A former Instagram product manager breaks down the company’s 2 key characteristics and how they could help or hurt its Twitter competitor

• Instagram is getting ready to launch a new standalone app that competes with Twitter.
• Insider spoke with a former Instagram product manager to better understand the platform’s decisions.
• Here’s why this ex-Instagram staffer is skeptical that a new app could save Instagram.

Instagram, as a platform and a company, is an enigma to many.

But Eric Wei — a former Instagram product manager from 2017 to 2019, and cofounder of creator fintech startup Karat — has spent years decoding it. Wei told Insider he worked on products like IG Live and business and creator accounts during his tenure at Instagram.

When it comes down to understanding how Instagram operates, Wei boiled down the platform’s behavior to two key characteristics:

1. “Instagram is all about building with conviction,” Wei said. While Facebook tests and, famously, likes to “move fast and break things,” Instagram is a bit more streamlined and has been since its original founders built the platform, Wei told Insider. Instagram is less likely to rush a test or product rollout, Wei added.
2. User experience is Instagram’s first and foremost focus — more so than creators, public figures, or businesses, Wei said. “At Instagram, the focus on creators was only insofar as they could help bring users,” he said. “Whenever we built things for businesses or famous people at the time, it was like, okay, but how does this improve the base experience for regular people?” Soon after Wei left Instagram, the platform began focusing more on creators — and Wei left to start his own creator-focused startup.

Now, Instagram is getting geared up to launch an entirely new app to compete with the likes of other text-based apps like Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon. A recent report by The Verge revealed that the app could be named “Threads,” noteworthy given that the platform had already launched a separate messaging app by the same name in 2019 and shut down in 2021.

As a former Instagram staffer and creator-economy expert, Wei is eyeing Instagram’s moves here.

“Creators [and] people really like to communicate with each other via text,” Wei said, and with Twitter’s recent changes, “there’s room for another” competitor.

So, what can Instagram’s past tell us about the potential of its upcoming app?

Remember IGTV?

IGTV, Instagram’s big play to compete against YouTube with a long-form video format, is a good case study for this. IGTV, which launched in 2018 with its own separate app, was sunset in 2022 and its app is now defunct.

At the time IGTV launched, creators didn’t have many other options to share long-form video content outside of YouTube or Facebook. To amplify the feature, Instagram’s creator partnerships team was tasked with scouting and onboarding celebrity and influencer talent. Sound like a familiar tactic? According to The Verge, Instagram is reportedly tapping celebrities like Oprah for its new Twitter clone.

But when it came to getting creators to use IGTV, some faced challenges migrating their long-form content from YouTube to Instagram, Wei said, noting the irony of the social-media-content ecosystem we have today where creators cross-post content everywhere.

“On the one hand, it kind of was on the mark,” Wei said about IGTV. “It predated the TikTok blowup.”

Instagram’s original cofounder, Kevin Systrom, “saw this change coming,” Wei said. But Instagram’s ethos was its own downfall when it came to rolling out the IGTV product and separate app.

There is a danger when following strong convictions, Wei said.

“Sometimes your conviction is just wrong,” he said. “IGTV was long-form, vertical, mobile. The mobile part was right. The vertical part was right. The long-form part was wrong.”

Instagram has ‘never made the separate app work’

While apps like IGTV, Threads, or Direct have been killed, some apps from Instagram have seen modest success, such as Boomerang and Layout, both content creation apps that launched in 2015. These latter apps have also been integrated into the Instagram app.

Wei is skeptical, however, that another standalone app under the Instagram umbrella will thrive on its own.

“We’ve never made the separate app work,” Wei said. 

The only other alternative, then, is adding a Twitter-like feed to the main Instagram app.

But “Instagram is really too complicated right now,” Wei said. That’s something even the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri alluded to when making changes to the app’s navigation earlier this year.

This is a conundrum many social-media apps find themselves in, Wei said. To remain competitive in social media, apps are pressured to “keep bolting on” new features to compete with rivals; and in order to utilize the network effect that made an app great in the first place, building on top of a successful app is an obvious path forward. This has led some apps to chase becoming a “super app,” which others have noted as a setback for Meta-owned Instagram. Apps that try to become a super app often wind up “cluttered,” Wei said.

“It’s almost this predetermined life cycle of a social consumer app,” Wei said, adding that Facebook has already gone though this phase. “I think Instagram is going through it now.”

Wei sees Instagram’s latest play then as a “Hail Mary” — if Instagram can’t keep “stuffing things” into its app, the only option is to start anew.