A rich man and his iPhone
That which can't be measured...probably needs to be better managed.
Of all of the iPhone’s accomplishments, one of the most remarkable is that it put the same exact piece of technology into the pockets of people in every strata of society.
In nearly every aspect of their lives, the extraordinarily wealthy exist in a different universe than the rest of us. They live in neighborhoods we can’t enter and on islands we can’t reach. They fly on separate airplanes, land at separate terminals, and always get the window seat. They wear clothes we can’t shop for, eat food we can’t order, and go to parties we can’t get into. To step out of a normal life—or even a normally wealthy one—into that of a billionaire is, I suspect, to teleport to a different planet—almost literally.
Except, oddly enough, when it comes to the place where we spend most of our time: In our phones. Wall Street bankers use iPhones; retired mechanics in Modesto use iPhones; teenagers in Tallahassee use iPhones. Gadget-obsessed techies, grunge guitarists, college baristas, park rangers living on the edge of civilization, professional athletes, and members of Congress use iPhones.1 And a man personally worth more than all but twenty five companies on the S&P 500 casually texts about about very different things than the rest of us—but does it from an iPhone.
This is an astonishing feat. For better or for worse, our phones have become one of our most important possessions. And no matter how rich you are, you can’t get a better one than the one I can get at the Cricket Wireless on the corner. Elon Musk, rocketeer, technological messiah, Iron Man incarnate, can’t buy a better phone than a suburban middle schooler.2
Though there's a long list of reasons why the iPhone was so successful, its egalitarian experience is somewhere on it. Steve Jobs used the same phone that we did, likely got frustrated by the same limitations, and delighted in the same bits of magic. His legendary “product sense” may not have come from a clairvoyant perception of what his customers wanted, but a keen sense of what he wanted. Because on an iPhone, chances are what he wanted is what we wanted, too.
Twitter is the exact opposite.
On any social media platform—and on Twitter in particular—none of us use the same product. Our experiences are unique to who we follow, how prominent we are, and, sadly, who we are and what we look like. Twitter with a few hundred followers is very different than with a few thousand followers—and both are very different than the Twitter that people with tens and hundreds of thousands of followers experience. As a white man, no matter how many followers I do or don’t have, Twitter also ships me a different version than the one women, people of color, and people who identify as L.G.B.T.Q. are allowed to download.
This presents an enormous challenge for even the most well-intentioned leaders at Twitter. A Jobsian eye for product isn’t enough. To build Twitter is to build, in effect, thousands of different products, many of which one person can never use. I can’t use the version that BTS uses, in which I’m inundated with thousands of adoring notifications. A well-paid product manager can’t use the version that politically marginalized groups use to organize and hold powerful people to account. And Jack Dorsey can’t use the version that tries to grind you into oblivion, with no recourse but to scream into the void.3 Worse still, unless we look and listen carefully, we may not even see that these versions of Twitter exist. In contrast to the iPhone, Twitter is remarkable in its experiential inequality.
Building and supporting a product like this doesn’t require intuition—it requires humility. It requires asking today’s tech industry, which has a history of building products for their creators and cultures for their founders, to reach well beyond their own experiences. It requires understanding how other people feel when they use something, even if that feeling is inaccessible and unquantifiable.
This is particularly difficult in “data-driven” corporate OKR cultures, which are often full of punchy platitudes that tell us measurable things are real—and smugly imply that unmeasurable things aren’t. But emotions and lived experiences are as equally factual as dashboards and product logs. We don’t have to use numbers to be rational.
For those of us who work in data, there’s a brief lesson here. If and when people go looking to understand the experiences of others, they often ask to “see the data.” They want to know, empirically, if the stories are real, or if they’re “statistically significant.” Uncover ideas with anecdotes, the pattern goes, and comfortably verify—or try to reject—them with data.
We shouldn’t offer ourselves this out. No matter how clever our analysis, and how precise our figures, the multitudes of experiences people have when using a product like Twitter can’t be captured in spreadsheets any more than reading Oliver Twist can teach us how it feels to be an orphan. It must be felt, up close. With some products—a dying phone battery, a crashing app, a Tesla that drives itself through red lights—we can feel it for ourselves. But for others, like Twitter, we have to seek it out. We have to accept the humbling fact that our feelings are not enough, and the discomforting fact that our data won’t save us from having to endure those of others.
The good news is that, like the iPhone, we’re all working with the same emotions, no matter how rich and petty we are.
Some clowns, however, do not use iPhones.
There’s something deeply satisfying about this.
Yes, people like Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk get harassed too. But doxxed women have a history of being attacked by harassers. I’m betting Elon Musk isn’t actually worried about his private jet getting cannoned down by some internet goon.