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It's November 5, 2022. You're acting Head of Product at Twitter. Elon Musk has been owner for 9 days. He's announced Twitter Blue at $8/month with verification included. Launch date: tomorrow.
You have one open question: should impersonation pre-checks happen before a user gets the blue check, or after?
Trust & Safety (now 90% laid off) says "after" will be a disaster. Engineering can build "before" in 3 weeks. Elon wants "after" — launch tomorrow.
You get to make the technical call. He told you so.
**Framework: irreversible platform decisions deserve reversible build cost.** A blue check next to an impersonator account is a damage class with no clean recall — once Eli Lilly is impersonated and the stock drops $20B, you cannot un-publish that screenshot. Three weeks of build to require impersonation pre-checks is the cheapest insurance Twitter could buy. WAIT was the right call. The actual launch on Nov 9 went "after" — within 48 hours, fake Eli Lilly, fake Lockheed, fake Tesla accounts moved markets.
Twitter Blue was pulled within 48 hours of launch (Nov 11, 2022) after Eli Lilly's stock dropped 4.4% on a fake "insulin is free" tweet. Relaunched in December with pre-checks.