Below are two quotes from The Facebook Effect (p 54). One thing that Mark Zuckerberg can attribute to much of Facebook’s success other than a well engineered product and a great idea is a clear vision. As I am learning from David Kirkpatrick’s book and my personal experience as an active Facebook user is the importance of a clear vision when beginning to develop a product.
When you understand your users (consumers, readers, viewers, etc) and know what exactly you are trying to do, everything must be so much easier. It must be so much easier to know when to stay no, when to drop features, when to change the course of action. For “Zuck”, Facebook always has and still is about connecting people, plain and simple.
As I begin two HCI projects, one related to sharing content and the other about social connectivity and news, defining, it’s nice to have a reminder to maintain a clear vision about what I want to do.
“A couple of Google executives came over to see if there might be a way to work with or even buy Thefacebook. Even at this early date, Google was well aware that something noteworthy was going on in Palo Alto. Zuckerberg and Parker were leery, though because of the risk of becoming subsumed by Silicon Valley’s Internet giant was real. If they wanted to do their own thing, they had to stay independent, they believed. Anyway, what they were trying to do was very different from what Google did. Their site was about people; Google was about data.
“Really great leadership, says Parker, “especially in a start-up, is about knowing when to say no–evoking a vision very clearly, getting everybody excited about it, but knowing where to draw the line, especially with products. You can’t do everything. And that’s a lesson Mark didn’t know yet. That’s a lesson Mark learned.”