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Bangaly Kaba

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2024-05-26
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2024-05-26
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  1. “Much as I work these social companies, I actually don't use my social products that much, I'm on Instagram. If you look at I am Bengali, I-A-M-B-A-N-G-A-O-Y, you Google that, all of my socials handles all have the same kind of link, including LinkedIn. So hit me up whenever. And then what can people do useful for me? I don't know. I mean, I think... I don't have a short list, I would say. I love to hear people's stories. I love to give advice. You know, obviously my time is a little bit limited occasionally, but I think if people can share with me things that they're learning or things that they see in the market or if they have questions, I always love to hear it. And so I think for me, like, you know, just healing other people's stories and learning what other people are doing is probably the most rewarding for me.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And what I found to be true is that just spending time with people and understanding their own story and their family life really led to a lot of kind of like shared interests and passions. And it helped really me to see that the world can be very similar in so many ways. And it is very much reflected to me in my day-to-day life in tech. Because as you know, in the Bay Area, there's so many people who come from so many walks of life who end up in this journey building these products and companies and just help me to value so many different voices, right? Like if you want to build world-class products, if you want to build product that can scale around the world, if you want to build product that's going to be hyper-growth, you have to be inclusive of so many voices. And so you have to build that skill to be able to acknowledge and learn from and to live in tension with different voices.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “What was I learned a lot about myself during the time? I learned a lot about relationships and people. I actually had a call with one of my old students this morning. She's like in her 30s now. This was like 20 years ago. So I still kept in touch with them. And I think that's kind of the comment I made about knowing people by name and story matters a lot. It says a lot that 20 years later I'm still talking to some of these students who are like their own adults running their own businesses. But also I think the human challenges and human connection, human problems are very universal right this was a really interesting place where you had kids coming from a variety of different walks of life you know some who lived in Azerbaijan or Kosovo and felt like the families felt like they couldn't be safe there so they wanted to syndicate somewhere else. So some kids whose parents worked at the US embassy and flight just were kind of there for a little bit of time.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Actually, served as a dean of a boarding school in Switzerland, which was like actually one of the most fun and interesting times of my life. It was American school in Switzerland, just outside of Lugano, Switzerland, the Italian-speaking section. And I'd say, you know,”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And that's to me was really powerful because I struggle a lot with just being balanced in life working out the way I want to and getting the right rest and making sure that I'm spending time in all the right places. And that's really like, it's a goal of mine, but like the problem is that my system for that specifically, I tend to, I'm not rigorous with it is when I need to be. But on the other hand, at work, I'm very rigorous in the systems and processes. So really that saying to me really kind of hits because it is both applicable to your life and how you want to live your life, but also how you want to run new teams.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I'm not big on models. There's one that I've actually been repeating. I don't remember where I got it from. It might have been like Adam Grant or someone on Instagram, but it was a, it's one I said it to a colleague of mine. He's like, wow, that really hit differently. It's that like, I think it goes something like this, like, you know, people and teams don't really reach, they don't actually reach their goals. They fall to the level of their systems.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Go and I sit in team readings and see how they operate. I just listen. I talk to not only the PMs, but the content designer and everyone, and I try to get to know them by both name and story. And what I mean by that is like oftentimes people execs come in and they're like, what are we doing? What are we prioritizing? Why does it matter? And they don't really take the time to actually learn who the people are, what this story is, like what they care about, what they're passionate about, both professionally and personally, and really try to understand how the team is working from that person's perspective. And what I find is actually when I do that, people are way more willing to hear when it's time for me to share my thoughts. They're way more invested because they believe I'm invested in them.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And it might not be on the border, I said, bro, but I know exactly where Katie is. So, really great app, can't say enough about it.