Facebook VP of Growth on how to prioritize power users vs marginal users

The second thing to think about is everyone in the valley gets wrong that we optimize when we think about growth for ourselves. So my favorite example is notifications. Again, talk to lots of companies, advise lots of companies. Every single company when they talk about notifications goes, oh, I'm getting too many notifications. I think that's what we need to optimize for on notifications. Okay. Are your power users leaving your site because they're getting too many notifications? No. Then why would you optimize that? They're probably grown ups and they can use filters. What you need to focus on is the marginal user, the one person who doesn't get a notification in a given day or month or year. Our experience of our products and by the way, building an awesome product is all about thinking about the power user, right? Building an incredible product is definitely optimizing for the people who use your product the most. But driving growth, people who are already using your product all the time are not the ones you have to worry about. So in this Danny Ferrante video, there's also that's linked from the lecture page. There's also talk about our growth accounting framework that we use to think about for growth. And we looked at new users, resurrected users, people who weren't on Facebook for 30 days and came back and churned users. And the resurrected and churned numbers for pretty much every product I've ever seen dominate the new user count. Once you reach a sensible point of growth a couple of years in whatever. And all those users who are churning and resurrecting had low friend counts and didn't find their friends and so weren't connected to the great stuff that was going on on Facebook. And so the number one thing we needed to focus on was getting them to those 10 friends, getting them to whatever number of friends they needed. So think about the user on the margin. Don't think about where yourself when you're thinking about growth.