3-Bullet Thursday - 18/3/2021
Hi all! 👋
Here’s your weekly “3-Bullet Thursday”, a shortlist of the interesting things I’ve found this week.
Building Products at Airbnb
Ken Norton, of Bring The Donuts, expected a handful of volunteers when he asked his readers about their company’s product culture. He got over 150 people, keen to share their experiences, and chose to focus his first piece on Airbnb. This is definitely one to make time for. Here are some of my personal highlights:
On “storytelling”
“Disney really inspired Airbnb with the idea of storyboarding. Brian Chesky took that idea and we created like 11 or 12 storyboards of the guest and host journey, emphasizing the magical moments. These aren’t screens mind you. Airbnb, the product, isn't our app. The product is staying at a guest’s home. These moments include being greeted by the host, being given the keys, getting the wifi password, etc.”
“Brian talks a lot about building ‘eleven star experiences.’ That really means challenging us to think about what the perfect experience would be, without being constrained by scale or other technical constraints. In our storyboards, we’re encouraged to figure out how to get a few users to really love the product, then we can figure out how to scale it up afterwards.”
Listen to Brian explain this firsthand in his Masters of Scale episode.
On “long-term product vision”
“When I first joined Airbnb, we had twenty priorities. That's not really goals, it's just a list of everything you're doing. Now, fast-forward to today, we actually have only one company priority, which is ‘to prepare for the travel rebound of the century.’”
On “experimentation guardrails” (and testing everything in general)
“The problem is the guardrail implementation feels a little bit restrictive because experimentation oftentimes gives you a short-term optimum, but it doesn't necessarily give you the long-term optimum.”
How the New York Times A/B Tests their Headlines
Spoiler alert: this article is less about how the NYT A/B test their headlines and more about what we can learn from their testing.
The NYT A/B test headlines for engagement, but on a limited basis. It seems that they only test a couple of headlines and on a select number of articles, rather than bandit testing multiple headlines for every article. This is probably because most (62%) of their revenue comes from subscribers and they don’t want to overly dilute the experience with clickbait.
A/B tested headlines are 80% more likely to rank on a “most popular” list, though it’s unclear if this is correlation or causation.
The more they test, the more likely they are to land upon emotionally charged headlines.
Trump, Addressing Conservatives, Plans to Claim Leadership of G.O.P
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Trump’s Republican Hit List at CPAC is a Warning Shot to His Party
Power Laws: How Nonlinear Relationships Amplify Results
The Farnam Street Blog is packed with wisdom. This piece on non-linear relationships, and our understanding (or misunderstanding) of them, is particularly interesting.
Linear relationships are pretty simple to understand. Doubling an output requires doubling an input.
Non-linear relationships are much more complicated in that “the behaviour of the system differs from the simple addition of its parts.”
When we set out to understand a complex system, our intuition tells us to break it down into its component pieces. But that’s linear thinking, and it explains why so much of our thinking about complexity falls short. Small changes in a complex system can cause sudden and large changes.
There are several orders of power law:
1st order (a linear relationship)
2nd order (eg. kinetic energy)
3rd order (eg. the conversion of wind to rotational energy)
4th order (eg. heat radiation)
There is only one power-law with a variable exponent, and it’s considered to be one of the most powerful forces in the universe. It’s also the most misunderstood. We call it compounding.
This explains why financial planners will tell you it’s the time in the market that matters, not timing the market. It also explains why investing a small amount when you’re young gives far better results than investing much more when you’re older.
Shane, the author, goes on to give a number of examples of how power laws affect us in finance, business, language, and more.