October 26, 2010

is asking 'is [blank] a failure' on quora a failure?

Quora: where product people go to defend their products. Asked on Quora: Is Facebook Places a failure? This is obviously a dumb question (based on what objectives? on what metrics? on what time scale?), but only on Quora will the product manager for Places call you out for it being a dumb question.

No - but your question makes it difficult to answer anything else unless we've directly done something that caused 499M of our users to abandon the service, led to the exodus of all our key staff and caused the valuation of the company to plummet to single digits.

Touché. (And no, this wasn't my question.)