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Emily Sato
I joined Snap in 2017 as an associate product manager, six months after the IPO, during the period when everyone was convinced Instagram Stories would kill Snapchat. (It didn't. Snap's audience was younger, more loyal, and used the product differently than Instagram users. This was my first lesson in how surface-level competitive analysis can be completely wrong.)
I worked on Snap Map and then on Discover, the content platform. Discover taught me the fundamental tension in consumer social: users want content from their friends, algorithms want to show them content from creators, and the business model needs both to work simultaneously. Every social platform navigates this tension differently, and the navigation is the product strategy.
I left Snap for Meta in 2020, joining Instagram's product team. I worked on Reels during the period when Instagram was aggressively pivoting to short-form video. The internal conversations about this were more nuanced than the public narrative. It wasn't simply "copy TikTok." It was: our distribution model is graph-based (you see content from people you follow), TikTok's is interest-based (you see content an algorithm thinks you'll like). Shifting Instagram toward interest-based distribution meant fundamentally changing what the product was, and not everyone inside the company agreed that was the right move.
After Reels, I moved to the Threads launch team. Shipping a new social product inside Meta was a bizarre experience. We had the infrastructure of the largest social media company in the world and the urgency of a startup. We launched in July 2023, got 100M signups in five days, and then had to figure out what the product actually was. The launch was easy. Retention was the hard part. It's always the hard part.
I left Meta in late 2024 because I wanted to write about consumer social with the honesty that's impossible when you work at one of the platforms. Social media coverage is dominated by hot takes and moral panic. What's missing is the product analysis: why do some features drive retention and others don't? What does the engagement data actually say? How do recommendation algorithms shape culture, and how does culture shape the algorithms?
I'm based in Los Angeles. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, my mom is Japanese and my dad is from Oregon, and I spent a year in Tokyo after college. I surf in Malibu, I'm an amateur ceramicist, and I have a complicated relationship with screen time that I think is pretty common among people who build the products that consume everyone's attention.
Experience
- Product Manager, Meta (Instagram Reels, Threads)
- Product Manager, Snap (Snap Map, Discover)
- BA Cognitive Science, UC Berkeley