Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s biggest mistake in the early days

“One of the greatest lessons that I learned in starting and running Twitter — and starting and running Square — is how important it is to instrument all usage.”

Jack explains why product metrics are so important:

“For the first two years of Twitter’s life, we were flying blind. We had no idea what was going on with the network… with how people were using it. We were making guesses and basing everything on intuition, instead of having a good balance between intuition and data.”

Twitter’s product was also going down all the time because of it, commonly referred to as the “Fail Whale” incidents. The image, depicting a whale being lifted by birds, became a symbol of Twitter’s repeated service disruptions.

Jack didn’t make the same mistake twice when founding Square:

“The first thing I wrote for Square was an admin dashboard, and we have a very strong discipline within the company to log everything, measure everything, and test everything. We treat the dashboard, analytics, and data as a product — we call it the Inference Team. Their job is to instrument all usage and infer all action.”

Full video: Stanford “The Power of Curiosity and Inspiration“ (Feb 2011)