EVERY SPOKEN WORD
70 min read · 13,535 words- 0:00 – 2:09
Introduction to Adam Mosseri
- AMAdam Mosseri
No, I think taste matters a ton. In a world where it's easier to build things, it's more important to make sure that your time is spent figuring out what you should be building in the first place. The people who I think are gonna make the most of it are the ones who are clear-eyed about what AI is good at and what it's not good at, and also have an instinct or a nose for what it will be good at and not good at.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
What's something that the Instagram algorithm knows about human behavior that people may not realize?
- AMAdam Mosseri
I think people assume that there's a much more detailed semantic understanding of everybody's interests and preferences in the algorithm than there is.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Is the rise of AI content a headwind or a tailwind for Instagram versus other platforms?
- AMAdam Mosseri
I think it's gonna be a tailwind, but I think it's gonna be a challenge. In a world where there's an abundance of synthetic content, I actually think people are gonna seek out creativity and authenticity and people. I don't think we should filter out AI content. I think we should let you know if content is AI content or not. Uh, that's hard, by the way.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Where do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable as AI continues to eat more and more of that product development life cycle?
- AMAdam Mosseri
That's a great question. So-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Today my guest is Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram. Over three billion people use Instagram monthly. That's one in every three people alive. It boggles the mind. Prior to Instagram, Adam designed and led the early Facebook News Feed. He also ran the team that built the Facebook ranking algorithm, and eight years ago, he took over Instagram from its founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. He's a designer turned product manager turned leader of Instagram. Adam is also famous for being the face of all of the controversy and changes that come with evolving Instagram as a product, which we talk about. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a free year of the most interesting and well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Adam Mosseri. [gentle music]
- 2:09 – 5:48
How product teams are changing inside Meta
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Adam, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
You've been doing product for a long time. You get to see how a lot of teams operate across Meta within Instagram. What is just kind of like the canonical product team look like in 2026? What's kind of most different today in how teams operate/should operate versus, say, a couple years ago?
- AMAdam Mosseri
It's changed a lot this year. So for the longest time at a big company like ours, the canonical team was something like two or three Android engineers, two or three iOS engineers, two or three server engineers, maybe a generalist, a PM, a designer, a data scientist, a researcher if you were lucky, and maybe that's about it, so you know, on the order of a baker's dozen. And that is a function of, you know, you wanna have for anybody who's writing code, someone who can review their code, and that's who's familiar with that code base, and having these different functions that are more specialized. You know, I think it's very different at a startup. But this year it, it's changing. We've adopted what we call pods, which are just mini teams where it's, call it four to six engineers who are a bit more generalists. Uh, one we call product staff, which is sort of an evolution of the PM, so a PM who can do some of what a designer does and some of what a data scientist does and some of what a researcher does, leveraging, um, the latest tools that we have for them. And then whatever specialist they need. If they, if they're doing something that requires a pricing strategy, you need a senior data scientist. If you're doing something that is really novel from an experience standpoint, you need a very senior product designer. So we try to build a team based on the needs of the work a bit, but then end up with a much smaller core, which is more on the order of six or seven usually. And that is a very big shift that's just happening to us this year. But they, just by virtue of having less people to coordinate, they can often move faster and make, um, better decisions, uh, a little bit less design by committee. So we talk a lot about, you know, AI adjusting and improving productivity, and that's part of it. Um, but I think another part of it is just the small teams I think often are just more effective.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
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- 5:48 – 14:01
Blurring roles and career anxiety
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I, I love this. So on this team of six to seven, what's, what's the makeup again? And which role are you finding you have less of if you're going from the kind of the-- if you're going 50% size?
- AMAdam Mosseri
You just have less specialists, right?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- AMAdam Mosseri
So you might not have any. You might be four engineers and a product staff, and there's no data scientist, there's no designer, there's no researcher, there's no content designer The product staff is the generalist that sort of supports all of those things. I mean, what's clearly happening is all of the functions are starting to bleed into each other, and the, and the whole industry is wrestling with what that means. You know, a lot of what a data scientist does at a big company, for instance, is relatively mechanical. And so, you know, there's stuff that they do that is really more like s- you know, art than science, and there's stuff that's really more, like, just pulling data, data management. You know, so some of the tools that we're building internally to understand, for instance, a traditional data science question would be a waterfall. So if you wanted to look at people creating reels, you would look at all the steps and then how people fall off on each step and try to figure out where there might be opportunities to improve things. That kind of basic waterfall analysis is, like, much easier now to use some of our internal tools to just pull automatically as opposed to having to have a data scientist do a bunch of bespoke work for that. So our product staff might be able to do that now, and they couldn't do that a year ago. So you just end up with this general- these people who have more generalist shapes. And then, and then when you need it, when you really need it, you have a more senior, ideally, or just more creative specialist. Um, so, you know, a phenomenal, uh, product designer or just a, just a genius, uh, data scientist or researcher.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
This is so interesting. It's exactly what I just heard. I had, uh, Fiona Fong, the head of engineering for Claude Code and Cowork on the podcast. She's Boris Cherny's manager, and she described the people she hires now are, one, builders with great taste that can take an idea from end to end, and people with deep expertise in a very specific domain.
- AMAdam Mosseri
The taste thing matters a lot. I really agree with that. Boris used to work at Instagram. Um, I love seeing-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Oh, that's right.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah, he was a senior IC at Instagram for a while. I love seeing him. He's all over Threads now. It's like he's sort of like the face of Claude Code.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
He's killing it.
- AMAdam Mosseri
He's an amazing thing. He's fresh.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
He's, he's a, he's a, he's a celebrity now.
