391–400 of 462 posts
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>> adequate business context, a decent design spec, and letting them figure it out. I wish more PM's thought like you.
Ditto. As an engineer, it feels like product managers often feel a need to keep cranking out new features as a way to justify their seat at the table. I would love to work in an engineering culture which found a way around that problem. If that means the job falls on me instead, so be it.
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You probably don't know the story. Selling was part of the plan all along. Whatsapp didn't even try to make money on their own.
The founders hearts were in the right place. Brian Acton created Signal Foundation and Jan Koum like I said also have done good things. They also tried the paid version for a while if you remember. And they were also dead against ads on the app. Unless I missed something or if I am wrong somewhere (At which point I would love to be corrected), Selling was the plan all along doesn't seem like a right observation.
I'm not saying they are bad people, and selling is not a bad thing either. I'm just pointing out that selling was the plan all along.
The WhatsApp story that gets told regularly (like in this instance) is a story of how such few employees and such small infrastructure is enough to build a massive product. You know what that translates to? Low opex. If they wanted to, WhatsApp would've been quite profitable if they wanted but instead they chose to sell to the highest bidder.
Again, that's not a bad thing, but also, I'm sure there were PLENTY of people that were interested in buying a billion user platform with 99% user retention. Why did they sold to Facebook? Only they know, but back then Facebook already had a tarnished reputation, so they definitely didn't do it "because of their mission and values".
My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out. Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers. WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long),…
This is why, after being both an engineer and a product manager (and VP of Product), and now a CTO of a seed stage startup, I’m fairly convinced PdMs are unnecessary. At least for the the type of company I’d like to build (WhatsApp as a primary example of that). Off loading the founders vision to someone else is a failure of both communication and org structure (at the seed-SB stage). People may not think hiring thei…
CEO and CTO beware, do not let Product Managers happen to your company.
I'm honestly not that surprised about the size. In my experience, efficiency and the number of engineers have not necessarily correlated. For example, I used to work for a company with about 500 employees (relatively large by German standards) and now work for a competing company in the same industry with less than 150 employees. The core engineering team only consists of a dozen engineers. The output is noticeably l…
I worked at a place that made a group of loosely-related websites. Basically different spins/themes on the same products. There were 4 of us on the development team. There were 10 websites. Some new, some in maintenance mode. I quit after a few years, and about 3-4 years later they went on a hiring spree. Tripled the number of developers. Refreshed some products, discontinued some, and some went into maintenance mode…
This is misleading. Likely, those 50 engineers were standing on the shoulders of the giants, i.e. those open source maintainers who build wonderful value for everyone out there.
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It’s comical that all of the replies to what you’ve written claim you’re wrong, because you’re actually 100% right. And this is even more true when you remember that the company had fewer than 20 people for a long time, and that there was only one real goal , that seems to be forgotten: they needed to clone BlackBerry Messenger and get it working on every platform possible. That was it. That’s all they needed to do,…
> I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man. Well, he had a point. What killed BB was the iPhone, not that their chat app was going to lose out to the competition. They simply had…
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It’s comical that all of the replies to what you’ve written claim you’re wrong, because you’re actually 100% right. And this is even more true when you remember that the company had fewer than 20 people for a long time, and that there was only one real goal , that seems to be forgotten: they needed to clone BlackBerry Messenger and get it working on every platform possible. That was it. That’s all they needed to do,…
> I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man. Well, he had a point. What killed BB was the iPhone, not that their chat app was going to lose out to the competition. They simply had…
BB and BBM are network effect. iPhone alone is not enough to disrupt the social-media aspect of BBM (which was very sticky at that time in quite a few countries).
WhatsApp + Android actually killed BB+BBM in those countries and not the expensive iPhone
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Ensuring user privacy _from you_ can be an effective defensive measure for small companies who cannot afford to mount a meaningful legal defense. "Here's all the data we have, officers. We don't have the keys. Good luck."
Again, how does this connect with why Whatsapp won as an app? Consumers didn't follow this logic. At all. They went for the convenient and free option. I'm so confused by this thread. It's like you guys are pasting the output of an ML model with only the input "secure" at me.
You talked about encryption on HN. What do you expect? Might as well have brought up gun control at a Republican rally.
(Not that you were anything but 100% right. The general public didn't care about encryption at all until the Snowden leaks.)
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> I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man. Well, he had a point. What killed BB was the iPhone, not that their chat app was going to lose out to the competition. They simply had…
People owned a BB because of its built-in message service.