"Growth teams should first focus on understanding (data, activation metrics) before building"
Evidence from the Archive
YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart
YouTube: started at 60% execution/40% understand, shifted to 85%/15% as understanding deepened
Instagram growth teams: 15 teams running 12-20 experiments/quarter with 60-70% positive/shippable rate, driven by understand work
Early growth PM at Facebook (responsible for friend-making), Head of Growth at Instagram (scaled to 1B+ users), VP of Product at Instacart. Now Director of Product Management at YouTube. Growth advisor to Twitter and others. Their core argument: Growth teams should spend their first period on 'understand work' -- instrumenting data and identifying what actually drives retention -- before building anything.
The evidence is specific: Instagram growth teams: 15 teams running 12-20 experiments/quarter with 60-70% positive/shippable rate, driven by understand work. Furthermore, youTube: started at 60% execution/40% understand, shifted to 85%/15% as understanding deepened. YouTube live experience: instead of iterating the current product, the team first mapped the entire funnel to understand where the real gaps were.
In Bangaly Kaba's own words: "What I call the anti-pattern of what we want to do. Someone says, 'Hey, you know what? This would be great to build.' And you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. Call that identify, justify, execute. First you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So understand, identify, execute." (Introducing the understand-identify-execute framework as the antidote to building on assumptions.)