this in a lot of ways, right? You see this with people who are poor executors, but incredible communicators, and they seem to continue to rise and rise because, like, you know, t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Instagram's onboarding funnel had zero step-level logging in 2016
“When I joined Instagram in January, 2016, believe it or not, the onboarding, the, like the signup flow at Instagram had literally no logging to it. It had logging of how many people started and how many people ended.”
Opinion
YouTube lacked Instagram's shared mental model for product craft
“Instagram had just this fantastic culture of thinking about how do we ship high, high quality products, right? And what does product craft mean? And so that is something that, you know, I came to YouTube and my teams particularly, they didn't have a mental mod…”
Insight
Kaba: Celebrity partnerships were a critical, overlooked growth engine for Instagram
“Another part that goes unspoken, still critical to this day was like the celebrity partnerships. Was critical, right? Because basically, you know, they had this wonderful partnerships team that basically took Instagram and taught celebrities how to use it, how…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Instagram's user retention doubled in 18 months after prioritizing friend connections
“And so that connection pivot was critical. It changed, it literally angle changed the retention on Instagram. And so if you, like, Google Instagram growth, there was, like, a tech crunch article about Instagram's growth that, you know, I think, 2017, 20 18, wh…”