Twitter’s former Head of Product opens up: being fired, meeting Elon, changing stagnant culture, building consumer product, more | Kayvon Beykpour
Kayvon Bakepore, former Head of Product and GM of Consumer Business at Twitter, shares lessons from transforming Twitter's stagnant culture into a shipping machine, navigating Elon Musk's acquisition, and building/shutting down Periscope.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Kayvon Beykpour's Background and Twitter Journey
First Meeting with Elon Musk and Walter Isaacson
The Story of Being Let Go from Twitter
Transforming Twitter's Product Culture and Shipping Features
Overcoming Resistance: The 'Hide Replies' Feature
Leveraging Aquihires to Drive Innovation and Cultural Change
Best Practices for Staffing and Successful Acquisitions
Critiquing Frameworks: Jobs to Be Done and OKRs
Recognizing When Frameworks Become Detrimental
Early Periscope: The Kobe Bryant Story
Analyzing Periscope's Failure and Lessons Learned
Twitter's Repeated Struggles with Video Implementation
The Art of Copying Ideas: Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces
Advice for Building Better Consumer Products
Kayvon's New Consumer Startup
Lightning Round: Books, Shows, and Life Lessons
8 Key Concepts
Functional Organizational Model
A company structure where departments are organized by function (e.g., head of product, head of engineering, head of design). This model often leads to decisions driven by consensus or deadlock if there isn't a strong leader to resolve conflicts and make quick decisions.
GM Structure
A company structure where general managers (GMs) are responsible for an entire business unit, including product, engineering, and design. This model allows for faster decision-making and execution within that specific unit, reducing bureaucratic hurdles.
Sacred Cows
Established practices, features, or beliefs within a company that are considered untouchable or unchangeable. These often hinder innovation and progress, as teams are reluctant to challenge or experiment with them.
Refine the Core Strategy
A product strategy focused on optimizing and improving existing features and functionalities to drive growth. While effective for increasing user metrics, it may not lead to new capabilities or a perception of significant product evolution by customers.
Aquihires (Acqui-hires)
The acquisition of a company primarily for its talent, often founders or entrepreneurial individuals. This strategy aims to bring in urgent, ambitious leaders to run new, often speculative, initiatives within the acquiring organization, sometimes in a siloed environment.
Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) Framework
A framework that encourages product teams to understand customer needs by focusing on the 'job' a customer is trying to get done, rather than just the product itself. While useful for customer-centric thinking, its over-application can lead to a loss of nuance.
Live-Only Product Durability
The challenge for a generalized consumer product focused solely on synchronous live video to maintain long-term user engagement. Such products often struggle without asynchronous features or a specific vertical focus to keep communities connected when not actively broadcasting live.
Teleportation (Periscope Vision)
The initial dream and vision for Periscope, where users could 'see through someone else's eyes' and be virtually transported to different places or events around the world, experiencing moments as they happened.
11 Questions Answered
He was fired by Parag Agrawal, who stated he wanted to take the team in a different direction and that Kayvon's skills were no longer aligned with Twitter's needs, just before Elon Musk's acquisition.
It shifted from a 'refine the core' strategy, which focused on optimizing existing features and led to user growth, to balancing that with taking bigger, more ambitious bets and challenging 'sacred cows' to introduce new capabilities.
Acqui-hires can be effective by bringing in entrepreneurial founders who drive urgency, have ambition, and are given responsibility and latitude to lead speculative product initiatives, often within a somewhat siloed structure to protect them from organizational inertia.
It's crucial to staff such projects with a team of people who not only have the right skill set but also have an obsession with the idea and genuinely believe in it, as this passion drives harder work, creativity, and the will to overcome challenges.
The main pitfall is following frameworks to a religious extent without nuance, which can lead to process for process's sake, making subjectively bad decisions, or prioritizing metrics over a good customer experience.
Signs include consistently making subjectively bad decisions, hindering the ability to take big, speculative bets that don't immediately drive current metrics, or when the framework doesn't lead to the right debates about trade-offs.
Periscope suffered from poor retention, was a live-only product lacking asynchronous features for community engagement, integrated too slowly with Twitter, and faced overwhelming competition from Facebook Live, which aggressively copied features and acquired creators.
Twitter repeatedly made the mistake of fostering internal competition by building separate teams and technology stacks for similar video functionalities, leading to fragmented visions, botched execution, and wasted time and resources.
It's always about doing the right thing for the customer, and copying ideas can be done 'in good taste' by taking inspiration from what works and then putting your own spin on it, leveraging your product's unique mechanics and avoiding past execution mistakes.
The best 'cheat code' is to be a voracious user of products, constantly trying new things, observing what works and doesn't, and honing your own taste and judgment by being curious and open to even seemingly 'dumb' ideas.
He asks candidates to talk about something they worked on that failed and why, as it reveals their self-reflection, passion, willingness to take risks, and what they learned from failure.
