Julie Zhuo: Defining Success Upfront

So let's say we built this, we validated that it's something that people want, or we think there's enough reason to believe that it's something that is a real problem, and then that's something that is worth solving. So now we build it and we put it out there. But even actually, before the thing is out in the world, in fact, even before, maybe we have a full prototype, the question for us to ask is, well, how will we know if we've solved this problem? What would be different in the world if we fast forward and now this thing that we've done is out there? How will we know if we should be happy, if we should be excited, if we think it didn't live up to our expectations? What exactly should our expectations be? And I think this is a really, really important question to ask up front. Too often what ends up happening is we have this idea and then we build it and we launch it into the world, and then results come in. We're looking at the dashboards, we're looking at how many people are downloading it and what they're saying. And there's tons of data points that we're trying to interpret and put together. But. But it's hard at that point in time to then be very, very objective about did we solve the problem? Because a lot of our natural inclination is to read into the good things that people are saying and to kind of consider all of that effort to have been worth it. And there's biases that kind of come from when you're already looking at data and you're trying to interpret whether or not it's good or bad. It's much better before you launch to have figure it out what constitutes success for you so that you can go into the launch with that understanding. And as results come in, you can map it to your previous. This was my criteria for whether or not we've solved the problem or whether this was successful. What we do here is we want to make sure that we set measurable goals and metrics. Measurable is really key. Measurable doesn't always mean like numbers or data, but it does mean, you know, there's a criteria where if I did this thing and I got this result, I know what to make of that result. So for the example of groups, you know, we wanted to help people solve the problem of helping them find, you know, other people to talk about their interest with. We ended up building a Groups Discover dashboard. What does success look like for us? So before we launched, we determined that, well, if we were successful at actually helping people solve this problem, we would see that more people are then discovering groups that they're interested in and joining them. But not just joining, because I could make a giant button flash and make it red, and I'm sure more people would click on it and more people would join. That doesn't really count. Right. What really matters is that they join these groups, and these groups are actually meaningful to them. Which means that if we fast forward a couple months, three months, let's say, and then we look back, these people are still using those groups, and they're actively engaging, meaning they're talking with other people, they're reading the content, they're sharing content. They're liking, they're commenting. We want to know that people are joining groups that are actually valuable for them and that they're spending time on.