- AMAdam Mosseri
He really is. He's his own li- yeah, for sure, in a world that is, like, on fire right now. Um, no, I think taste matters a ton. Uh, so in a world where it's easier to build things, uh, it's more important to make sure that your time is spent figuring out what you should be building in the first place. Um, actually, so a lot of designers right now are very anxious about their roles. You know, you've got these other generalists doing design. You've got engineers doing design, product staff doing design. But I'm actually pretty long on design, or designers, because they tend to have taste, and I think that is something that is much more difficult to imagine being automated away. And so there's other challenges with design sometimes, but I, I'm pretty long right now on designers.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I've always felt that too, as it is so easy to build, and all the work that AI produces is so... Like, you can tell this was Claude Design. [chuckles] I know what you did here.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
This is Codex.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Well, they all have their vibe, right?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yes, exactly.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Like, you, when you vibe code your apps, we call it vibe coding. But you're a little, like, "Oh, that's a Codex app," or, "Oh, that's a Claude app." Like-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Right, and that's Replit. That's Levelable. Like, you can- [chuckles]
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... you can predict these things. You-- Like, I've always thought that too, that design should be thriving right now. For some reason, it hasn't yet. If you look at jobs for designers, they're kind of flatlining. I feel like the missing piece is, like, the PMME piece of deeply understanding the business and what will grow it and what success look, you know, like all that stuff, the business side of it versus the, the taste side of it.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. I think you're gonna see, like, I know, um, we have a senior designer, uh, at Instagram, uh, called Nate, who just transferred into product stuff. So I think, I think some of what you'll see is, you know, it will be harder to talk about design roles and who's a good designer because they're not gonna just stay in traditional design roles. You know, if you're an amazing designer, you might, you probably have strong opinions outside of just the interaction and visual design. You probably have strong opinions on product strategy, even on the business, on the go-to-market. And so I actually think some of our strongest product staff are gonna be converts from design and from data science who are just looking to expand their reach. And they were influential across functional boundaries before, but this world where those functional boundaries are just wildly blurred just allow them just to jump in. And so sure, they'll be technically a generalist on paper, but they're, they're clearly have a, a uniquely s- you know, strong ability in one, one type of craft. Um, but they've got the ability and strong opinions to make informed decisions across other parts or other crafts. And so, you know, I don't know that all the strongest designers I have will all be in design. They could, they, they probably will be the m- the majority, but I can imagine a bunch of really strong ones, you know, moving roles. But, I mean, I should also check my own bias here though, because I started as a designer at Facebook-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Right
- AMAdam Mosseri
... way back when, and I'm, I switched roles. Um-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
No, designers are great. Um, I'm a big fan. So this is really interesting. There's always been this, like, GM model where different types of functions can become GMs. It's like this product staff role feels like a similar situation where different functions can become product staff.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah, yeah. And that was true of PM before, but it's just so much more true now. Um, and it'll, I mean, in some ways it's probably the age of the generalist, but I st- I still think there's gonna be a real important role for these really amazing specialists who are just, they're all about going... I wish I was like that. I always had this, like, I romanticized, like, the phenomenal machine learning engineer or AI researcher or shoemaker. Like, I think that's the coolest thing in the world. But it's never been my shape. I've always been, um, I've never been great at anything. I've always just had range. That's always been my strength.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Same. [chuckles] Okay, so this idea of product staff, so the idea is on these new pods. So this is, like, a new thing you guys are doing. So there's these pod teams, product staff, engineers, and maybe one specialist that's going deep on, say, pricing algorithm or something like that. So what this tells me is that there's these, like, adjacent roles that are maybe, uh, more in trouble over the years. Uh, data science, for example, user research, for example. You talked about designers being anxious. Is there, is there anything there of just like, oh, these-- maybe folks in these groups should think about shifting to other roles?
- AMAdam Mosseri
I, the-- I mean, there's anxiety everywhere. I mean, I, I, I've talked to a lot of people at a lot of other companies, and it just seems like there's just a lot of concern right now about competition, about job displacement, about unintended or unforeseen consequences of all this technology and all this moving so quickly. So that's definitely happening. I, I think that, I think that you will see the functional lines continue to blur, but I still think there will be room for functions. They'll just be shaped differently. There'll be more... They won't all be senior ICs necessarily, but they'll all be either senior or on their way to being senior. Like, you can't just have a bunch of super senior data scientists and, like, no new ones, 'cause then who's gonna be the new super senior data scientists in the future? So you need to basically hire and mentor and grow talent. You know, maybe the team is smaller overall, and then the, those who aren't on their way to being super senior move into more of a generalist role. I think that's, like, a reasonable soft landing. But I do think you're gonna wanna make sure you're investing not only in today's senior talent for each specific function, but in tomorrow's. Um, otherwise, I think you're gonna regret it in a couple years is my take. That said, who knows what the world looks like in a couple years? Um, so my big thing and just generally, like, don't over-- don't be overly confident in whatever your predictions are because there's just too much flux right now.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
The Benedict Evans was on, was on a podcast recently, said the same thing. We don't know anything [chuckles] about what's going on.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. I like, I like, I like him a lot. I, um-
- 14:01 – 16:48
Hiring traits that matter now
- LRLenny Rachitsky
So you talked about taste. This makes me think about, so you're interviewing a lot of people, hiring a lot of people. What are some traits that you're-- that are, like, trending up in things that you look for more and more now in this world, and what are some traits that are trending down and maybe less important to you?
- AMAdam Mosseri
I mean, there are some things that are the same, right? So for the longest time, almost no matter what the function, I always look for three things. Do you have sort of grit? Like, you know, you're kinda like you're really gonna... You've got some drive, some fire in your belly. Are you a quick learner? And are you s- you know, are you reasonably, ideally very self-aware so that you can actually take feedback and know what you're good at and know what you're not good at? Because if you have those three things, if you've got fire in your belly, you learn quickly, and you're self-aware, you can kinda get good at anything eventually. Um, and but if any of those things are missing, there's usually an issue. So that's sort of like the baseline. Right now for hiring, but just for, I think, people who are gonna be more successful over these next five or 10 years as things change so significantly, I think two things that I, I'm continuing to encourage m- myself to do are to stay curious and to put yourself out there. I just think you gotta try things, right? This is like, you know, to that point before where that no one really knows what's going on. You just have to be willing to try things. It's almost-- I don't know. Do you speak another language?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Uh, Russian, yeah.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. So when you learn another language, I think one of the most important things and one of the best predictors, this is my guess, I don't have any research on this, about, you know, are you gonna get good at speaking, is are you willing to sound like an idiot? Are you [chuckles] willing just to say it and be corrected and not be offended and then just get better and better? You just have to put yourself out there. And with all of these new tools and models and technologies, I think you just have to be willing to try stuff. Um, so if you're curious and you try stuff, I think that'll, you know, you'll learn, you'll adapt. But if you're not curious or you're not willing to make mistakes or try things, I think you're in a ton of trouble. Uh, or at least I think it's gonna be a really difficult time. So those, I think, are premiums not just for hiring at a company like Meta or a team like Instagram, but I just think across the industry and multiple industries over the next 10 to 20 years. Is there something that maybe we're looking for less of? For some of these functions, um, I think that there's some that are still gonna be very large teams, and so you need people who are really good at managing large organizations. Large organizational leadership is its own craft and skill. It's actually different than management. Um, but I do think there'll be less of those roles. I think we'll have more smaller teams, and there'll be less people who manage thousands of people. Um, and so that's not that that job will go away, but that will be less of what I'm looking for in hires 'cause I'm gonna have less roles like that.
- 16:48 – 19:38
How AI is resetting who succeeds at work
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Something I'm hearing from a few folks is AI is almost kind of resetting people's impact and success in terms of some people that were maybe low performers pre-AI can now do, like, things they were bad at, or AI now allows them to do, and now they're thriving, building all these things, helping other people. Do you see that at all, just like AI is just, like, lifting other people up, maybe lowering some people down?
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. I mean, the job is just different. I mean, t-take, take a s- take, um, take engineering. Engineering used to be maybe not majority, but a large percentage, 40, 50, 60% writing code. You know, it's not now, especially if you talk to anybody at these labs. They're spending most of their time planning and reviewing code. That is a very different job. You might hate that, and you might have loved just writing code. Or you might have-- you might love that, and you might not have been that fast at writing code. So, you know, who, who succeeds is a function of whose strengths are aligned with the tools needs and the business' needs. And so y- this is, uh, definitely happening. Another thing is you've had people who had good ideas about how to contribute it to other functions, but didn't have the mechanical or technical skills to do so, and AI reduces the boundary to do that, and then all of a sudden they can. Like, you know, I- It's, for me it's kind of funny 'cause when I got hired at Facebook, we-- all the designers had to be able to program. That was like our... I had a, I went through a technical loop. We gave up on that 'cause it was too hard to hire people. Um, but I now get to program again for the first time in maybe 10 years. And, you know, I am not a good engineer. [chuckles] I'm a mediocre engineer on a good day. But now I can write code responsibly, which is just an amazing thing. You're seeing this across all sorts of levels in seniority and functions. You know, just designers who are programming, uh, engineers who are pulling data and doing strong analyses, data scientists who are putting together proposals for designs. You know, the tools aren't all great, by the way. I think too often we have this really polarized binary outlook on the state of AI. Like, are you AI-pilled or are you anti-AI? It's like people aren't binary. I said that to the team yesterday. And the state of the tools isn't binary either. You know, they're amazing at some things and remarkably bad at others. And the people who I think are gonna make the most of it are the ones who are clear-eyed about what AI is good at and what it's not good at, and also have an instinct or a nose for what it will be good at and not good at, you know, not, you know, next month or in a couple months from now.
