Don't Fall Into the Trap of Taking the Wrong Lessons from Others' Success

Another reminder on the value of first principles thinking

Very early days at Pinterest, I remember our new growth team was working on an update to our new user experience (NUX). I ended up getting pulled into the process, and I remember part of that process was going through the NUX for a bunch of other social apps at the time. Let me tell you, I remember studying Instagram’s NUX like it was a map!

We ended up shipping something that was, honestly, weak, and the metrics showed it almost immediately. The growth team knew that they had to re-do it, but as sometimes happens, redoing it got deprioritized and Pinterest went through a period of hyper growth with an underperforming NUX.

A couple months later, I was curious to remind myself of Twitter’s NUX and I remember signing out and going through the new user flow. Want to know something funny? They’d updated it… to something similar to Pinterest’s. The NUX that we knew was under performing the previous NUX. The NUX we knew we desperately had to redo.

And you can imagine exactly how it happened. Just like we looked at Instagram’s assuming it was God’s gift to NUXs, Twitter looked at ours, assuming we knew what we were doing. Narrator: we didn’t. :)

This mistake in logic happens all the time. A company is successful and it’s easy to assume that all the details about that company are part of its success. You might aspire to constrain yourself to the number of employees Instagram had when they got acquired, or build a fully distributed team like Gitlab from the start, but unless you are able to understand from first principles if that decision is the right decision for you, be careful taking it at face value.