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think one that I'm enjoying quite a lot actually, it's really kind of really simple but amazing is this app called Flady, F-L-I-G-H-T-I. It is a travel app and it manages all of your flight itineraries and your friends itineraries. But the reason why I love it is it goes two or three clicks deeper than the average travel app or like your airline app and it tells you when your inbound plane is wrangling it helps you to understand like where the gates of my wife was just in Madrid last week and she texted me saying hey I'm at the airport but no gate is announced I looked at Flighty I'm like your gate is E67. It's actually been assigned but hasn't been announced and this happens a lot in Europe right like you'll be there and they won't tell you the gate until like an hour beforehand so it gives you so much information right before it's actually publicly announced which is really helpful especially if you really need to be somewhere because oftentimes I know if my plane's gonna be late and if I need to rebook before anyone else does right which helps you gives you a better chance of getting somewhere or like I will be able to get to a gate I get to SFO”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Helps you have a meaningful conversation around how they think about themselves and their self-awareness and to what extent they're ranking these skills based on the context they're in versus their own ability. Sometimes you rank something of five because like something you'll just recover because you haven't had to do because there's a strong function at that company, right? And so when they stack rank it and people are like, I've asked this part four or five times on a recent role I hire people like, ooh, this is really hard but really good question. And then you can lend. I usually will dig into like what if like number two, right? And what's number four and number five and why? And it really helps me to one calibrate like, am I looking for the right person? And two, are there skills actually a match for what we need at this time?”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “A relatively new one that I love. It is, so this works exceptionally well, I believe, for more senior hires, whether they're like group product managers, directors, or even kind of senior ICs. I go through and I think about what are the four, usually five skills that are really critical for someone to have in this job. And I think about them myself and I think about the archetypes of like who I'm like what like what is the ratio I want of these but then I ask them I say hey take out a piece of paper or take out your laptop I'm gonna give you five skills and I want you to stack length them for me one to five right so one bang the one you're strongest at and five being the one you're relatively weakest at so like it's way better than saying give me your strengths and weaknesses it also forces them to contextualize it against the skill that you're looking for but it also”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Few I've recommended most of them over my shoulder actually like range by David Epstein. I think it's really critical. PM work really being able to be a master of a lot of different things or somewhat deep in a lot of different things. Deep work, Cal Newport, kind of clearing space to be focused and do the things thinking about the most important work and undisturbed way. And then start at the end by Matt Waller, who's a kind of behavioral scientist, a buddy of mine, really thoughtful book, helps you kind of really think about what you're building, but in a way that's more holistic.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “That is actually a lesson. And I think it's part of that is doing that. One of my takeaways is to do that not only with the people there, but with the people who've left it to. Like the people who've left the company will give you a perspective that is raw and different and much more, I think, aligned with what you want to hear. And it may or may not be the same, but I think that people, this isn't specific to Instagram cars, like whenever you talk to people who are at the company, they'll always try to tell you the best version of the company. The people who left will tell you what the worst version or their version and you want you to like triangulate that information. But you need both sides.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Felt like it became loggerheads where I didn't feel like I was probably either delivering what they wanted or being supported in the way that I wanted to be supported.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And because that was the core what they did. And they're really building out a lot of their product experience and a lot of what the new function. And so I think what they needed at the time was a much more tactical in the weeds, kind of like get your hands dirty, do, do, do, do, because they hadn't really seen that before. And what I wanted to deliver in that experience was more kind of like building a right systems, the right people, the right processes so that we can like figure out how to institutionalize the work. I think for me that was probably my biggest oversight is that I think they needed more tactical and I was like kind of more, I want to say in the clouds, but more think about like where do we want to go with the experience that we need to build versus like let me get deep in like the funnel data”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Probably from I think my time at Instacart was probably not my best time. I think I went to Instacart with a vision of what I felt the product could be or should be. And it was, I think, a big story that I deeply believed. But I was not, I think, aware or in tune with what the DNA of the company was at the time, which was it was like a company that was really great at operations.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Interesting, it was like the cultural context was so different, so we had to get creative and creative ways to figure out how to solve it.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “My friend sells jeans at a market. None of this is relevant. You don't even know the name of the school sometimes, right? It might be a number or something. And so all of the descriptors that we take for granted were not relevant and the names were very common. This was really illuminating. So what they would do is go look at pictures and say, is this my friend's car? Or is this my friend's, like, can I see my friend's animal and what's available? And it was interesting because, you know, the understand work leads to more realization. So when we went back to Menlo Bark with the data, turned out we said, okay, let's look at the data in a different way. What are the most common names on Facebook? And we looked at in the top 10 common names are Indian names. And like the most common name was Amit Kumar. There was like 250,000 people a month who used Amit Kumar. Like who were like real people. So imagine you're in Bangalore and you're trying to find your buddy namit Kumar. It's probably 5,000 that we could possibly recommend to you.