Move Fast #5: Great artists steal. Winning product teams copy

Many teams hesitate to copy competitors or industry best practices. In an environment where innovation and creativity are valued, copying feels like cheating.

In most forms of racing, competitors will draft behind the leader, conserving energy while letting the leader deal with the headwind. Then, at the right moment, the drafting racer will slingshot past using their reserved energy. Winning product teams do something similar - they ruthlessly copy undifferentiated features from competitors and best practices, drafting off the leaders. This lets them conserve resources to focus creative efforts on the features that will allow them to slingshot past the competition by delivering unique value.

For example, Snapchat pioneered the "stories" format, allowing users to post videos that disappear after 24 hours. When Instagram launched its "Instagram Stories" feature three years later, it was a nearly identical copy in function and name. Meta executives were completely unapologetic for what many saw as plagiarizing Snapchat's innovation. Instagram stories surpassed Snapchat stories within a year, and today Instagram has three times as many MAUs as Snapchat.

Reinventing every feature is a surefire way to slow down your velocity. Don’t reinvent your lead gen page, don’t create a new way to adjust settings, and don’t rebuild basic navigational paradigms. Sure, Snap created an entirely new interface - but is the novel navigation paradigm your competitive differentiator? If not, copy the established standard and move on to the things that truly make your product great.

Resist the temptation to make minor improvements as you copy commodity features. Though tweaks may seem like easy wins, they are usually predominantly a coping mechanism for teams to deal with the discomfort of copying. Any deviation is added effort for unlikely gains: The industry has already iterated basic features to a highly effective form with a high degree of user familiarity. 

Copying should extend beyond what's visible. A lot of application logic can be inferred and should be copied as well. On multiple occasions, I’ve seen teams build notification timing and rules from scratch when observing best-in-class apps would have allowed them to establish rough heuristics, building complicated timezone logic when they could simply have timed notifications at the same time as the last app open.

Lack of product leadership exacerbates the problem. Post-it note brainstorming has become routine rituals for big tech product leaders to secure organizational buy-in rather than spawn creative ideas. Gathering teams to ideate and cluster colorful stickies rapidly is fun and engaging. But without this ceremony, many leaders lack the tools to align and unify stakeholders. Once groups participate in these sessions, momentum overrides practicality - it becomes difficult to copy a proven idea instead of reinventing concepts, even if duplication would yield better outcomes.

Determine what elements must be innovative - focus your creative energy on those - and celebrate teams that copy everything else.

This is the 5th installment on moving fast; make sure to check out the previous posts: Treat your engineers as adults, Set deadlines, even if you have to make them up, Ask for weekly updates, Eliminate unnecessary A/B testing