20 Actionable Insights
1. Secure Top-Level Alignment
To drive significant cultural change in an organization, ensure you have alignment from the top leadership, as it’s difficult to effect change from a small pocket within the company.
2. Identify Sacred Cows
View ‘sacred cows’ (things the organization believes cannot be changed) as a built-in roadmap for innovation. Addressing these reveals cultural hesitations and opens opportunities for product evolution.
3. Cultivate Product Obsession
Staff projects with teams who are not only skilled but also deeply obsessed with the idea they are pursuing. This obsession drives harder work, creativity, ambition, and the will to bring the product into existence.
4. Embrace Aqua-Hires for Innovation
Accelerate cultural change and speculative product initiatives by acquiring small companies led by entrepreneurial founders. Give these founders significant responsibility and latitude to run their projects like startups within the larger organization.
5. Balance Core Refinement & New Bets
Maintain a portfolio of product bets that balances refining the core product (which drives reliable growth) with speculative initiatives that add new capabilities. This ensures continuous evolution while sustaining existing success.
6. Be a Voracious Product User
To improve your product sense and craft, become a voracious user of various products, constantly trying new things. This practice helps hone your taste, build muscle memory, and understand what works and why.
7. Practice Repetitive Storytelling
Internally, tell the story of your product vision, strategy, and bets repetitively to build alignment and excitement. Externally, clearly communicate what you’re doing and why to users and constituents, inviting constructive criticism.
8. Address Team Alignment Swiftly
At the leadership level, quickly identify whether team members are aligned with the vision (‘on the wagon’). Swiftly convince those who are not, or ensure they are not in roles that hinder progress, as talented individuals have limited patience for organizational friction.
9. Bet on People in the Deep End
Take bets on individuals, especially by throwing them into challenging roles they might seem unqualified for on paper. This approach fosters significant learning and drives change and growth more effectively than other contexts.
10. Avoid Internal Product Competition
Do not allow separate internal teams to build competing products or features that address the same core user need (e.g., two different video stacks). This wastes resources, creates political friction, and leads to a subpar, fragmented product experience.
11. Prioritize Radically
When pursuing a new, high-potential product, be willing to make it the number one priority across the entire company, even above other established projects. This radical focus can accelerate development and ensure success, especially when learning from past failures.
12. Design Durable Live Video Products
For generalized short-form live video consumer products, ensure they are surrounded by asynchronous features and capabilities. A live-only product is unlikely to be durable on its own, as users need ways to stay in touch with the community outside of live broadcasts.
13. Use Frameworks with Nuance
Avoid following any product framework (like Jobs to Be Done or OKRs) to a religious extreme. Instead, apply frameworks with nuance to avoid losing sight of the customer and making decisions solely for process’s sake.
14. Balance Org & Customer Needs
Make trade-off decisions that balance what’s right for the organization with what’s right for the customer. Recognize that sometimes metrics aligned with frameworks may not benefit the customer, requiring judgment and product taste.
15. Recognize Framework Over-Reliance
Identify when a framework has been implemented too religiously by observing if it leads to subjectively bad decisions for users or prevents the organization from taking big, bold bets that don’t immediately drive current metrics.
16. Ask About Failures in Hiring
When hiring, ask candidates to discuss projects they worked on that failed. This question provides insight into their self-reflection, passion, willingness to take risks, and what they learned from setbacks.
17. Always Find Something to Do
Adopt the work ethic of ‘when you’ve got nothing to do, sweep.’ Always look for something productive to do to move the ball forward, be impactful, and avoid idleness.
18. Build Products You Want
Be a customer of your own product to identify pain points and build features that you genuinely want to use. This direct user perspective can lead to more compelling and useful products.
19. Try ‘Dumb’ New Things
Maintain curiosity and be open to trying new products, even if they seem ‘dumb’ initially. Some of the most meaningful innovations start with seemingly simple or unconventional ideas.
20. Seek Inspiration Broadly
Draw inspiration from diverse sources, including sci-fi, fantasy, and other creative content, to jog your imagination and foster creativity. This can lead to novel approaches in product development.
6 Key Quotes
The sacred cows are like their own roadmap. It's like a built-in free roadmap of like, all right, what are all the things that you think we're not allowed to change? Let's start there.
Kayvon Beykpour
Don't work on this feature. This is bad for your career. This is not going to launch and you don't want to work on this. You don't want to be seen as having worked on this.
Engineering team member
Why the fuck would anyone want to watch someone else stream live? ... I'm just fucking with you bro this is incredible.
Kobe Bryant
When you've got nothing to do, sweep.
Fred (Kayvon's first boss)
Do you want to just like come like hang out? And I was like, what would my job be? And he was like, don't know, you know, just like hang out and you can swipe left or swipe right.
Kayvon Beykpour
The day after we get home from the hospital, Parag called me and said that he was letting me go and that he was taking the team in a different direction.
Kayvon Beykpour