Kevin Celso Alvarado

UX advocate, testing guru, and product visionary.

[Michael McGuiness @mikemcg0]

Q: Does my startup need a growth team?

Mark Zuckerberg has said that one of the best things Facebook did was invent the idea of a growth team.

In the clip below, he elaborates on this further:

“Making it so that we could grow faster was the most important product feature we ended up building for Facebook. The traditional approach to growing and marketing is you have a communications group or marketing team and you buy ads. Sometimes there’s a place for that.. But if you’re actually trying to grow a product, the best levers for doing that are often within the product itself.”

He continues:

“There’s no magic in the group we’ve built here that other people can’t replicate. It’s just being very rigorous with data and investing in data infrastructure so that you can process different experiments and learn from what customer behavior is telling you.”

He cites Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature as an example of a critical product growth lever.

The key point here is that the best levers for growth are often within your product itself. Facebook’s growth team had a simple framework for growth focused on acquisition, activation, engagement, and virality. They then used this framework to prioritize design experiments and build products. Quickly iterating through these experiments and rigorously measuring what was working (and trying to understand why it was working), helped put the platform on the path to billions of users.

In terms of whether your startup needs a growth team though, the answer is probably not yet. Not because the function isn’t important, but because the whole startup should be the growth team. As Alex Schultz is CMO and VP of Analytics at Facebook puts it:

“If you’re a startup, you shouldn’t have a growth team. The whole company should be the growth team, and the CEO should be the head of growth.”

[Linus ✦ Ekenstam @LinusEkenstam]

This is unacceptable, should not be possible

Made possible by @_nonfigurativ_

[tldraw @tldraw]

let's go https://t.co/4dHJiLCegg

[Storybook @storybookjs]

Last week, we shared StorybookGPT – a GPT that automatically creates stories for React TS components.

Today, we bring you another incredible tool: Storybook Genie! It lets you automatically generate stories for React components via CLI 🤯

@_Eduard26 👏

https://t.co/U0kqkKVFp2

[Hakim El Hattab @hakimel]

Now that ChatGPT has vision and DALL·E in the same context it can generate avatars 😁

[patagucci perf papi @kenwheeler]

I’m so tired of hearing backend devs complain that front end devs aren’t real devs. Like what do you even do these days just manage the passwords for third party services and wear light jeans or?

[Hakim El Hattab @hakimel]

Motionscribe 0.9.0 is out with support for video and layouts 🎥

https://t.co/CjlmexbqX4

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

GPT generated this academic paper from a dataset in 30 minutes.

It may not be a blockbuster but it tests something kind of interesting in a sophisticated way - in short, it may be publishable, somewhere.

The text is prone to hallucinations, but the data analysis less so. 1/2

[Hakim El Hattab @hakimel]

Cypress makes me feel about 10x as confident in my work. Just look at those tests go 🥰

[Nathan Manousos @trafnar]

Figma acquisition shows how hard it is to turn money into software. You'd think for $20B you could build something as good as Figma yourself, but you can't. Software is art.

[ْ @reblmoon]

Oh my oh my noah aka will byers ATE this scene in stranger things #StrangerThings4

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

It's common to bring up how, after 11 years, Uber is *still* not profitable, though slowly getting to not make a loss. Lots of operations costs.

Learned that Atlassian - the one building JIRA - after 20 years, is still not profitable, despite being a digital business. 🤯

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

An interesting question is this:

What is more important? Engineers using the language as experts (e.g. best practices in the language), or engineers solving the business problems?

The answer to this hints at whether you are building more a platform, or more a product team.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

A summary of crypto that articulates most of my observations.

Many DeFi, “web3” and most NFTs is an insider’s playground to make rich profits through insider trading, rug pulls and wash trades; all of which have regulatory protections in … regulated markets.

None with crypto.

[Kevin Celso Alvarado @tstpleaseignore]

@muddi192 @eileendoodles @tobiasrogers Sometimes it’s better to have a notional roadmap and manage priorities according to data, rather than constantly be reactive to short term optimizations. Visions can take time to execute.

[Tikhon Jelvis @tikhonjelvis]

Pausing deployments won't help you avoid incidents over the holidays, so pause monitoring instead.

[Storybook @storybookjs]

Sneak peek of Component Encyclopedia!

We scoured the web for OSS UI components and put them in 1 place for you to reference while building your UIs.

https://t.co/cI1IFGz7cA

🌎 Browse 1000s of UI components
🔍 Search across projects
▶️ Play with live UI implementation

[Noah Pepper @noahmp]

The best habit I've learned working at Stripe is the reflex to always write a short document (or ask someone to write a doc) to contemplate any major decision.

Nothing brings clarity like writing.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Recipe:

1. Write an essay.

2. Explain to a friend what you said in it.

3. Go back and rewrite it to say what you just said to your friend.

[Alexander Trefonas @a3voices]

@paulg Recipe:

Create a product
Explain to the users what it does
Go back and change it to do what you just said