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “A lot of things that we learned. It was mind blowing, but one of the most interesting things Lenny was that we watched people try to make friends and we said, hey, wait, like that's their profile page. Why don't you look at it? And they would say, well, that doesn't have any relevant information for me. So I need to go look in the pictures. Like, well, why doesn't the profile page have relevant information for you? That's where the information's supposed to be. And they're like, listen, this guy's named Amit Kumar. I have 10 friends named Amit Kumar, right? Like, what is this page going to tell me? Also, and they would scroll down, they'd be like, all of these fields are not relevant to me, right? And so you look at Facebook at the time was very Western centric. It probably still is. It is. It was like name. It was like school you went to, like job title, right? Like affiliations, that kind of stuff. That's all Western paradigms. And like some of these people,”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Of investigate what was going on, like watch people make friends, watch them use people you may know and really understand what was happening and see what was going on because we felt like there was context that we were missing.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And we did, and we noticed a lot of really interesting things, especially in India. Facebook seemed to be broken from a people graph perspective, right? Like we just didn't, the data was telling us like people didn't have as many friends in common. Like in the US, it might have been just making up a number. On average, we saw 22 friends in common when you make a friendship connection. But in India, it was like seven, right? And then there was a lot of friending and messaging or friending and unfriending. We're like, what's going on here? So we had some hypotheses from the data. We ran a bunch of tests. Nothing seemed to work and like be a breakthrough. So, you know, actually at that time I had to propose and, you know, they agreed to do this. Like we needed to understand more. So we were literally on the ground in India every three months took a team of engineers with me. Like I'm talking like we're in Delhi and people's homes and Mumbai. And we went to go.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “My time sorry, I joined Instagram or Facebook in 2014, and I was responsible for people recommendations globally. And at the time, Facebook was at scale and big and dominated North America. And so really the focus area at the time was South Asia and Southeast Asia.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “For them to get and navigate between their first account, whether it's like your account and a business account or your account, an offense account or like a bakery account. You know what I mean? And so that created a multiple accounts team, which I ended up owning. And that ended up even becoming like a bigger after I left. So that's like an example of like under fan work to solve a real problem, real solvent solving massive solution, massive impact, creating new data that you didn't expect that drives new understand work, which creates a whole new team to allow you to kind of move around your Instagram account more seamlessly. And you can see this now. Like, when you go to post, you can decide, okay, I want to post as Lenny, I want to post as this other thing. Or when I want to write a story, you can change anywhere. And that was all an effort that came out of this realization.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “But was also super interesting was that It helped us to realize that getting people back into their account more drove more account Content creation on Instagram in ways that we didn't expect. And so because we were getting people back into the account, people were getting into the second account and getting into a third account and they were going into their Finster account and creating content more. And so that actually led to the creation of multiple accounts team, which is what has made it easy for you to navigate between accounts on Instagram today. And so that was understandable, actually, coming to life, right? Like it was, hey, we're going to do the understanding work to figure out how to solve account access issues. And we're going to solve it in solving it when we looked at the data. We're like, hey, why is all this account? Like, why is all this content creation happening? That was not what we were expecting. And where is it happening? And it was happening from second and third accounts. And so that made us realize that, oh, people are not only getting locked out of their first accounts, but they were actually creating a lot of them in the second and third accounts. How can we make it easier?”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And we made it super simple for you. And the second time, if you tried it twice and it didn't work, we knew that you were on a trusted device, we were just send you a text message and say, hey, are you trying to log in? That solved like half the problem. And then the other half, what we did, and this still exists today on Instagram, when you log out, we say, hey, Lenny, it looks like you're going to log out. Do you want us to save your credentials on your advice so you don't have to worry about your password? Right. And then we later added an ability to have a passcode. And that's all basically in the other half, right? And so just like being really thoughtful around like what is actually the core job that people are trying to do, because a bad experience would be like, hey, let's make it really hard for people to walk out. And then how we wanted to experiments really help people to get back into the experience. And so what was interesting was that we were able to solve this.