I think roughly the same about the provocative terrorists/someone might die part of the quoted memo, but the same argument completely fails to make sense for the other part, where he lists all those questionable things they do for growth and calls them ok (because they are less bad than terrorism? Seriously?)
A phone company analogy would be pretending that cancellation letters never arrived to get another 24 months from a leaving customer, or getting some call center agent to tease out a statement from the customer that could be mistaken for a revokation of the cancellation (they tried to pull that on me once and did not even speak to me, apparently some random flatmate on the phone was considered good enough to mark that checkbox)
This is cut and paste from my other comment below, but my interpretation is kinder (maybe too kind?):
>That’s why all the work we do in growth
I'm not reading that as "anything we do for growth is justified". It's "everything we do in growth", as in all the tactics we currently use in our departments focused on growth, are justified.
This is like "everything we do in sales is kosher". It's admitting you do some abrasive things, but it's stuff that's justified.
Does it sound gross? Yes. Is it true for most companies? Yes. These are uncomfortable truths, companies make sites imperfect to optimize for ad revenue, do extensive A/B testing to see how they can influence behavior, go as far as sending you 20 email drip campaigns or bombard you with notifications to wear you down into using their products, these are all growth tactics that get used by not-evil companies.
To me, the dumbest part of this is that someone would write this all down, and be proud of it. So proud they'd make it a memo and send it company-wide.
This is the silent shame of the tech world. We're forced to modify our most harmless ideas to make a successful product in the real world where even having the best product ever won't guarantee success without tons of marketing using ad campaigns driven by ill-gotten analytics data.
That's what "Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here." is saying.
> I'm not reading that as "anything we do for growth is justified".
Maybe I interpretation was a little eager see scandal.
> To me, the dumbest part of this is that someone would write this all down, and be proud of it.
...and that is pretty much exactly what I wanted to add after reading the first part. It's a bit like the difference between someone who occasionally cheats on his partner but is ashamed of it and someone who cheats on his partner and then brags about it, calling everybody a loser who doesn't.
Dirty little secrets are much more bearable if they stay dirty little secrets. Once they go from secret to pride, they will quickly lose the "little" qualifier and you end up like Uber (who seem to have an infinite supply of dirty secrets to get discovered, but the general attitude was never hidden).
A phone company analogy would be pretending that cancellation letters never arrived to get another 24 months from a leaving customer, or getting some call center agent to tease out a statement from the customer that could be mistaken for a revokation of the cancellation (they tried to pull that on me once and did not even speak to me, apparently some random flatmate on the phone was considered good enough to mark that checkbox)