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Company teams build for themselves
Two kinds of users
Picture an Instagram power user who uploads a post and collects a thousand likes, or ten thousand. A notification for each one would make the phone unusable, so Instagram made notifications for likes off by default, and people choose to turn them on.
A brand-new user sees it the other way around. The first like on the first photo ever uploaded is heartwarming and touching, and for roughly the first year, getting likes means a great deal. For that person, notifications belong on.
Why growth teams exist
The people working on Instagram are all power users of it, and the same pattern shows up at companies like Amazon and Airbnb. A growth team exists to keep in view the people who still need to be acquired and brought up to speed, and who need a different experience.
The split only matters at scale. In the early days a startup needs a passionate, retained core of users, and there is no gap between the two groups. Once a product reaches tens of millions of people, one team thinks about the marginal user getting onto the service while the rest of the company thinks about power users.
Why do product teams drift toward power users?
Teams that use their own product every day are doing what the industry calls dogfooding, a phrase tied to a 1988 internal Microsoft email by manager Paul Maritz. It catches bugs early, and it also means the people judging every change are the most experienced users the product has. Defaults carry real weight with everyone else: a 2003 study in Science by Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein found that countries where organ donation was the preset option had far higher consent rates than countries where people had to opt in.
Why does the first like feel so strong?
A 2016 brain imaging study led by Lauren Sherman, published in Psychological Science, found that teenagers viewing photos with many likes showed more activity in the brain's reward circuitry. Separately, neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz showed in experiments with monkeys that dopamine neurons respond most strongly to rewards that were not expected. As a reward becomes predictable, that response shrinks.
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