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Important actually for people to be able to log out. We don't want to restrict people's ability to log out because there are many people in the world who don't want to use background data because they're in prepaid phone plans or they don't have a lot of money and they want to share their phone with a sibling. And so they log out. And so it's really important. So we don't want to take away that behavior. But we did have to do a better job of helping them get back in. So we did two things. One was like there used to be a time when you can probably find it on Google if you did like an archive search where if you wanted to log into your Instagram account there would be a tab for your email and then there would be a tag for like your handle right and like and we didn't really make it easy for you to log in with your phone number either and you had to get to the right tab and right place to get the right thing and so we did this omnibox experience where it was just like email phone handle put it all in one place”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “At Instagram We saw this big problem where people were logging out and not being able to get back into their It's crazy, like hundreds of thousands of people a day could not get back into the account. And it was because, and like when I say could not get back into the account, I mean, they literally Wouldn't try 28 days later, we would never see them again. And we thought it was a problem because they didn't remember where the email was, which email they signed up with, or what their actual handle was, or what their password was. And so we were losing 10, 12 million people a year from what we called account churn, account access churn. So we worked on this problem and we had spent a lot of time in South Asia and Southeast Asia trying to understand how to grow the product. And from that time, we realized that”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Was like a tech crunch article about Instagram's growth at, I think, 2017, 2018, where we're going 40, 50% year over year. And obviously there was a lot that went into that skyrocket. People think that stories was the sole reason why we grew. And Story brought us a lot of people. But I mean, we literally our retention doubled over the course of like a year and a half. I mean, if you could imagine, imagine if like, you know, your bank account, like the interest rate doubles every month. You know what I mean? It was incredible. just this shift in making sure that people got connected with their friends early on changed the way that like people perceived the value and so a lot of the top of funnel work that we did a lot of the activation work that we did really like paid off in spades ultimately”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “2016, 2017, where we had to convince Kevin and Mikey that it was actually not the right thing to do to prioritize celebrities to everybody because we were basically biting on your nose to spite your face, whatever that is. Because the regular person wasn't having a great experience. And so it doesn't mean that we shouldn't recommend celebrities, but you have to recommend celebrities to people who are already on there. They already have their graph. And the most important thing to do is actually get regular human-to-human connections in the first, whatever, when people first sign up so that when you Lenny actually go write your first, make your first post, your friends would see it and you would be validated and you would feel like, okay, this is a police for me. I have a community here. And so that connection pivot was critical. It changed. It literally angle changed the retention on Instagram. And so if you like Google Instagram growth,”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “You know, basically, this is 2016-ish days, the average person would come on Instagram and retain, but then leave after seven, eight, nine months. We saw a flattening and a retention curve, then we would see it dip again, which was very weird. And we're like, why is this happening? And it turned out that what was happening anecdotally is that people were wrapping on Instagram, following a bunch of people, following a lot of celebrities actually, because the celebrities were being shown. And then when they actually went to make their first post a few months later, none of their friends were following them. And so there was like posting into an echo chamber. And anecdotally, people would stop using the product because they felt that. We hypothesize. Like no one was liking or following or commenting on their posts. And so we had to do this thing. We called it the connections pivot, right?”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “And what I mean by that is if I followed you, Lenny, or if I followed Kim Kardashian or if I followed Selena Gomez, all follows were treated like they were equally important. And this is actually a really important fact. It was a really important factor for a couple reasons. One, early celebrities who adopted Instagram obviously benefited from that because a celebrity is going to get a follow before an average person does. It doesn't mean that like, you know, their follows weren't meaningful. It's just that when you have a machine learning that's just optimized for a click-through, a follow, then that matters. But what ended up happening is we ended up looking at the data and I can't take credit for this. My colleague at the time, Rob Andrews, had identified this. He was the head of growth marketing. He's a peer of mine.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “One thing that's actually, I think, interesting as an interesting story that doesn't talk about a lot is I think the early Instagram was built where it was built in a way where every follow was created equal.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I mean, it was part of Facebook's growth, too, right? But I think a little bit differently, it's not as much partnerships. But when you Google someone now, you Google someone's name, oftentimes Instagram is one of the first five things that comes up for the average person.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Now every time a creator or celebrity did something on Instagram, every news media article picked it up and it just helped to drive searches and Google searches, which helped to make Instagram part of the cultural zeitgeites.