Countdown: How a Simple List Can Transform Your Product

Addressing User Issues with Empathy

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Countdown is an early Facebook tradition that Andrew Bosworth and Mike Schroepfer started over a decade ago. Teams create a list of major people-facing issues and work together to burn them down. These are often issues that would otherwise go ignored, because they don’t move metrics directly. 

As Boz shared with me about the tradition’s roots, “I read about this approach the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has. Someone asked what the most effective regulation for protecting the environment had been, and they said it wasn’t a regulation at all, but rather their decision to publish a list of top polluters. Nobody wanted to be on that list, so it created really good incentives to clean up."

By December of 2018, Facebook Marketplace was growing rapidly. Our stats were strong, but we struggled to ship meaningful features focused on quality, since they were not strictly aligned to the metrics. That was when we decided to revive Countdown on Marketplace, and the impact was significant.

The Countdown list is completely non-metrics driven. Instead, it’s sourced by a cross-functional team of Research, Design, Product Operations, and Product Marketing. They gather feedback from people who use our products and surface the biggest pain points for our team to work on. This work is not done to move a specific metric, but rather to think deeply about experiences that need addressing. Teams self-select to own various items and sign up for Countdown as part of their roadmap for the next six months. While most Countdown issues can be addressed in a few days or weeks, some can take longer than the full half-year, depending on their complexity. 

The goal of a Countdown is not to create a comprehensive list of consumer problems. Rather, it is to ensure we capture important consumer-facing issues and continue to improve the experience on an ongoing basis.