- 19:38 – 23:23
How Meta thinks about token spend and AI costs
- LRLenny Rachitsky
You mentioned, um, that AI writes all our code now. Someone tweeted this that's, this idea that stuck with me for, like, months now of just like, "Remember we used to be able to just write code for free?"
- AMAdam Mosseri
[chuckles] I think you'll still be able to write code for free, it'll just be with a smaller model. But yes. [chuckles] That is the only-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Like, yeah, I guess that's true. Like, there's models that are close to free, but it's like, yeah, that's crazy. Now it's just like tokens.
- AMAdam Mosseri
But just think about, think about the cost. Think about what you pay for, um, a s- a, a model now, and how, and what the level of intelligence you're getting from that model is. And then at that same price point a year ago, what were you getting? At some point, they will just, the, the incremental value is, will be, won't matter. Like, you know, we're, you know, we're getting there I think with small projects and programming. Like I d- I think the models will matter even beyond, you know, this week you've got Fable and obviously Mythos from Anthropic, but I spent a lot of time with that this week. Um, it's, uh, for the first time I'm like, "Oh, I'm just talking to a much more technical, much smarter engineer than I am." You know, the next version, you know, you know, a year out of that model, do I need to pay for frontier tokens, you know, for whatever, you know, Anthropic model 6.0 is? Or is Fable just fine for all of my side projects? Probably just fine.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Probably pr- pr-pretty cheap by then too.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah, when Kevin Weil was on the podcast when he was CPO at, uh, OpenAI, he's, he famously said, "This is the worst the model will ever be."
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And it's still hard to comprehend that. Wow. That's, that's only gonna get better. So on this point of, uh, token spend, ROI, and things like that, uh, Meta was famous for this, like, leaderboard of token spend. Um-
- AMAdam Mosseri
Oh, it's a terrible idea. No leaderboards for token spend.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
[chuckles] Okay. Okay. Talk about that and just how do you think about just, like, budgets for engineers and product teams at this point? Do you just, like, spend as much as you want? Is it like there's a cap we have? Is there any sort of thing you've kind of figured out that works well?
- AMAdam Mosseri
Right now we've managed to get the costs reined in a little bit by, like, s- shutting down the silly things that we were doing. And so, you know, it's not that hard to build a token incinerator, and that doesn't create a lot of value. And as soon as you actually look at the dollars in and value out, you might just be like, "Oh, that's just a bad idea." And so right now we don't have, um, token limits for, for, for our engineers, or actually I think for anybody really. Uh, I think that'll eventually have to happen, um, particularly if costs go up before they go down. I think they'll eventually go down because, for the reasons that we just talked about. But I think of it like as any other resource, right? Like, I have to decide how to deploy capacity to my different teams 'cause I have a limited number of GPUs and CPUs and storage and RAM, et cetera. I have to decide how to deploy OpEx for labeling budgets across my teams. I have to decide how to deploy payroll for headcount across my teams. I think that y- you can i- imagine at least in, in a year or two coming, that the c- the burn rate of a strong engineer might be the same as their salary or their cost of employment. And if, in that world, like, you're gonna probably need to put in some caps. The caps should probably be m- come, like, uh, a proportional to your sort of, uh, you know, the company's sort of trust in your ability to use them in an ROI positive way. Uh, but I can imagine caps being healthy. Right now we're not there. Uh, I think costs will go up because we'll just be using more tokens, not because prices will necessarily go up. But then I think prices will come down because all of these frontier models are gonna be in a bit of a pricing war. Um, so we'll see. I think it'll be a bit of a rollercoaster.
- 23:23 – 25:56
Where human judgment still matters
- LRLenny Rachitsky
So coming back to this idea that, as you said, we've evolved from we used to write all our code to now we're approaching all code will be written by AI, and it feels like now the transition is it's not just written by AI, but it's, like, one-shotted by AI. Like, coding now is steering AI, and it's like how often you have to correct it is, is coding now. And then there's, uh, so it's like the software development life cycle slowly being eaten by AI. Uh, it'll start helping us come up with ideas I imagine more and more. The question I like to ask people is where do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable as AI continues to eat more and more of that product development life cycle?
- AMAdam Mosseri
Taste, like we talked about. Um, judgment, particularly around strategy, right? Like, you're, you're not- You might get feedback from an AI on a strategy, but you're not asking AI to come up with a strategy anytime soon. Or if you are, then it's within the context of bounds you set. So here's my goal, here's my vision, here are my constraints, here's my job, here's my budget. I think that, you know, it looks more like management, right? Like, you are trying to define what success looks like, decide how prescriptive you wanna be about the path to success, and then giving feedback along the way, and that is its own craft. Uh, you know, and you-- it'll be interesting to see how Matt, you know, you know, if some of the same dynamics come up. Like, I believe that if you are too prescriptive as a leader with a team, you end up stifling good ideas. But if you're too open-ended, sometimes teams just waste time, um, going in the wrong direction. And so that level of autonomy you give a team, like maybe that applies to, you know, agents in the future, um, particularly when we're talking not just about building something, but deciding what you build in the first place. Um, but I think of, I think of vision as an articulation of the world or the, or the state of the product you wanna get to. And I think of strategy as an opinionated path to achieve that vision. A str-strategy can't be like be the best or be amazing. It has to be controversial, that you have to be-- or there sh- a reasonable person should be able to disagree with it, 'cause otherwise you're probably just trying to compete on raw execution. And I think there, both vision and strategy, I think, are gonna be where our brains are spending a lot of our, more and more of our cycles, and I think less on, on execution.
- 25:56 – 30:36
Why AI is not automatically great at strategy
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Something I have always thought is AI should be incredibly good at strategy because you would think, "Here's the market. Here's all the information on the market, our competitors, our metrics, our numbers, our growth, all these things. Help me figure out how to win." You'd think AI, knowing all that, would be really good at this.
- AMAdam Mosseri
I think it could be. I th- I have found it's not unless you steer it pretty aggressively, and I don't mean towards an answer, I mean based on the constraints. It turns out when you're trying to come up with a strategy, there's a lot of things to consider, right? You need to consider the state of the technology, the personnel on the team, and what's motivating them, and what you can get. You know, sometimes coming up with an idea that is on the bubble, you know it's gonna actually attract some of the best talent, and so it, that kind of like, that kind of, the push then goes to the idea. Uh, obviously the competitive landscape, the regulatory landscape for companies as large as ours, and the compliance landscape, the identity and reason to exist for the brand. Um, you know, you have to consider all of these things. I think if you ask an AI just for a strategy lazily, you're not gonna get something great.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Right.