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “The partnerships team was there before I joined. It was a very savvy and astute thing that Kevin and Mikey set up. They really kind of They made the partnership team drove a lot of the word of mouth around Instagram, but it was the partnership's work in combination with the product work that actually helped to allow a lot of Net to land, right? Like it was our ability to think outside the box and understand that we needed to have a web presence because it was critical for international growth. And it also helped with SEO. And so the idea of launching REP really drove and actually increased Instagram's growth by 10% the minute we launched it and it was something that George Wang, who was there before me had the idea around it wasn't really something that Kevin and Mikey believed in initially, but we had to prove to them that it was really impactful and once it launched, then they understood why it was impactful and all of the effect of it. But Webb was really critical for driving so much SEO, which helped support a lot of the celebrity work and the partnerships work.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “And so you have not just the invites, but now you have the celebrities, now you have the SEO component, and then we would do a bunch of paid media on top of that using a lot of those signals. And so we would have, and then we have our own content. And so you have all of these different kind of growth engines compounding each other. So every time the invitations got better, every time I got more celebrities to adopt, every time the SEO gets better, it's like magnifying the top of the funnel. And at the bottom of the funnel, or in mid funnel, we're making sure that people are retaining and getting value and staying around over the long term.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “To set the norm for how the platform gets used, but they also were getting picked up by the news and the media for all the stuff that's happening in celebrity world, which then added on to this other growth level which had, which was SEO. And so every time a news article came out, they would link to the creators or the celebrities Instagram account or that particular post, right? And so you have this whole SEO engine that worked. And the SEO engine was because you have both web, which we launched at Instagram, which created the canonical kind of like SEO tables. And then you had all of these inbound links from these celebrity sites and news media. But then what you also had is you had embeds for Instagram in all of these different sites, right? Like a news article, whatever would post, you know, Lenny's podcast, Instagram account. And those embeds help with SEO.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Kind of look at where Instagram is and Heinz Leiner and Groom, there's a lot that goes into it, but if you actually unpack the top of Funnel for what work that Instagram, there's certainly a component of it, which was our core component, which was invitations, like people inviting you and making sure that those invitations work and they work well and that people's friends are coming on, you get notified, but another part that goes unspoken, still critical to this day was like the celebrity partnerships was critical, right? Because basically, you know, they had this wonderful partnerships team that basically took Instagram and taught celebrities how to use it, how to make it work for them, how to tell their own story and be their own brand. And that was a critical growth funnel because with that, you had the ability for them to create these celebrities and celebrity creators.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “How do you help to make sure the finding value and the building habit and they're retaining? Because that's the thing that helps you to compound over time. Like if you're bringing a lot of people but they're not staying around, then you just have a leaky bucket and like it doesn't matter how big a top phone is. So making sure that that first month and two months, three month experience is great. And then the other part is really figuring out how do you build compounding growth loops where it's not just One way of acquiring people, but you're building two and three and four ways that layer on to each other that help you to really supercharge your engine of like acquiring people. So to Instagram,”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Usually it's somewhere in the Onboarding to like habit building experience, right? What does it take for someone to actually understand the value, that first moment, that first aha moment in the product? And a lot of teams, it's shocking how many teams don't really understand what that moment is for them. And then also, how do you get them to build habit around the product? Oftentimes a lot of people equate growth to top of funnel, and that is also critical. I think having the right top of funnel motion is really critical and building on that. So I think there's one part of it's like once you have the right top of funnel motion to get people to come in.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “So, it's a great question. I think it's essential, it's mandatory for hypergrowth. I think it's very helpful if you have a product or a company that is not growing what you want it to be. And so you're focused on capturing more share of wallet instead of expanding your audience, right? And so sometimes you can imagine like a cosmetics company, for example, right? That's like digitally enabled. You can imagine that they've hit a ceiling in terms of the growth of their users and they're really just trying to get people to buy more products, but maybe they're missing the people who want to use that product are missing.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Been like an office admin who is going to buy this thing every week because of during happy hours and team staff. But then the next adjacent user might have been the mom of three or four or the dad of three or four who's home with the kids and they need to depend on Instacart. Burs says, you know, like later on it might be they're a single person in New York who does this out of convenience. But like what they're optimizing for how they use the product all changes and the functionality and the abilities are fundamentally different. So you have to be them. You have to watch how they use the product. You have to talk to them. And then you have to visit them and literally see what they're doing in real time in order to make sure that you're enabling the right jobs for them.