A few years ago Chris Cox recommended I watch “The Story of Film,” a documentary on the history of filmmaking. It is fun to remember that only ~100 years ago, film was a new medium. It took generations of film makers to learn how to use it effectively in a process that is ongoing. In the beginning, movies were just plays and radio programs put on film. It would take years to invent something as simple as the smash cut.

In a recent conversation with film maker James Cameron he posited an interesting perspective on this journey: the process of experimentation film makers were embarking on wasn’t so much inventing how to tell stories, as it was discovering the ways in which audiences are more (or less) inclined to engage in stories. The experiments that worked represented film makers using their own instincts to find something deeply resonant to a larger number of people. Having seen and even felt the success of each of those successful experiments, more filmmakers copied it and tried new things in addition and the language of film got richer and deeper. So rather than seeing the smash cut as an innovation in storytelling, we might also see it as a discovery about how audiences understand stories.

As a consumer I sometimes use a new product and feel delighted that it works exactly how I want it to. That is the feeling of being on the same wavelength as the designer and, perhaps more likely, with a broad enough subset of the population to be a commercially viable target. To that end I also know the discordant feeling I have when a product doesn’t match the mental model I had of how it should function.

Humans aren’t uniform and I suspect our receptiveness to storytelling is more universal across our population than our natural inclination to any given tool, so I don’t mean to suggest all products have a platonic ideal we are yet to discover. I also think context changes constantly so even within areas of highly consistent preference there is a moving target. And of course there is a path dependence that prevents some avenues of exploration entirely, which could be more fruitful arms of discovery, such as if film had come in different formats with different chemistry and speeds early on.

Still, I find it useful to think of product development as more akin to archaeology or cartography than chemistry or math. This is a good interpretation of what people mean when they say making great products “is more art than science.”

Now obviously the work itself is scientific. New technologies need to be rigorously studied and understood to be built effectively. And those technologies create new capabilities, perhaps entirely novel in the world. But in the end the capabilities are used to explore consumer preferences.

I do think you can bring some formality to the process to make it a bit more scientific though. Years ago a colleague of mine named Justin Shaffer wrote a great post internally about why people posted on the internet at all. He talked about the bid for connection it represented, the social credit people get for being the one to introduce great content to their friends, and the way content created a platform for conversation. I still think of that report often and find it as useful now in the group chat era as I did at any point previous.

A few years later Kevin Systrom introduced us to Clayton Christensen’s “Jobs to be Done” framework, another tool that aims to help teams understand more formally what need they are serving for their customers so that they might better serve it. Today my team uses “User Journeys” to make sure our products have a focused point of view on who is using our products, what problems they have, and how our product is going to help them.

I have said many times that the biggest misconception people have about Meta is that we create the social trends observed on our platform. But in my lived experience that reverses causality. The trends exist in society and we are simply discovering them so that we can serve people better.