- AMAdam Mosseri
You're gonna get something pretty predictable that probably the competition would expect you to do. I think if you want a really more effective one, you need to think long and hard about what are all of the different inputs that need to be considered. Make sure you steer the AI in a way that it's considering those as well, and it needs to be a conversation and a back and forth. But I think if you're willing to put in the work and the time, it can definitely be helpful and definitely be clarifying, um, particularly if you tell it to be critical. Different models have very different vibes, though, on-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah
- AMAdam Mosseri
... how willing they are to be pushed back. [laughs] So I've, I recommend picking one that likes pushing back.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah. M- uh, Mythos has gotten really good at being like, "I can't do this. Let's, let's move on." Like, uh, there's all these limitations.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Claude has always been-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah
- AMAdam Mosseri
... a little bit of a jerk in a way that I actually appreciate.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
[laughs] I true. I, I use-
- AMAdam Mosseri
I appreciate it. I really do. 'Cause I don't want-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah
- AMAdam Mosseri
... one that's just like, "Oh, you're so right. I'm so sorry I said that."
- LRLenny Rachitsky
[laughs]
- AMAdam Mosseri
It's like, no, hold on. [laughs] I want, I want, you know, I want the real, real-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah
- AMAdam Mosseri
... sort of intelligence. I don't want-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah
- AMAdam Mosseri
... the pleaser.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
This point you made about people being excited about the strategy is such an interesting one. There's this idea that I read, I think Cory, Cory Doctorow wrote this. There's this kind of-
- AMAdam Mosseri
Mm-hmm
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... concept of a centchar- centaur and a reverse centaur. So centaur is a human body horse, uh, this is going somewhere, I promise. Uh, human body, uh, horse-- Sorry, human upper part, horse [laughs] lower part.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Horse body. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Horse body, where the human is in charge, and that's kind of, we prefer that. We wanna be in charge. Reverse centaur, which is what we wanna avoid with AI, is where the AI is controlling us, and we're just doing its bidding.
- AMAdam Mosseri
So it's a horse head on a human body?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah, exactly.
- AMAdam Mosseri
It's terrifying.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
So, like, in a sense, like Uber drivers and DoorDash people, kind of this is their life, which is not great.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Mm-hmm.
- 30:36 – 34:23
Why great product leaders are curators
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. Going back to product leadership, things you've learned along your journey. Uh, we were chatting ahead of this about just things you've learned, and one thing that you said about some of the product, the best product leaders you've worked with is that they're less visionary and more curators. I'd love to hear more along these lines.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. I mean, you do sometimes find amazing product leaders who are, who are just, like, idea machines, just prolific idea machines. But I do think a lot of the best are, have, have taste are... have something about them that really makes, once, makes really strong talent wanna work with them, but end up sort of being curators. Curators of people, curators of ideas, curators of technologies, curators of strategies. 'Cause I don't really care if I'm hiring a strong lead for an area if the strategy comes from them or comes from somebody else. I just care that there is a amazing strategy, and everyone has bought into it, and that the, and then we're executing against that strategy well. And so I think that some of the best product leaders, yes, have ideas. It's hard to be a great curator if you don't have some of your own ideas. But are-- that embrace the reality that they can't come up with everything themselves, and so they need to create an environment in which great ideas bubble up and are, uh, chosen or decided upon. And so, you know, I think it's not just about curating ideas, but it's a, sometimes about curating teams and people.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I love that. I so agree. I feel like everyone's always joining a team, and they just wanna do vision strategy, just, like, not actually, you know, hands-on work. [chuckles] And now AI's-
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... coming in. "Here, let me do the strategy." [chuckles]
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah, exactly. [laughs]
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And I love this point that there's so much power and value and people underestimate just the, the need for just a, like, a really good curator of, of the team's ideas.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. Sometimes it's also, sometimes it's not just who's good, uh, or what idea is good, it's also what is gonna work given the broader context. So for instance, on team building, a huge thing that I'm always considering is not just, like, is this person a really strong candidate for this role? It is, how does this person fit into their leadership team? You know, so if I, you know, for s- an area like trust and safety, you know, I have an engineering lead, I have a product staff lead, I have a data science lead, I have a design lead, I have a research lead. You know, I need to make sure that those five complement each other. I need to make s... And that's, you know, about what skills each one has, what weaknesses each one might have. I also need to make sure that they, um, this is more art than science, have a good vibe, right? You know, you need, you know, trust and rapport. A leadership team with strong trust and rapport can work through most anything. A leadership team without trust or rapport, like, anything could become an issue. And so that, that chemistry bit is, is, is, like I said, much more art than science, but that also matters. And so I think some of the best leaders, and product leaders specifically, also either do that instinctively or consciously, but you know, they have a, they have a nose for, for building teams that are gonna have good energy and, um, good collaboration.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Warm and fuzzy stuff.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. [chuckles] Yeah. Well, the s- the flip side is also true, right? [chuckles] Like, I've, I've had many times in my career where I've had two people who I think are amazing, and I even adore them and love them, and they just can't get along. [laughs] You know, like, this isn't a competency issue. This is just a personality issue, and you just have to just sometimes call it and split them.
- 34:23 – 38:08
What Instagram’s algorithm actually knows about you
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I wanna transition talk, to talk about Instagram, the product, the platform, things you guys have learned there. Let me start with this question. What's something that the Instagram algorithm knows about human behavior that people may not realize?
- AMAdam Mosseri
One of the most common misconceptions is actually in the opposite direction. I think people assume that there's a much more detailed semantic understanding of everybody's interests and preferences in the algorithm than there is. Most of what's really driven the progress in the world of recommenders over the last five, 10 years have been, you know, these large embedding models and these other techniques that basically produce artifacts that cannot be read by people. They're not legible. They're like giant vectors. It's like, sure, I can show you the vector, but it's just gonna be a bunch of numbers in, like, a seven-dimensional space. It's like... And so when, when we talk about does the algorithm know something, usually we think in these more semantic terms. It knows I like surfing, and it's like, uh, it doesn't. It just has this big-ass number that happens to correlate with surfing. Um, that said, I think that is starting to change, right? I think that what one of the things that LLMs are enabling is they can describe in, uh, you know, words, you know, English for or whatever language you prefer, what some of those previously illegible artifacts, um, are at least proximate to, if not mean directly, right? So this is, like, the thing I've been really-- I posted about this this week, this thing called your algorithm. Basically, the idea is we take a look at all of the stuff that you've interacted with, and then, you know, we, all of that is in an embedding space. You can think of embedding space as a map. You can map a bunch of videos into the same map. And so videos that are close are similar. And now we can just have an LLM just be like, "Describe that part of the map." And it can be like, "Oh, that is, like, deep pour-over coffee snobbery." [chuckles] And, um, and that's kind of amazing.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That is so cool.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Um-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That, like, you can ask the LLM to look at these numbers and extrapolate here's, like-
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... the topic that you're interested in.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That's awesome.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Or look at the videos.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Look at the videos.
