Facebook’s Modern Agile Principles
Facebook has five core principles. I wondered how they mapped to Modern Agile’s four principles. Below is each Facebook principle, followed by how I believe it maps to Modern Agile principles:
Be Bold: Building great things means taking risks. We have a saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” In a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.
This value hits on three Modern Agile principles. Make People Awesome requires boldness and taking risks. Being safe to make mistakes is essential to Make Safety A Prerequisite. And creating an environment that nourishes rapid testing and learning is the essence of Experiment and Learn Rapidly.
In a recent podcast, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, cited the example of a summer intern named Ben who wanted to test Facebook’s resiliency to bugs. He created a faux bug and it accidentally took down Facebook for 30 minutes. Ben got hired anyway because even though the experiment caused a major issue, it was the type of experiment that Facebook encouraged.
Focus on Impact: To have the biggest impact, we need to focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.
You get the biggest impact when you empower people and keep them safe. “Focus on Impact” contains elements of Make People Awesome and Make Safety A Prerequisite. If an election isn’t safe because another country is filling Facebook up with false information, then focusing on impact has a lot to do with making Facebook safer for elections. Working on the biggest problems requires a focus on what would make people way more awesome.
Move Fast: Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. We’re less afraid of making mistakes than we are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We are a culture of builders, the power is in your hands.
Note: This one has been updated to say Move Fast with Stable Infrastructure.
Speed is a value I find in many great companies. Moving fast in order to learn faster is the essence of Experiment & Learn Rapidly. Not being afraid to make mistakes is the essence of Make Safety A Prerequisite. Facebook has posters all over the place that say “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Finally, moving fast to learn requires that you Deliver Value Continuously.
Be Open: We believe that a more open world is a better world. The same goes for our company. Informed people make better decisions and have a greater impact, which is why we work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information about the company as possible.
This maps to Make People Awesome. Facebook is saying that in order to make a great impact and make better decisions, it’s imperative that people in the company are informed about as much as possible about the company itself. This is deeply respectful of staff. Being well informed adds safety to decisions and actions. So “Be Open” also suggests Modern Agile’s principle, Make Safety a Prerequisite.
Build Social Value: Facebook was created to make the world more open and connected, not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.
This embodies the principle, Make People Awesome, since it extends far beyond the company to people in the entire world. It also suggest Deliver Value Continuously. In a biography about Mark Zuckerberg, he said “The question I ask myself like almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’ Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time.”
So that’s my quick and dirty analysis of Facebook’s principles and how they map to Modern Agile’s principles. I hope that was helpful! As always, feedback is much appreciated.
