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IGTV was a huge flop, and Reels followed it. Reels began with some wrong assumptions and a few constraints the team held onto. They learned that quickly, decided to change those constraints, and redid the product.
Flops were common at Instagram, and the team moved on quickly. Ian Silber, who worked on IGTV, has seen the same pattern many times: sometimes a thing is wrong, and the only way through is to put it in the world, get the feedback, and iterate. Plenty of things he shipped did not work out, and plenty did.
How the team reacts after shipping matters most: fixing forward and continuing to iterate and listen to users. Seeing that again and again has hardened him to critique and feedback.
How did Reels differ from IGTV?
IGTV launched in June 2018 as a separate app for vertical videos that could run up to an hour. Reels launched in 2020 inside the main Instagram app as short vertical clips with music and editing tools, in a format close to TikTok's. Instagram folded IGTV into its general video offering in 2021. The standalone IGTV app was shut down in 2022.
Why does shipping early produce better feedback?
Eric Ries popularized the minimum viable product in his 2011 book The Lean Startup, meaning the smallest version of a product that can teach a team something. Real users reveal behavior that internal discussion cannot predict. Ries described a build, measure, and learn cycle in which each release is an experiment. The approach grew out of lean manufacturing methods developed at Toyota.
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