- AMAdam Mosseri
And so the way you were, um, both... And so you can also embed concepts into that same space. And so, I mean, embeddings are really the underlying technology underneath LLMs, right? That's how the, all the whole thing works. And so, you know, so what, what we, what we, what we do now is we let you, you know, quote-unquote, "see your algorithm." You can see what topics we think you're interested in, um, and you can adjust it. You can add and remove things. But the idea here, giving people some agency back in a world where, you know, these social media apps are getting taken over by recommendations. Uh, but we can't do a lot of other things yet, which we will be able to do. You know, you could... There's things that aren't topical that you might ask for. I want more fun content. I want to see my friends more. I don't wanna see my high school's kids', friends' kids' photos. You know, I don't know. We can come up with... I don't wanna see seven photos in a row, but I'm happy to see six photos in a row. Whatever your heart's con- you know, you, whatever your mind can come up with. So, we have a lot of work to do, and so I'm excited about that. But, um, I think a misconception historically is, until recently, we don't really know as much about you as you think. We're just like, "Oh," like, "You liked these photos. This, these people also liked those same photos, and they like these other photos, so you might like those other photos." Like, that's kinda how... I'm oversimplifying. That's like-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah
- AMAdam Mosseri
... kinda how it worked. Now, only now are we actually getting as sophisticated as I think people have assumed we've been for many years.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That is really interesting.
- 38:08 – 40:56
Why chronological feeds often disappoint users
- LRLenny Rachitsky
One that comes to mind is kind of this transition everyone eventually goes through to this, like, algorithmic, broad, global feed. Uh, everyone... It always feels like people think, "I just wanna see chronologically everyone I know and follow, and that's gonna be my favorite feed," and it continues to be proven wrong. No, you actually engage a lot more, uh, a, a lot more when it's this algorithmic feed of things we think you will love.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. It's tough because, I mean, I get... I mean, I posted this week, this thing about agency, and I just got destroyed in the comments, which is just part of the job. I get it, right? Um, the, there's, but there are a couple issues with the algori- with the chronological feed. So, one is... And some of this is the tension between an individual's interests and what works when you scale it up, right? So, if you do a pure chronological feed, the incentive for everybody is to just post as much as possible, uh, 'cause it will always be at the top of everyone who follows you's feed as soon as you post. So, what ends up happening is that the feed gets overwhelmed with professional content, with usually large company content and publishers, 'cause they get... You know, The New York Times can pump out 50 things a day. Your f- your best friend won't. [chuckles] You, you might get one thing a week from them. And so, your feed just gets taken over. Um, so part of it is the incentives that emerge. 'Cause when you, when you design these systems, it's almost like designing a city. You need to think about, okay, here's the, here are the, here's how the mechanics work. What are the incentives that arise? How are people gonna act within those incentives, and then what happens? And the other thing is, uh, sometimes the most interesting thing was just not the most recent thing. Recency's an important input into relevance, but it's not the only one. My sister got engaged last night, and, you know, she's in Germany-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Congratulations.
- AMAdam Mosseri
No, she didn't. If she did, she's married.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Oh, okay. [chuckles]
- AMAdam Mosseri
She got married last year. That's why it was top of mind.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
All right.
- AMAdam Mosseri
But if she got engaged, you know, and I missed it because she lives in Europe, and, you know, we're different time differences, like, do I really wanna see a picture of, like, my brother's po boy sandwich? You know, uh, po boy sandwich, or do I wanna, like, see my sister's things first? So I, uh, it's tough. It's tough. I'd love to figure out a way to find the right balance. I wanna give people agency over the experience, but I think it needs to be in a way that creates a system that makes sense, not just for us as a business, which matters, I'm not pretending that's not an issue, but also for the overall community. 'Cause we've done chronological by default and where you can make it default, and you see not only does usage go down, overall sentiment goes down. The individual who made that choice might be happy at the moment, but when they... you just get pummeled with stuff you're less interested in over the course of months, we ask 'cause we run surveys at massive scales. We just see people start to become less and less satisfied
- 40:56 – 43:42
Why AI content may be a tailwind for Instagram
- AMAdam Mosseri
with Instagram.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Kind of along these lines, uh, everybody asks you about this these days, uh, AI, and content, and how that all impacts everything that's going on. I wanna ask you something I haven't seen someone ask you. Is the rise of AI content, uh, a headwind or a tailwind for Instagram versus other platforms? Do you think this helps or hurts you guys?
- AMAdam Mosseri
I think it's gonna be a tailwind, but I think it's gonna be a challenge. It's... And not just because it's more content. Obviously, we're an attention business, driven business. We're an advertising business. More content means potentially more attention. It, that's not for free, though. Like, I don't think we're very good at ranking AI content yet. There's great AI content, there's crap AI content. You should just see the stuff you're interested in and not any of the stuff you're not interested in. But I do think that in a world where... Or for years now, and I've said this many times, power's shifting from institutions to individuals across industries. The easiest example is sports, where players are more relevant than teams now, and that was not the case when I was a kid. In that world, you're gonna s- I think it m- behooves us to invest in individuals and to invest in, specifically for Instagram, in creators, and I mean creators broadly. I don't just mean influencers who are promoting branded content and making, you know, native-only videos. I mean anybody who's using platforms like Instagram to help do what they do, right? It could be, you could be a journalist, you could be an artist, you could be selling scarves you sew. But, like, you're out there as yourself pro- creating and sharing content that helps you achieve whatever it is you're trying to do. So, we've been leaning in that direction for many years now. That's been our, you know, one of our two or three most important audiences for as long as I've been on Instagram. In a world where there's an abundance of synthetic content, I actually think people are gonna seek out creativity and authenticity and people more, not less, and I think that, that will help us. That doesn't mean that we won't have AI content on our platform. There's gonna be ... bad and good AI content, and we're gonna try and handle that, you know, the way we normally handle content. So unsafe goes away. Interesting versus not interesting is based on ranking and personalization. Um, but I think people are gonna really seek out other points of view, 'cause Instagram was never just about the content. It was always a-about, to a certain degree, the person behind the content, the point of view, the reason they're sharing it, their perspective. And I think that's gonna become more important, not less. And I think given that we are not the best at a lot of things, but we are the largest, uh, creator platform, you know, you know, if you look at how we define creators and how many creators use us versus other platforms, I think it'll be a tailwind for us because I think people are gonna seek out people.
- 43:42 – 48:00
The future of AI and human content in the feed
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And then this connects to your earlier point that, uh, companies, uh, like, say, New York Times can pump out a bunch of AI content versus a creator, and so you're saying you kind of want to protect against that, too, allow individuals to continue to perform well in spite of just all this AI content.
- AMAdam Mosseri
If you just love AI content, great. Like, you should be able to have a feed that's just, like, AI town. And if you d-don't, then you shouldn't have it in your feed. Like, you know, uh, to me it's like, I don't think we should... I mean, I understand why people are, right? There's a-- I'm not oblivious to the overall [chuckles] paradigm shift and sort of revolution that we're sitting in. But I don't think we should judge content based on the tool that made it. Um, I think we should judge it based on the content, the point of view, the person behind the content. Like, I don't, I don't think we should filter out AI content. I think we should let you know if content is AI content or not. I think we should let you know more about the person who posted anything so that you can make informed decisions about whether or not to believe or trust them based on, you know, knowing who they are or where they are or how many times they've changed their profile or, you know, you know, if their profile is three days old or s- three years old. Um, but I don't think we should be making value judgments based on what tool you used.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Is there an AI, uh, content creator you love, that you're just like, "This is so good. I love watching these AI videos"?
