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So much of my confusion about why Facebook and Twitter for the last few years just felt like broken products evaporated when developer friends at both Meta and Twitter both told me that engineers are tasked with proposing changes that drive revenue, engagement, or other OKRs.

This blew my mind. All these years I thought product people were thinking up these awful changes and meh non-features—no, the engineers were tasked with this, the thinking being they look at code daily, so they must know what’s an effective use of time and resources.

Like my friends said, “Suddenly everything makes sense why social media is terrible”.

The classic Jobs–Ford story (“if we’d asked people what they wanted they’d have said a bigger keyboard/faster horse”) teaches that you need design sense, not just metrics and experiments and user research. So it’s shocking that these big companies don’t practice this?

(I know I’ve seen people with product titles at both firms, so I’m not clear whether they work in a tiny part of the space, or if my friends’ experiences were unrepresentative.)