Twitter

Twitter's product market fit showed in user fervor, not in graphs. Verrilli says you could feel how much people loved Twitter even while the organization was chaotic. It kept working through nine heads of product in two years.

He reads this as real product market fit and network effects surviving a badly run organization, including wholesale changes later on. His test is emotional fervor rather than 'the graphs look okay'. Quote: "if you manage to bottle lightning doesn't matter how badly you screw up the organization".

Lenny's Podcast▶ 25:56

Twitter needed years of working groups to lift an obvious limit. Everyone knew the 140 character limit had to go. Japanese users tweeted six times more often because kanji fits more in the same space, yet no one wanted to decide, and it lifted almost two years after Verrilli left.

Editing tweets took another two and a half years after that. Verrilli's view is that endless working groups signal weak leadership, not real complexity, and that nobody died when the call was made. Quote: "most of the time you hear it's really complex. It isn't. Leadership's just weak."

Lenny's Podcast▶ 36:44