🌿 Product dev culture

Goals, goals, goals. Everyone owns what they’re building and should understand the “why” behind their projects. The user problem and success criteria are clear at all times to inform down stream decisions.
Get product out to users ASAP. You can’t learn by over-thinking in a corner— you learn by getting features in user hands. We ship a lot to learn faster, and everyone is usually involved in 2-3 experiments at any given time.
MVP mentality. Keep things simple and focus energy on the most important parts of the feature. If something is redundant or not required for the goal, trim it.
ROI-focused. Upside vs effort is always important for evaluating priorities. If it’s quick, just do it. If it’s a bigger lift, we should be clear on the upside and and our appetite for scope.
Data-driven. We let the data speak. Our team runs experiments to evaluate user impact and anyone can run experiments or use data to make a case.
Human-centered. We balance data with qualitative insights. Monitor community feedback and conduct user research for a fuller picture. Collaborate with User Happiness to quickly address user concerns.
Directionally correct. Speed and building toward a good direction is much more important than perfection or being “right.” Prioritize energy on the most critical details and assume we’ll iterate on the less urgent details.

📐 Scope norms

Time is our team’s biggest constraint but use it as an advantage— time constraints are good to force us to aggressively prioritize, keep things simpler, and cause us to think creatively. And we learn fastest getting something into user hands.

Whenever we’re evaluating the ROI of a project, we should call out the appetite we have for the project scope and then re-evaluate as needed. For reference, historically we’ve gotten many quick swings out within a calendar day and big swings out in ~3 calendar weeks.

Below is the common range for how long different swings take to start an experiment (designing → implementing → internal testing → experiment start):

Size	Scope	Risk	Examples
Quick swing	hours to 2 days	Low	Copy changes, redesigning a modal, etc.
Medium swing	1-2.5 weeks	Medium	Name an emotion, request a hug, redesigning a flow.
Big swing	3-5 weeks	High (ROI must be particularly high)	Redesigning home navigation, seasonal events, most new social features like gifting.

The bigger the swing, the more time internal testing can take but 5 weeks is a less common upper bar. |

For a given project, it is often hard to know what the full scope will be until we finalize the design so we tend to scope out design and eng work separately. When designers or engineers are scoping out their own work, it tends to land in the following ballparks (caveat that a project could be a quick swing for design but medium swing for eng):

Size	Scope	Risk	Examples
Quick swing	1 day or less	Low	Copy changes, redesigning a modal, etc.
Medium swing	≤1 week	Medium	Name an emotion, request a hug, redesigning a flow.
Big swing	1-2 weeks	High (ROI must be particularly high)	Redesigning home navigation, seasonal events, most new social features like gifting.

Very few projects take 4 weeks for a designer or eng. |

It is hard to know what the full project scope is (esp for medium and big wings) until we finalize the design. But before every project starts, we do try to still have a ballpark sense of what kind of scope this likely would entail to evaluate our appetite for the project.

Design effort: We should have an initial concrete scope for the design exploration with a clear date for the project team to regroup. It’s normal for design to surface new angles or challenges we weren’t aware of, so it’ll be natural for the team to dynamically adjust the design scope with new information.