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Closer to the late majority. And so we saw this at Instagram, right? Like we would always be working on our registration flow. And at one point, we were converting at some insanely high percent. And then three months later, it would go down by 15% because anything was broken, but just because we'd broken into new markets. You're bringing on people in India. You're bringing on people in the Philippines. And their understanding of how it works, the phone they're going to use, et cetera, are all different. So really the core of their adjacent news was a few things. One is like, you know, you have to understand who's using your product today and why. And when you're growing at some really strong pace, 30, 40, 50% or more per year, you've got to be on top of who is your next belief, the next user is and why. And then you also have to be the adjacent. You definitely use the product life them and see how it's working, what's broken with it, right? And so at an Instacart, the adjacent user, the original user might.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Really important to understand who your users are today and the persona of the user, what motivates them, why they're using it, but then also to understand who is the next user, who is the user who could be using this product, but for some reason it doesn't work for them. And understanding who that adjacent user is and when you're actually starting to see that adjacent user adopt the product. And one of the ways you start to see their jacinter starting to adopt the product, especially with the data, is you start seeing cohort curves decline, right? You start seeing the people who sign up today, three or six months from now, they're signing up and they're doing worse job. Nothing's changing the product, but just the understanding of how the product should work is different. They might be less tech savvy, right? On the scale of an early adopter versus like a late majority, they might be”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “This was something that came out actually my time at Instagram. It was kind of a framework that we came up with because Instagram really was at that time, you know, we grew so fast that the people who were using Instagram in February were completely different than the people who were using it the following October and then the next January. I think when I joined, we were at like $445 million monthly actives January 2016 at the end of that year we were at 636 million like 47% that year. And so, you know, when we talk to users first half of 2016, when we talk to women in the US in their 30s, they're like, why would I have an Instagram? I have a Facebook account. Literally people said that, right? Who's that long ago? And then like a year later, it's like, of course I use Instagram. Like Instagram is my everything. The world changed so fast. And so when you're in a hypergrowth product, it's a real...”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Think about growth, right? You think about what it means to grow an Instacart? What does it mean to actually drive better retention? Well, it's actually really important to make it easy for people to make the next order. And so the product wasn't really built for that, though people had the best intentions in mind.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Another example of this, right? Like this is years ago, but at Instacart. Made it really hard to reorder stuff. Super hard to reorder. And it was shocking to me because when I thought about it, when I go to the grocery store, 90% of the time I'm getting the same stuff. It's like, you know, maybe not every trip, but over the course of a month or two, you've got a list of things that are part of your stable. And then occasionally, you know, like holiday time I want some peppermint bark chocolate or something, you know, but like it's not like it's like there's like random snacks you're gonna throw in but like there's and so when we looked at the data it turns out like after five times when you go to instacart 90 of your order was the same right but like when you wanted to reorder at least back then you couldn't go and reorder easily you had to dig and find it like seven or eight clicks and when you did reorder you had to reorder the whole thing you couldn't take pieces you couldn't take i want to take the milk and the blueberries right and so you know”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “And is the product actually working? Like, as I'm doing this, I'm looking and saying, is the product actually set up to deliver these things? Do we actually see it work or not? I think there's a lot of assumptions that the product works, but a lot of times teams will support. The pieces of a flow, but not actually build the experience, the output. They don't design it in a way where you're getting the real output that you need.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “How are people in their daily lives? How is their daily life actually reflected in the purchase experience? Are we making it easy for them? Because when you buy groceries, you're not going grocery shopping because you want beautiful ingredients in your fridge. You're going grocery shopping because you actually have a meal to put together. So like are we actually reflecting the real job to be done, which is I want to buy tacos. I want to make taco Tuesday, can we make it easier for people to find ingredients with tacos? As opposed to having them sort for tortillas and tomatoes and avocado. And so it's a really thinking about what is the job and then what is the flywheel to make that happen and how do we make this come to life.”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “What they're receiving, the people who are paying, right? And all of those flywheels have to work. And so part of what I've been able to do is really think about like how do we connect the dots in a story that the teams can uniquely understand can help them lean in even more and have clarity and purpose of work, right? Sometimes what's super important about the flight was actually is enabling for your teams to know what to work on and what not to work on, right? And then it also helps us to understand what do we know and what do we not know about creators and viewers and monetization operations so that we can do the understand work to improve the velocity and to prove the impact. And that's really where we've been focused. And so we did, I did a lot of this in YouTube, but also did this in Instacart, really thinking about when I joined Instacart, one of the big questions I had was like,”

    2024-05-26 · Lenny's Podcast · Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source