Kevin Weil: Accommodating Customers Worldwide

It's one of the hardest parts of building a product. From here in the US our audience is global. We have 700 million people around the world that use Instagram and maybe 20ish percent of them are in the US so 80% are outside the US in a different country. A lot of those people are in very different circumstances in many cases. I bet most people in this room have iPhones. The majority of people using Instagram have Android phones. We all live on good networks. There are a lot of people that use Instagram around the world on bad networks. On no networks, you need to think about things like downloading things while you're on WI fi because you can't depend on a cellular connection. So there are very different sort of physical circumstances. There are also different social norms. People think about privacy very differently. You and I, maybe if we get a follower on Instagram, we're like, oh cool, one more follower. There are people in the world who, when they get a follower, they think, why is that person fault? I don't know that person, why? So you have very, very different contexts around the world. We try and do a lot of research. We try and actually get out and talk to people all over the world as a way of getting a better sense of what their needs are and how they think about Instagram. We send, we send product managers, researchers, designers, engineers to different places in the world because there's no substitute for actually getting out and talking to users.