The Middle of the Road: Growing with Ambiguity

Meeting our client for the first time was the moment that crystallized their visions of scaling the social media platform. The client envisions the platform to be a space where individuals and communities share their commitments, actions, opinions, events, quick snapshots and whatnot. The underlying challenge with having a grand vision for the social media platform is that it leaves potential pathways and approaches completely open-ended. As our client did not have a pre-defined work scope for the project, our first task became devising an actionable work scope for the client. 

The ambiguous nature of our project tested our team in so many ways as we strove to put forward a workable scope for the limited time we had for the project. Starting from a very broad and huge vision required thorough understanding of the client in terms of their short-term and long-term aspirations. I feel like each of us interpreted the vision of using technology as a force for good in our own way based on our own backgrounds and experiences, which ranged from developing functionality and usability of the platform to instigating social change amongst the youth. What’s more, our client wanting short-term immediate actions while presenting long-term broad visions threw us into chaos in terms of pinpointing what the client actually desires. Based on our first discussion with the client and our own divergent interpretations of their visions, we came up with two distinct workstreams that the client could choose from: short-term expansion of the current platform versus long-term provision of youth training programs. Hailing from management consulting and finance background, I preferred the first option because, most importantly, the client must have approached us with a clear problem even though they were cautious not to come off as too forthcoming in the kick-off meeting, and secondly it is always better to pursue clearly achievable and tangible goals that are certain to bring outcomes in the short-term rather than exerting efforts into goals that are based on speculations and assumptions that are not only unverified with the client but also uncertain in terms of results and continuity after the end of the project. 

Our team proposed both workstreams to the client in our second meeting for scoping finalization. They expressed their position to prioritize short-term results of increasing user numbers on the platform, claiming that they need to have user numbers to start with rather than have strategies and actions to make users to stick around. As I studied the matter further, this turned out to be a clear dilemma with scaling any social media platform. To build a social media network, one needs to solve the chicken and egg problem continuously over a long period, so that the platform would be able to breed organic growth. It means that the central value of a social media platform is its users. For initial users, there are nothing to gain from the platform, which obviously hampers further growth. Thus, scaling a social media platform has inherently structural problems that need to be overcome with carefully designed strategies to enable organic and exponential growth where the network itself becomes its own asset. That’s also what the client does not seem to understand very well, and that’s why I proposed B2C solutions in our pitch deck as a way of overcoming this problem in the short and medium-term and to offer value to users on the platform who cannot benefit from initial social network effects and thus will not be incentivized to come back. In my opinion, the idea of enabling organic growth is hardly achievable on its own without involving businesses and integrating commercial aspects (B2C) into the infrastructure underlying the C2C interface. Moreover, the social media market is already moving away from a web-based network to a fast-paced video content-driven mobile apps such as TikTok and Instagram. The social media giants are already struggling to keep their user numbers steady as technology is advancing fast and social interests of young people are evolving dynamically every day. Thus, the social and business milieu the client is playing in is already very shaky and risky, and I believe that they understand this as well. 

The fact that the client is still exploring the possibilities and testing boundaries makes it challenging to deliver concrete results and tangible values. To achieve meaningful contributions and long-term impacts, each step towards translation of the whole vision needs to be clearly defined, and each step needs to be broken down into small achievable goals and targets. There are myriad trajectories and approaches that we can take to populate and popularize the social media platform that would yield varying degrees of results, and it is a continuous iteration process rather than “one-size-fits-all” approach that will solve the problem of scaling a social media platform. Hence, as I reflect to myself, I wish the client was slightly more specific about their potential pathways and end goals so that they would have been able to maximize our team’s contribution in a more meaningful way. As our team moves forward with working out differences in opinions, values, interests and aspirations, which is obviously a short-term challenge for any team work, what the clients wants to end up with is clearly open to them.