Elon Musk Flips Product Managers the Bird: Why Twitter Needs to Fail (Whale)
If, somehow, Elon Musk pulls a rabbit out of the hat (and cages it and forces it to work 20 “hardcore” hours a day) and turns Twitter around, I fear he’ll set product back by a decade. In his recent midnight email to employees demanding they swear fealty to the almighty technoking or leave, Musk declared:
“Twitter will also be much more engineering-driven. Design and product management will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway. At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company, so I think this makes sense.”
And thus another 1000 employees departed, joining the 3,500 (half the company) who had just been let go. After that first mass layoff, the New York Times reported that the new ratio of engineers to product managers was estimated to be 70 to 1. That’s 10 times more engineering-skewed than other Big Tech firms, where the ratio is surprisingly similar at about 11:1, regardless of company size (see chart below.) This ratio of engineering to product is also close to what both Marty Cagan and Ken Norton, two of the most widely cited product management advisors, recommend to startups and big companies alike.
I can only imagine that the ratio at Twitter is now more like 100 to 1 after Musk’s mealy-mouthed line that “design and product management will still be very important” but that “those writing great code” will “have the greatest sway.” Also note Musk’s obsession with those “writing code.” This is not the same saying as “engineers” and, if I were an engineering manager or a developer who adds value by collaborating, reviewing other people’s code, or even removing code to reduce bloat, I’d be worried about my job.
Another part of Musk’s email stands out. In explaining why “those writing great code […] will have the greatest sway,” Musk goes on to explain:
“At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company, so I think this makes sense.”
I mean, Twitter is software and it relies on servers, but so what? That’s not what Twitter is. It’s not why I (used to) come. Twitter is a community. It’s where you go so you (as the site says) “Don’t miss what’s happening. People on Twitter are the first to know.” Twitter can fulfill that promise with code, sure, but you might also want to build a place where the info is trustworthy, where abuse isn’t rampant, where newsmakers and celebrities are excited to participate, etc.. and to do that you might need some non-engineers to do some non-technical things to foster that community. Actually that might be what you need even more than new code! And, bummer, some of this work is not cool and much will be invisible or hard to measure. e.g. It’s harder (though not impossible) to measure abuse that never happens because of good policies or content moderation than it is to measure the impact of some new button.
“Features will not save you!” is my new favorite mantra. I got it from Chris Ladd, the CEO of Better Notes, which makes apps for guitar players. He’s an engineer by training and when I interviewed him for Crafted, a podcast from Artium about the craft of making great software, he said he has to constantly fight the impulse to build new stuff. It’s so much fun to build new features, but he’s realized that they’re often not what his users need:
“Somebody needs to call me monthly and just tell me, “Features will not save you.” Are you making something that is solving a real problem for people? Are you telling them that it exists? Like I have people that email me after having the app for five years and say like, “Thank you for adding this feature. I’ve wanted it forever. It changes the way I use the app. I use it every day.” The feature has been there for eight years.”
Point being: there’s a lot more to software than shipping new stuff all the time. And just because Elon likes hanging out with engineers and parsing their code, Twitter might need more than just new lines of code.
Product People
The profession of product management has taken off in the past decade or so. It went from something few had heard of to something that… well to something you might mention without explanation in a general interest New York Times article about Twitter. My own aha moment for product management’s sudden sexiness was during the Emmy’s a few years ago: Indeed ran an ad in which a dude is looking for a job and striking out left and right, but then he turns to Indeed and, lo and behold, lands his dream job — “product manager” is written on screen in his search query — as a PM at a bright and sunny Silicon Valley startup.
And yet… product management can still be a hard thing to explain. If you don’t have engineers: you don’t have software. If you don’t have designers: your app looks like shit. If you don’t have product managers… uh, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ? You’re probably fine… for a while. Someone (the CEO most likely) will be the de facto product manager and sometimes they’re great at this. But more often, you get away without having a product manager for a while — a few months, maybe a year (it really depends) — but then the wheels start to come off. “Why doesn’t anything work anymore!?” you might find yourself asking. Among the many hats product managers wear is to be “the glue” that binds customer needs with business value; engineering constraints with design considerations; novel features with a consistent user experience; risk with reward…
Oh, and product managers ask lots of annoying questions! First and foremost we start with the cliche, but critical “what problem are we trying to solve?” We get to know the (potential) customer and ask them lots of questions. Then we circle back to the business and ask “how will we measure success?” And we might also even deign to ask extremely annoying questions like, I don’t know, “how might this product be abused?”
Elon Musk got lucky when the botched rollout of the new blue verification checkmarks mostly just led to comedy. “Insulin is now free!” declared a fake (but verified!) Eli Lilly. Hilarious! (Although not if you’re Eli Lilly or want their advertising dollars.) A fake (but verified!) Nintendo posted an image of Mario giving us the finger. LOL, Mario! A fake (but verified!) George W. Bush said he “misses killing Iraqis” and a fake (but verified!) Tony Blair agreed! Oh, you two!
But let’s get really dark for a moment. What if a fake (but verified!) Indian Prime Minister Nerandra Modi posted “kill all Muslims” or a fake (but verified!) Pfizer tweeted “haha, the new Covid booster shots are actually arsenic” or a fake (but verified!) Tom Brady posted “I’m airdropping my crypto to the first 1,000 people who send me their private keys” and on and on… It took me (and my sunny disposition!) like five minutes to think of these very bad, but very possible scenarios, whereas Product and the now effectively disbanded Trust and Safety team at Twitter spent lots of time on this stuff and did in fact present a list of likely abuses to Musk before the disastrous and unnecessarily expedited — or else you’re fired! — rollout. But whatevs. Let’s launch it and “see what happens.” (BTW, product manager’s pro tip: You will always “see what happens;” this is not a hypothesis you can prove or disprove.)
Anyway, Musk and his ~100 engineers per one (“still very important”) product manager now run Twitter. Good luck to them! For the sake of the marginalized groups who’ve found power and belonging through Twitter, I truly hope they succeed, especially since “black Twitter” and other groups may not find new homes as easily as, say, “product management Twitter” or other professional conversations that I expect will thrive on LinkedIn (where I used to lead News efforts as PM on the “content experience” team). However, for the sake of so many other companies that are embracing being “product-led”, who truly care about solving real customer problems, who fixate not on what new features to ship, but on what outcomes to achieve, and who, to borrow a phrase from Marty Cagan, are creating empowered teams that are given problems to solve, not solutions to implement… I hope Twitter goes belly up like a giant fail whale with a cautionary tale.
—
Apropos of nothing, I write an occasional newsletter on product and innovation called Apropos of Nothing. Subscribe here.
I also just launched Crafted a podcast about great products and the people who make them. The show is from Artium, the amazing software consultancy where I serve as a product and engagement leader. However, this Twitter screed is all my own and not meant to represent Artium.
