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Mark Zuckerberg: Listen to Your Users to Find Problems. Treat Your Solutions as Hypotheses.

By Mark Zuckerberg · Product & Building · 1 min read

People were clicking through hundreds of profiles just to see what changed. That behavior told Zuckerberg what to build. First a profile update feed. Then News Feed. Each step learned from the last.

Key Points

Use data and qualitative feedback to identify problems — then use intuition for solutions
News Feed was years in the making — they watched how people used profiles and learned incrementally
Test hypotheses by rolling them out and getting more data. Learn incrementally.

Use data and qualitative feedback to tell you what problems to solve. Use intuition to figure out the solutions. Then test those hypotheses.

Watching Users Click

Zuckerberg: When we started, we didn't have anything like News Feed. We just had profiles. One of the big behaviors was people would just click around — hundreds of profiles — to see what people had changed. To see the update in their friend's day.

We learned from that. People were not just interested in looking up a person — they wanted to understand the day-to-day changes.

People clicked through hundreds of profiles just to see what changed. That told us what to build.

From Profiles to News Feed

Zuckerberg: First we made a product that showed in order which of your friends had updated their profile — so at least you knew whose profile to click on. Then the first version of News Feed was really simple — it took the content people were posting and put it in order on your homepage.

News Feed was a relatively big shift, but it actually had been a couple of years in the making — by watching how people were using the service.

News Feed was a couple of years in the making — by watching how people used the service.

Problems From Data, Solutions From Intuition

Zuckerberg: When things are working well, you use data and qualitative feedback from listening to how your community uses your product — to tell you what problems to solve. Then you use intuition to figure out what the solutions might be.

You test those hypotheses by rolling them out and getting more data and feedback. When stuff is working well, you're learning incrementally and growing that way.

Data tells you the problems. Intuition tells you the solutions. Then test the hypotheses.