Meta, Twitter and the Launch of Threads

By Adebayo Komolafe

Meta recently launched Threads and reached 100M organic users in 5 days. The launch left trails of product management lessons here and there.

I have penned a few of mine here:

1. Use your GTM Leverage – Instagram was Threads’ GTM leverage. You don’t necessarily need to start from ground zero if you have an advantage. Effectively wear your advantage. I also loved how the team linked Threads to Instagram. It shows that the team knows that Instagram is their Trojan Horse and links to the burgeoning Gen Z market. If it helped them fight TikTok with Reels and helped them compete Snap with Stories, it might as well help them in the text-based Social business.

2. Design is Everything – A quick look at Threads shows that it has a very neat design. No clutter. The app is intuitive, sticky and easy to navigate. It shows that the Meta team had learnt loads of lessons from their previous failures. Don’t be fooled by this simplicity, though. Behind every simplicity lies a heavy amount of complexity.

3. Build an MVP – You have no reason to prove to anyone that you are an engineering wiz. Products are built on the journey, not from the start. So don’t overburden your product with so many features. There is research that says that users often use just 30% of product features. So focus on what the user needs now and expand gradually.

4. Hire the Best Hands – Word has it that Mark Zuckerberg literally hired the Twitter veterans that were recently laid off. Although there are legal issues around this already between Musk and Zuck, the morale of the story is that the best people create the best products.

5. Trademark Everything – It is the dream of every founder/product manager that their product becomes a phenomenon. There are few times in product history when a brand/product becomes an integral part of the culture. Twitter attained that successfully. In your product journey prepare and look out for these moments and make sure you trademark all the product lingos that come along. In this instance, we see that Threads is basically a steal from Twitter’s language registers. So firm up and trademark your sweat!

6. Don’t be like Bluesky – When Jack Dorsey left Twitter and built Bluesky, it made news, but I think Blusesky made the huge mistake of making everyone wait. That was so unnerving. Social media feels like sugar, people want it now, or they don’t want it at all. 100% access and 100% ease of access is the first pre-requisite for product success. Even if the product is mid, access shouldn’t be something users have to bargain for. Besides, even if the Bluesky product is actually mid, you get negative feedback and bad PR, and PR, good or bad, is PR anyway… I feel Clubhouse missed it here too. In essence, the sauce that made Jack win over Clubhouse while he was at Twitter made him lose the shine to Threads because he never implemented that same strategy with Bluesky.