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Twitter Lesson: PMF Survives Dysfunction, "Complexity" Masks Leadership Avoidance

Two related lessons Tom draws from his time at Twitter:

1. Strong product-market fit can survive severe organizational dysfunction — the product kept working for users even while the org around it struggled.
2. Problems that get labeled "complex" are frequently just weak leadership avoiding a decision. Example: years of internal indecision over whether to change the 140-character limit — not because the tradeoffs were genuinely intractable, but because no one with authority was willing to make the call.

Related: Garbage Can Theory (of Organizational Decision-Making), Strategy 'Keeps Changing' as a Clarification-and-Buy-In Failure.

"Systems Beget Systems" (Verrilli)

Tom Verrilli extends the leadership-avoidance diagnosis from the Twitter anecdote into a general claim about process itself: heavy alignment machinery isn't a necessary consequence of scale, it's a symptom of management being unable to see what's actually happening in the org — and once that opacity exists, "systems beget systems," each new layer of process compensating for the last one's blind spots rather than fixing the underlying visibility problem.

Quote: "most of the time you hear it's really complex. It isn't. Leadership's just weak."

Из тем: Growth, PMF, and Business Model Design