One of the truly first "wowza" / "light-bulb" moments I had about how Tech companies operate was on my first team here at LinkedIn - we were working to make LinkedIn a better place for hourly & frontline workers
As part of that mission, we'd test new features tailored to the needs of hourly workers (ex: highlighting hourly wages instead of yearly salaries on jobs):
- But we obviously couldn't just dramatically change how LinkedIn looked like every week (users would hate that)
- And how do we know what changes to keep / which ones to prioritize?
I was introduced to how Tech companies experiment - how hundreds, if not thousands, of experiments are conducted at small scales (ex: 1% of all FB members) to measure their impact --> the best of which are kept and introduced at large!
The light-bulb moment: there is no 1 Meta / Netflix / Spotify experience...
Every app on your phone likely has a ton of experiments being run on at it at this very moment! Your XYZ app is (at least slightly) different than the one on your friend's phone. Tech companies (and their surface areas like websites) are analogous to a science lab - hypothesize, experiment, analyze, learn, repeat.
