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Ads and discovery under one owner
The impression war
Every placement raised the same questions. Where do ads go in the feed? What does that do to discovery metrics, and what does it do to ad dollars? The two teams were always at war for impressions.
One owner for both
One of the first things Tom Verrilli did after joining Twitch was put ads inside discovery and make one PM accountable for both. Organic placement and paid placement feed the same goal, so that person makes the trade-off between them directly.
Months of back and forth disappeared, along with the politics that turn a company-first decision into a career-first one. Put the same person across several things, and they tend to align those things on their own.
The same logic at Whatnot
The same logic runs through Whatnot's product org today. Leaders stay hands-on so they see more of the board, and someone who knows both how to handle sellers who ship slowly and how powerful discovery is can make the right call on tuning the discovery algorithm.
Why does every ad slot cost the feed something?
A feed has a fixed number of positions on each screen. An ad placed in one is a slot that an organic item can no longer fill, so ad revenue rises while engagement with the organic content can fall. Feed teams track this trade-off as ad load, the share of feed items that are ads. Because the two numbers pull against each other, teams that own only one of them tend to argue for more space.
Why do org charts shape the products people ship?
In 1968 the programmer Melvin Conway argued that organizations design systems that copy their own communication structures. If two teams own two halves of one feed, the feed tends to show a seam between their goals. That observation became known as Conway's law. Software researchers have since cited it widely as an explanation for why product boundaries so often match team boundaries.
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