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. What is she called? Plastic, Plastic Dream Sequence. Is that what it is? Um-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Cool. I'm gonna check that out
- AMAdam Mosseri
... I think I might watch it. Check the name. Yeah. Plastic Dream, uh, um, Plastic Dream Sequence. I have it on my phone. I'll double-check. Um, it's these, like, uh, like sort of dolls, Barbies, but they're, like, singing s-songs in these little tiny sort of-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I found it. Yeah
- AMAdam Mosseri
... silhouettes and snippets, and it's just, it's just amazing. It's, like, a little weird, but, like, also kind of amazing, and it's, it's very clearly AI. It's not pretending not to be. But it's, has a very clear creative and aesthetic point of view. And every time I come by one, I'm like, "Yep, we're doing this now. I'm gonna watch this for 30 seconds." [laughs]
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I have it pulled up here, and I don't, I, I wanna watch it, but I'm not going to.
- AMAdam Mosseri
[laughs]
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That's awesome.
- AMAdam Mosseri
If Only That AI, that's another one. He's-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm
- AMAdam Mosseri
... out of, uh, he's in France. I think he's in Paris. He uses multiple different tools and models, but he kind of tries to create these dreamscapes and animate them. So he create, uses one model to create the image, another one to create the video, music, et cetera. Uh, he's, like, very clearly got his own aesthetic. Um, uh, and he's just... Like, you could, you could think of him as a painter, but, like, this is his tool.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Is there kind of a vision of AI versus human in the feed? Do you think it'll... Like, you said you maybe wanna mark it. Like, how do you think about people? Are they gonna be like AI account, not AI account? How do you think about it, or is that still kind of a work in progress?
- AMAdam Mosseri
Maybe we'll end up in the same place, but there's a difference between marking content and marking accounts, and they're both useful and interesting. So, if content was created with AI, I think you should be able to know that. Uh, that's hard, by the way, because we can detect that right now, but as these models get better, we might lose the ability to detect that. So we should also be very careful to be honest with you about how confident we are in our own sort of assessment. Um, but I think you should be able to just ask, be like, "Hey, is this AI?" And we should be able to tell you, "We think it probably is," or, "We're not sure," or, "It's definitely not," or, "It definitely is." Um, I actually think we might be, might be more practical to, to label camera-captured content, like basically non-AI content, as opposed to labeling AI content long term-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm
- AMAdam Mosseri
... for a couple reasons. But then at the account level, I think it also matters. There is definitely an, a new spam vector, which is these fake accounts, which, by the way, uh, an AI creator, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. But there is, there are these spam vectors which are trying to abuse that, and, you know, they're selling, like, you know, bogus supplements, and it's like an AI monk, and it doesn't present it. It's not obvious that it's an AI, and it's just trying to, like, take advantage of, you know, a certain aesthetic or a certain sort of stereotype. Like, we need to figure out how to crack down on that. And so I do think, I do think we should be making sure that you know. Basically, you just need to know, and then you can make your own informed decision. Is the account a real person or not? Is the content a real piece of
- 48:00 – 52:05
What Adam admires about other social platforms
- AMAdam Mosseri
content or not?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
When you think about other platforms, uh, in the space, social, you know, content platforms, are there any, um, features or just, or, like, ways of, of, of approaching stuff that they do well that you're kind of jealous of or really impressed by?
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah, there's a bunch. Everybody, so many people do so much good stuff. I mean, for me, like, one of the things that we are finally catching up with, but I've been always very impressed with, is TikTok and their recommenders' ability to break small talent. Um, in the world of ranking recommenders and rank, um, you can talk about exploitation-based ranking. That sounds terrible, but it just means, like, using the data you have. And then you can talk about exploration-based ranking, going and trying to figure out, you know, what someone might be interested in that they might even not know they're interested in yet. And it is much easier to move engagement by showing people stuff that you know they'll probably like because lots of people like it. It's much harder to go and figure out how to essentially test content so that we can see, like, "Hey, m-maybe you... Sure, you like ... Bieber, but you might also like AfroPunk. And so we're just gonna, like, show you some AfroPunk and see what happens. If you do the latter, this exploration-based ranking, you can-- I think it's really good for niche creators and small creators because you give them a chance to find an audience that either wasn't gonna see them before or didn't even know that they were interested before. So we've invested a lot over the last couple years in ranking, not just increasing engagement, but increasing originality, increasing the number of, uh, pieces of content that break out, uh, increasing recency to stay culturally relevant. And so a lot of that has been inspired by, by TikTok and ByteDance. I think we're catching up. Um, there's actually a couple of those areas where we, I think by the best we can tell, we're ahead of them. There's a couple where we're still behind, but for-- we have line of sight to, I think, being the best in class at recommendations for the first time, um, d- during my tenure. Uh, so that's the, the... I think, you know, they, they get a lot of credit for inspiring a lot of that work.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Nice job.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Well, we'll see. Not there yet. [chuckles] They call me disappointed dad. My team is always like, "Can you ease up on the disappointed dad vibe?" So I'm t- I'm trying to, I'm trying [chuckles] to, trying to be a little bit more-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
[chuckles]
- AMAdam Mosseri
... um, generous about giving people their flowers.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
[chuckles] Like you say that, but that's an interesting common thread across really successful leaders is just never being satisfied.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Always feeling like-
- AMAdam Mosseri
It's a blessing and a curse
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... here's all the problem. It is.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. [chuckles]
- LRLenny Rachitsky
[chuckles] On this creator piece, I think that's also, you know, people, uh, complain about this global algorithm not showing them all their friends, but I feel like this is a benefit of what happens when you do this, now that you can break new creators into a wide audience if you have this kind of global algorithmic feed, which is really great for a lot of people.
- AMAdam Mosseri
I mean, I'm out there talking about a lot of these contentious issues, and I get beat up a lot in the comments, which is fine. My main thing here is just to try to communicate that there's almost always trade-offs, right? There's, uh, you know, you can't just have all of the things, unfortunately, you know? You wanna have, um, you know, you wanna never see something you're not interested in, then you're also just gonna see, like, the most basic, general, lowest common denominator stuff all the time. You know, you wanna discover new and interesting things, you're occasionally gonna see stuff that was just a miss. You know, you know, but this isn't just true about ranking. These all, all these major debates have trade-offs, right? You know, uh, s- privacy and safety, those two things are in tension, you know. Do you, do you want a company scanning your messages or not? There's some really significant trade-offs on both sides of that debate. Um, and so generally speaking, when I argue and engage in debate with people who feel really strongly about things, I'm not usually trying to convince them. They're usually, their mind is usually made up. I'm just trying to enumerate all of the different puts and takes for the rest of the people watching the conversation.
- 52:05 – 56:31
How he handles public criticism
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Speaking of getting torn apart in the comments, like, you're so in the middle and thick of all of these really hairy situations, changing the feed. You're, like, in the Cambridge Analytica lawsuit, all this. Just so, like, you're in the center of so much controversy and, uh-
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... is that some- [laughs] Like, yep. Oh, man.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Um.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Is that just, like, you, I will lean into this, this is the thing I need to do? Or is it, like, Zuck being like, "Adam, you gotta be the front face of all this stuff and get in there"? Like, where does that come from?
