Tango · Head of Design and Product · 2014–2018
The last product I shipped end to end with my own hands.
Tango had lost the messaging war and survived on ads. I made the case that its real strength was live video, and then designed and ran the product that proved it. Revenue grew about 10x in a year.
- Role
- Head of Design and Product, promoted from Principal Designer; reporting to the President
- Hands
- 100% hands-on: product strategy, UX, UI and the roadmap, personally
- Period
- 2014–2018
- Company
- Consumer messaging, games and video; tens of millions of daily users on iOS and Android
Contents
Starting point
A product of happenstance.
Tango launched a video-chat app the same month Apple shipped the first iPhone with a front-facing camera, and got a million downloads in its first week. Alibaba put in $350M to make it the American WeChat. Then it lost the chat war to WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram, and settled into life as an ad-supported free video-chat app on very solid video technology.
The fight it lost
Messaging was a war of distribution, and Tango didn’t have it.
Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp had the graph. Tango had the better video stack and a loyal, global, cross-platform audience that nobody was monetizing.
Two products
I led both of Tango’s products.
The core app, which became Tango Live, and a VR + mobile live co-gameplay product built from zero, which IMVU acquired. Both were mine to design and run.
The analysis
The core strength was live video. So build on that.
Tango had been the first cross-platform app that let anyone video-chat regardless of phone or OS. Video broadcasting apps were taking off in China, and Twitch had shown that audiences would pay performers directly. Put those together: one-to-many live video, with real-money gifting inside the app.
Core strength
Not a messenger. A video company.
The analysis started from what Tango was actually good at, not from what it had been trying to be. Cross-platform live video at scale was the asset.
The model
China for the format. Twitch for the money.
Broadcasting apps were blowing up in China; Twitch proved real-money gifting in the West. The proposal, pitched to the President, was to expand from 1-to-1 to 1-to-many with in-app purchases and gifting.
Asset
Cross-platform live video with a global daily audience.
Format
One-to-many broadcasting, as proven in China.
Monetization
Real-money gifting from viewers to broadcasters, as proven by Twitch.
The product · my hands
It launched in a ••• menu. Customers found it anyway.
Live video shipped tucked into the "more" menu. It blew up regardless, so I re-architected the app to put three of its five primary tabs on Live: broadcast, discover and the gifting economy around them.
Product strategy, UX, UI and roadmap: me, hands-on. Shown: the broadcast view and the discovery grid, as shipped.
A broadcast, a gift, and a grid that finds the next one.
Viewer count and gifts on the stream, chat and a leaderboard over it, Popular and New in the grid. The consumer polish still holds up a decade on; the aspect ratios don’t.
Outcome
From loss-making to a real business, in about a year.
Revenue grew roughly 10x in the year after Live launched. Live became the business, and the company’s architecture, roadmap and brand followed it.
Find the thing the company is actually good at. Then build the business on it.
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