Facebook and Product Management
Product Management, UX, Startups, and more — freshly curated by Zeda.io
Hello, all you product-loving folks! 🥰
Welcome to this week's edition of Product Café, your weekly cup of coffee for everything product management, startups, and more. ☕
Did you know? 💬
That Al Pacino was the first “face” on Facebook. The earliest iteration of the site showed an image featuring a man’s face obscured behind binary code. Although it wasn’t clear who it was at first, it later came to light that it was the face of acclaimed actor Al Pacino.
Product Management at Facebook
Today, I wanted to talk about how big and successful companies create amazing products, how their PM culture could be different from what we traditionally know, and what we can learn from them.
We all know that being a Product Manager is not for the faint-hearted—with mountains of features in the backlog, countless requests, and of course the stress that comes with releasing features on time. But with the right culture, team, and support, companies can release amazing products that change the world. One such example is Facebook.
As a product that was born in a college dorm room to now catering to 2.91 billion monthly active users worldwide, I am guessing their PM culture would have also evolved and improved over the years till they figured out which method yielded the best results. So, how do they do it?
1. More ownership
The PM culture at Facebook believes in giving ownership to different leaders. It empowers members within their own team to take up more leadership responsibilities.
According to Will Lawrence, a PM at Facebook, execution should be ranked in order from highest to lowest priority. This way, the first half of this list which is of the most priority should have your unique attention, and the bottom half of the list can be delegated to others in the team.
1. Road-mapping
2. Product decisions
3. Prioritization
4. Escalations
5. Seeking approvals
6. Communication
7. Project Management
8. Experimentation
Lawrence calls this ‘Meta-execution’ which requires finding capable leaders to drive more execution independently. Once you’ve identified these leaders, you can give them ownership and continue to offer support along the way.
2. Giving sub-tasks to Junior PMs
While senior PMs focus on strategy, many of the sub-tasks that lead up to execution are given to Junior PMs. Lawrence recalls that when he first joined Facebook, the majority of his days were spent supporting the team in whatever way he could so they could execute the launch successfully. These included creating Gantt charts, discussing experiment results, and writing weekly summaries.
3. Vision and strategy
PMs are required to own the vision and strategy of the product area that they handle, and since products are usually interconnected on Facebook, one team’s milestones cannot be achieved without help from other product teams. That’s why PMs are also required to understand the vision and strategy of other teams and products.
Fun fact: After Facebook became a suit of different products, Facebook, the app was internally called the Big Blue to avoid confusion from Facebook, the company.
4. Everyone chips in
While in most organizations, everyone’s responsibilities are well-defined, at Facebook, everyone from Engineers to PMs to Designers all play their part to bring the product live. Here, teams collaborate to see which task each of them can take up so that the best outcome is achieved. That’s why Engineers usually take up creating tickets and tasks so that PMs can spend time focusing on the vision and building the roadmap.
5. Data wins argument
Any idea for a new feature has to be backed by data. This means creating a minimal viable product (MVP) of the idea and testing it with Facebook’s users to give you answers to questions like “How big is this opportunity?” and “Why would we want to build this?”. The MVP here doesn’t have to be perfect but your users’ response will help you further iterate and improve the idea. Doing this helps speed up the decision-making process because of the conclusive data that you have collected.
Source:
Another fun fact: Off lately, I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting more friend requests from my aunts and uncles than from friends in my age circle. Interestingly there’s a reason behind that. Facebook now has more users over the age of 55 than any other social media app. According to Richard Broughton, an analyst at Ampere, the reason for this is that "older people usually tend to be late to the internet party”, and youngsters are seen flocking to newer apps like Instagram and Snapchat—potentially due to the simplicity of these newer apps and Facebook’s growing privacy issues.
Song of the week 🎶
It’s been a while since this song came up on my Spotify suggestions. I heard it for the first time after so long and I immediately regretted not adding it to my playlist before.
In other news, Google’s search explorer goes visual!
Catering to the TikTok generation, some Google search results will now be highly visual where different pieces of information related to the search are presented in colorful grids with images and videos from both YouTube and TikTok. For instance, if you search for a place, Google will show you maps, directions, weather, photos, and other snippets—all placed in boxes at the top of the search results.
That’s all folks! Have something you want to share? Put them in the comments below and we’ll get back to you soon.
See you again next week! 🥂
It’s hard to explain what a Product Manager does, we get it. But you know what’s not that hard? Sharing this newsletter with your friends and colleagues!
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