- AMAdam Mosseri
It started on News Feed. So I used to run News Feed at Facebook, and I-- my take was that the debate was gonna happen with or without us, so we might as well participate. And so I started being really active on Twitter specifically, 'cause that's where journalists really lived at the time, and I thought it would be-- show some humility to show up on their turf, so to speak. Uh, my Twitter ended up being, like, the most, the darkest place in my life [chuckles] because I just followed all of our biggest critics. That's not a dig on Twitter. That was just-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Perfect
- AMAdam Mosseri
... what I did. Um, and that's where it started, and it kind of slowly built from there. For better or for worse, we've become a really important part of daily life for a lot of people. We touch a lot of people. We have a lot of responsibility, and there's a lot of change, and there's... with change means there's gonna be anxiety and stress and scrutiny. We've made great decisions. We've made mistakes. Um, we've been criticized for things that I think, um, we've been criticized unfairly. We've been criticized fairly. And so we just need to accept that this debate is gonna happen broadly, so I just think it's better for us to talk about it, um, and just be clear about what we're doing, why we're doing it, what the trade-offs are. If people disagree, that's okay. We're not necessarily, you know, winning over friends when we talk about what we do. But I think over the long run, people are fundamentally more afraid of things that they don't understand, um, and about things where people are more secretive and less accessible, and so I've been tried, I've tried to show up in an accessible and authentic way. Um, and I've made mistakes, and I have enjoyed it at times and hated it at other times. Um, but that's kinda how it started. There was also kind of a fun debate in, on Mark's sort of senior leadership team a long time ago where we were just talking about how we're a social media company, but we had, like, a very sort of conventional approach to communication and, like, press releases, and it's like, why don't we just use our platform? So, um, I was not in that debate, but I stuck myself into that debate trying to mediate it, and I think, um, n- but that was also a reason why I ended up getting sucked in, 'cause Mark was like, "All right. Well, let's see. Like, why don't you try it and see how it goes?"
- LRLenny Rachitsky
What's something that helps you deal with the, the hate that flows at you every time you say something that people disagree with?
- AMAdam Mosseri
You try to r- put it in perspective, right? You know, like, so it, it started with I did a redesign of News Feed in 2009. We launched it March of 2009 for Facebook. I was a designer. I was a front, like an IC designer, front, you know, entry-level designer. And the first comment That came in was something pretty derogatory. I think it was like, it was like homophobic and anti-Semitic, [laughs] you know? And it was just like-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Perfect
- AMAdam Mosseri
... literally, we're all sitting there, we launched this thing, and we're just looking at the stream of comments, and it's like the first one. And it was specifically about, they don't know me, but it was like, "What expletive, expletive, um, censor, censor," uh, "designed this shit?" [laughs] And I was like, "Oh, it was me." Um, [laughs] and I was, like, devastated. I was, like, a 25-year-old kid. And I don't know. I thought about it, and I came, I came to this idea that if you spent 30, 40, 50 minutes a day at a, at, at your desk, and you organize your photos there, and you wrote letters to your friends there, and you read there, and then I just came and I rearranged your desk, and I didn't tell you, I didn't warn you, I didn't even explain why, like, you would be pissed, and that would be reasonable. Um, and that was what was happening just, you know, with millions of people. Um, so I try to put things in perspective. Um, and then I try to step away from it, um, get time with my kids, get time outside. Uh, there, there are months where it's really not hard at all, and there are months where it's really, really grinds on me.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Along
- 56:31 – 1:00:21
Lessons from the Instagram feed redesign backlash
- LRLenny Rachitsky
those lines, there was a famous kind of reversal when you redesigned the feed into this kind of video scrolly experience. There was this whole-
- AMAdam Mosseri
Mm
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... protest. The world protested. [laughs]
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. That was pretty rough.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Uh, what was kind of like, "Okay, wow, we're actually not right and we should go back," what was kinda, what helped you decide, "Okay, let's change course"?
- AMAdam Mosseri
So actually, that one got, it, that one, uh, three or four things got conflated. We had to redesign a feed that went to the video viewer. That was a test to 4% of users on iOS. It was a not, it was not gonna roll out. It was just a, like, an early test to get us some sense and feedback on the idea. We were also leaning into Reels a lot. We were also leaning into recommendations, so posts from accounts you don't follow a lot. And there were also creators who were upset about the fact that their reach was going down, and they were blaming ranking changes on that. Those four things got all conflated. We had some pretty big-name creators publicly, like, slap us. Then the press covered that creator sort of backlash, which then got more creators doing it, so we ended up with this little bit of, like, a multiplier effect or echo between the creator community and the press back and forth. But we were never gonna launch that. That was an early test. We were all, we knew it was, needed work. Um, we actually have continued to grow video and invest in creative tools and invest in ranking and invest in recommendations, and that's driven and amet- most of our growth in the years since. Um-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Showed them
- AMAdam Mosseri
... but I think we were pushed... Well, I don't know. It doesn't feel like... But, like, it, I think we were p- I think my real takeaway wasn't that we should've not tested that design necessarily. I think we could've been, we could've done a bunch of things better to explain and maybe move a little fast- move a little slower. I think we were just pushing things a little bit too fast.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm.
- AMAdam Mosseri
And when you are responsible for a, a platform like Instagram, you need to be reasonable and realistic about how much you can evolve it. Now, I would much rather have backlashes like that every couple years, but continue to evolve and continue to stay relevant than the alternative, which would've been, like, we didn't have video, we didn't have DMs, we didn't have stories, we didn't have ranking, and we wouldn't be on having this podcast right now. Um, um, but the cost of leaning in is that you're gonna occasionally, like, make a mistake, and you're gonna definitely, um, pay for it.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
It's interesting how running experiments now is, like, very risky for companies at your scale. One person spots it, and they go, "Oh, shit."
- AMAdam Mosseri
You kind of need to have a press... You don't need to be proactive about communicating it, but you need to have a comm strategy.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Like, we can't, for any, for any design change or any test that could be controversial, we, we talk about it beforehand and be like, "Okay, not if it leaks. When it leaks, what are we saying?" You know, are we, you know, should we talk about it proactively? Should we talk reactively? Either way, what's the message? Because you can't, you can't, you can't launch something to three billion people and not test it first, but you can't test something at our scale and not expect people to cover it and not, and be... And so you have to be ready to talk about it d- before you even know you wanna launch it. Um, so it's, um, it makes the development cycle more complicated than it used to be.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah. Uh, the, uh, head of growth at Anthropic launched an experiment with pricing, and it just went crazy on Twitter. He's like-
- AMAdam Mosseri
Oh, yeah
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... his whole, that 1% of people were just trend stuff. They're like, "No, Anthropic."
- AMAdam Mosseri
Pricing particularly. That one is a real-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm.
- AMAdam Mosseri
You gotta be real careful with that one. I've, I've, uh, I've learned, we've all learned these lessons. We should all share notes more. That's what I think. [laughs]
- LRLenny Rachitsky
There's one how to, how to avoid the internet hating you for the day.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah, yeah. I'm happy to talk to that about Anthropic. [laughs]
- LRLenny Rachitsky
[laughs] I think he's all right.
- 1:00:21 – 1:03:03
Adam’s biggest failure: Instagram on iPad
- LRLenny Rachitsky
He's all right. Okay, I'm gonna take us to two recurring corners on the podcast, Fail Corner and Hot Seat Corner. Fail Corner, what's, uh, what's something that you worked on that was just a huge failure that helped you become better?
