Bangaly Kaba reflects on the lack of data instrumentation in Instagram's multi-step signup onboarding flow when he joined as Head of Growth in 2016.
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 growth teams maintained a 60% to 70% experiment win rate
“I remember when I left Instagram, this is many years ago, but we had like, had 15 teams and we might've been running 12 to 20 experiments, a quarter a team. And I would say probably 60 to 70% of them were like positive and shippable, which is incredible.”
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…”