Here's How LinkedIn Delivered Another Killer Quarter

How does CEO Jeff Weiner and his team keep doing it?

Shareholders should thank "Project Inversion."

That was an effort Weiner pushed to revamp LinkedIn's technical infrastructure and site architecture.

It's the kind of long-term investment in boring, wonky stuff that rarely gets Wall Street excited.

But it allowed LinkedIn to update its professional-networking products twice a day, rather than once every two weeks.

Those frequent changes, in turn, allowed LinkedIn to see much faster what was working and what wasn't.

As a result, all three businesses LinkedIn is in—recruiting software, advertising, and subscriptions—are on fire, growing 68% to 90% year over year.

New products, like the LinkedIn Today content-aggregation site, and Sales Navigator, subscription tools targeted at salespeople looking for customer leads, are throwing fuel on this fire.

The biggest risk now seems to be that LinkedIn can now potentially roll out new products and changes to existing ones faster than its users can adapt and learn how to use them. But that's a good problem to have.