Product Strategy - Social Media Platforms
First principle approach to social media platform product strategy
Random ideas that everyone including Elon Musk is throwing at Twitter can be a hit, but they have to be very very lucky. In this post, I will take a very simple first principle approach to Social Media Platform’s product strategy and in the next post I will share Twitter’s 5 core product themes using their mission and this product strategy to come up with core areas of investments.
Need for a structured approach v/s “i have an idea approach”:
We have seen folks throwing ideas at Twitter - like Blue check, subscription etc. We need to take a structured approach to build products and companies and create a deterministic path to winning or learning.
What the company should focus on should be deep enough to connect to a company’s values/mission and a clear winning strategy v.s spray and pray approach. Something that Satya Nadela did really well with Microsoft after taking over from Steve Balmer, by first going back to the mission/values of the company and then crafting a strategy for Microsoft.
…..We need to prioritize innovation that is centered on our core value of empowering users and organizations to “do more.” We have picked a set of high-value activities as part of our One Microsoft strategy. And with every service and device launch going forward we need to bring more innovation to bear around these scenarios.
First Principle - Product Strategy Framework for social platforms:
Mission: Once the values/mission is set for a company, the next step is to think about the strategy. Missions/values are company specific, so we will skip it here, will cover it later in an example.
Product Strategy: If we look at first principles, all social media platform need 5 core pillars to thrive and win. They need to a way to bring more users, keep them safe, focus on how to increase their engagement followed by monetization and adding new use cases to propel further growth.
It applies very well with Facebook, Tiktok, Snap etc and also Twitter as the foundationally are all platforms that connect users with each other in some unique way. Adding random ideas and claiming it’s a strategy does (like paid subscription) is not a strategy, its just randomization based on personal opinions or one of data point. Twitter under Elon Musk desperately needs
Application of this strategy (Facebook/Meta example):
Facebook Mission: Giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together
Strategy:
User Growth, Safegy and Engagement: Freinding (Creating connections) and posting updates were the core features that found product market fit for facebook in the early days. They focussed on bringing more users, adding safety features (lock your profile, bot detection, illegal content etc) as they learnt about the issues (more improvements always needed), focussed on growing engagement using friends suggestions, notifications, multi platform product (ios, android, web) etc.
Monetization: In parallel they created a robust ads platform to meet all kinds of business needs with appropriate targeting and created an ads business user base which was hard to beat.
New Use cases: Then they focussed on new use cases like messaging (messenger, whatsapp), instagram, stories, videos etc. in their journey and executed better than any competitors. Now they are making another big bet on AR/VR as a new use case to built on top of their huge user and advertiser network to unlock more engagement and Ads $$
Facebook (Meta) executed better than anyone in all 5 areas to stay relevant and ahead of the competition, now they have a bold bet on AR/VR, we will see where this one lands
All this is good, but which features we should build or twitter should build?
Once we have this high level framework, the next step is to find opportunities in each of these 5 pillars (pillar strategy) to help achieve the mission of the company by hitting a specific goal.
Most people think ideas are the most important thing, we need to take step back from that and first focus on a strategy and then bring ideas from every part of the company to create a pillar level product strategy and roadmap.
I will take a stab at Twitter as an example in the next post!