- AMAdam Mosseri
Oh, a bunch. Um-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
So many
- AMAdam Mosseri
... so I'll give you two maybe. So before Instagram, my first project as a PM was on a project called Facebook Home, which was a sort of fork of Android, um, t- at the operating system level-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I remember that
- AMAdam Mosseri
... and a, and a piece of hardware with HTC. It was a spectacular failure. I learned way more in that year, year and a half, than I did in any year, I think, probably in my career, 'cause I was just a design manager before that. I declared myself a PM 'cause the PM on the project quit, and I just threw myself headfirst into understanding carriers and OEMs and, uh, certification as well as Android and operating systems and just learned a ton. Um, so-- And I'm happy I brought that project to an end because it had been going on for a long time, and sometimes you, the best thing you can do is execute an idea that doesn't have market fit well just to deci-decide whether or not the idea was a good idea in the first place. Another big mistake I made, um, during my Instagram tenure was the first version of Reels was built on top of Stories. Stories had a ton of momentum. This was, I think, 2019, and we were trying to build Reels into Stories because we were trying to build on the thing that was growing the fastest. But it was not a strong foundation. Most, you know, the read-through rate on Stories is relatively low. There's way more Stories than most people have time to consume, so most of the Reels were never seen, and then they disappeared. Um, and if we had the version of Reels that we launched in, like, mid, just maybe think of this like the summer of 2020, in the summer of 2019, I think... I don't think TikTok is in... I think TikTok is still big and important, but I don't think it's as big as it is now because when they really took off was when the pandemic hit, and a bunch of people had a lot of time at home and were looking for a little bit of joy and were totally fine with their phone having sound on. And so if you look at the numbers, the 2020 is when they exploded, and we were out of position. And, um, on one hand, you know, I, I'm a designer. I'm trying to not add new things to the product. I'm trying to extend existing primitives, and that was the idea. On the other hand, I was wrong. [chuckles] And, and it's a pretty big fork in the road if you just look at the overall business over the last eight years.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
We created a lot of economic opportunity in the world, allowing TikTok to, [chuckles] to grow. So there's a lot of-
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah, it's good. I'm, I'm glad they exist.
- 1:03:03 – 1:06:56
His approach to kids, screens, and social media
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay, final question. Um, I'm curious just about your screen time policy with your kids. I know you have three kids. Uh, there's a lot of concern these days about Instagram hurt- not being great for people, not for ki- for kids. A lot of tech executives don't let their kids use devices while they're building the product. As head of Instagram, how do you think about screen time with your kids?
- AMAdam Mosseri
The key thing for me is boundaries. Um, it's also about education and being, and having conversations with them. But my kids are too young to use social media. They're 10, eight, and six. Um, but they each have an iPad. They get, um... They have to earn their time, um, so they have different ways they earn their time. It's usually about, like, sitting down to do your homework three times for half an hour each gets you a total of 90 minutes on the weekend, and then they can use that time on the weekend. Um, but you kind of have to set that boundary where it's like you can't just, like, you know, it can't just be they ask for it and you give it to them. I think that matters a lot. And then I'm pretty opinionated about what they do on it, right? I approve what apps that they have. I think parents should be approving what apps t- kids specifically are, um, downloading onto their devices. We've been advocating for this at a policy level for a long time at Meta.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- AMAdam Mosseri
I think those things help a lot. Um, there are some exceptions. Um, one is planes. It's just, like, about surviving. I don't know if you've ever... For those of you who are parents, it's-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I am, I'm going to be, yeah.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. It's like you just like... That's just like, all right. You know, we're fly- you know, it's a 10-hour flight or eight-hour flight. It's like, yeah, just, just, you just need to get through it. Um, the other one that I'm starting to experiment with my 10-year-old with is... So schools are interesting 'cause I think I'm pretty supportive of a no phone in classrooms. Um, that's happening more and more. I think that's just probably good for education, and I do also know in the world of AI that there's concern about kids using AI and not learning critical thinking skills, and I think that's a valid concern. But I also am worried about kids not learning how to leverage AI and then being sort of at a disadvantage, so that's a balance. I think you need both. So with, with my eldest, we started, um, vibe coding recently together. Um, he's just loves video games, so I was like, "All right. Let's make a video game." And so he's made this 19-level platformer game that kind of looks like an 8-bit version of Super Mario from when I was a kid. But, like, each level has its own theme, its own types of monsters. There's a store where you can buy different skins or weapons, and there's like-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Wow
- AMAdam Mosseri
... uh, like all... It's unbelievable what a 10-year-old who still types with three fingers can do, um, with just, you know, a couple hours of sitting together. But that is more of, like, a I want you to learn how to, um, make things. I, I want you to be thinking, not just playing games, and I'm gonna sit with you and do th- we're gonna do this together. Um, so to me, these are the things that matter, boundaries, um, scoping it down to the activities you think are healthy for your kid. Every kid is different. Um, but I do think you want your kids to be digitally literate, um, AI literate because I think if they're not, they're gonna be at a disadvantage, but just you also don't want it to be a free-for-all.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
This is selfishly useful for me as a, as a... I have a three-year-old, and I'm trying to figure all this stuff out, so this is useful.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Oh, yeah. No, it's, it's-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
For me to figure out a strategy
- AMAdam Mosseri
... it's amaz- it's a thing, and you're, you're, you're not that far off. You're really just not that far off. It's gonna happen in a couple years.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Just vibe coding next year. Let's do it. Um-
- AMAdam Mosseri
I couldn't believe... I tried to do it six months ago, and it just totally didn't work, and then-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm
- AMAdam Mosseri
... now with the newer models, it's been amazing.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
What's their platform of choice? Are they Claude coding t- uh, [chuckles] person or something else?
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. [chuckles] Yeah, my 10-year-old is using, is using Claude Code right now.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Amazing.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Um-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay
- AMAdam Mosseri
... um, but, um, we will see. We'll see how that goes.
- 1:06:56 – 1:08:28
What Adam wants listeners to remember
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Adam, uh, I'm gonna let you go. Thank you so much for being here. This... You're just, like, such a gem of a person. It's just-
- AMAdam Mosseri
Thank you
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... so obvious how clear-
- AMAdam Mosseri
[chuckles] I appreciate that
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... and, like, how authentic you are and just, like, how deeply you think about everything. Uh, so I really appreciate you being here.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah. I appreciate you bringing me on. Um, been a fan for a long time. It's nice to finally get to have a conversation.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I really appreciate that. I really appreciate that. Uh, let me just ask you this final question I ask everyone.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
What's a way that listeners can be useful to you?
- AMAdam Mosseri
I just think, you don't even have to tell this to other people, but just remember that this world and technology is complicated, and there are almost always trade-offs. Um, and you can totally disagree with the decisions I or we make. Um, but just remember that we are people here trying to make these decisions, just trying to do the best we can. And I, I actually do invite the criticism and the critique and the feedback, but, um, but know that none of these contentious debates are nearly as simple as most people pretend to make them out to be.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Wise words. Adam, thank you so much for being here.
- AMAdam Mosseri
Pleasure. Thank you, Lenny.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Bye, everyone. [outro music] Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at LennysPodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Episode duration: 1:08:28
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