Watching Nolan Like a Product Person

Nolan gets three hours and a paid ticket. Your onboarding gets six seconds and one bar of network.

I watched The Odyssey on its opening weekend last month, all two hours and fifty-two minutes of it, in a hall that stayed full till the last credit. Somewhere in the second hour the man in row F leaned over and whispered a question to his friend, who shrugged and kept eating popcorn. It sent me straight back to a Tenet screening years ago, when a different man in a different row leaned over at the forty-minute mark and asked, “Yaar, who is going backwards now?” Both pairs stayed to the end and argued in the parking lot. Sitting there, I thought that no product I have worked on would survive that level of confusion. If a user on our app whispered “what is happening” at the forty-second mark, Amplitude would show a drop-off, and someone would open a Jira ticket by Monday.

There are two seats in every one of these notes. One is the man in row F, who paid for a ticket, sat in the dark with a friend, and gave Nolan three hours of attention he could not easily take back. The other is the person in the metro, standing, one bar of network, phone in one hand and a pole in the other, opening your app because a bank SMS told them to. Every note I take in a Nolan screening ends up being about the…