Building products at Facebook Inc

I’ve been supporting the WhatsApp business messaging growth team (Click to WA ads) for almost a year. It’s been exciting to build products that connect billions globally.

I often get asked about the product culture at Facebook and what stands out for me. While team-level micro-cultures make it hard to generalize at Facebook’s scale, one thing I believe is true across the company is that building great products is everyone’s responsibility, not just that of PMs. All team members, irrespective of title and role, take ownership of driving the product forward. To empower the team while moving fast, Facebook PMs:

1. Focus on driving impact
2. Create frameworks to decentralize decision-making
3. Leverage recurring updates and lead reviews to scale communication
4. Escalate effectively

1. Focus on driving impact

You hear people talk about focusing on impact every day at Facebook. Everyone wants to create impact for the user and the business. But what does it mean? Impact is the sum of choices that increases the value of the product for the user and inches Facebook closer to its long-term goals (which Mark regularly shares).

All team members can articulate their individual and the team’s impact as people problems, which are needs as described by people on the street. Distinct roles, such as engineering, data science, and design, focus on the same definition of impact but leverage different levers. Further, performance reviews are centered on an individual’s impact as well. Often areas of improvement are framed in terms of creating impact for people.

Depending on the role and problem space, impact quantified in different ways. For the Reels team, it might be the number of original creations, for the site reliability team, it might be uptime, and for the Shops team, it might be the number of new shops created.

2. Create frameworks to decentralize decision making

The entire product development process is designed to move fast, and frameworks are at the core of it. PMs create frameworks to scale decision-making and hand over ownership to team members. When faced with a decision, frameworks allow team members to make choices without having their PM in the room.

Frameworks are created at every level of the company, from the CEO creating one to highlight Facebook’s company-wide priorities to PMs creating them for individual workstreams. These are created for different purposes; some help teams decide which user segment to prioritize while others help determine what tradeoffs to make (such as ad revenue vs the number of advertisers).

Further, partner teams also build frameworks to prevent internal cannibalization and ensure net positive decisions for the company. A hypothetical example is WhatsApp and Messenger teams balancing messaging growth in certain countries. (To learn more about execution at Facebook, you should read Ben Erez’s and Will Lawrence’s notes)

3. Leverage recurring updates and lead reviews to scale communication

To move fast in a company of Facebook size (>50,000) PMs democratize information through strong company-wide communication. PMs share written updates with relevant stakeholders bi-weekly and host product reviews with leads at a regular cadence (every 6 weeks for me). This allows PMs to keep executives and stakeholders aware of the team’s progress and raise blockers.

For regular updates (every 2 weeks for me), people use a format called Highlights-Progress-Me (HPMs). Generally, these are for managers and directors:

1. Highlights: key accomplishments
2. Progress: status of projects
3. Me: personal updates

4. Escalate effectively

People are given full ownership and the autonomy to decide the future of the product. Everyone is trusted and expected to signal blockers to the relevant team or organization leads as they arise. The key here is that executive escalations aren’t seen as a sign of failure, which departs from the traditional school of thought of “only reach[ing] out to executives as your last resort”. However, people don’t escalate on a whim: they take time to understand the other side’s point of view, detail their own and ensure that it doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone involved.

Hope this helps you better understand Facebook’s product culture.

Occasionally, I write and speak on product management and interviewing:

1. How I Prepared for Facebook PM Interviews: Leadership and Drive
2. How I prepared for Facebook PM interviews: Execution & Metrics
3. Webinar: execution mock interview with Lyft PM

You can find links to all my notes on rohankatyal.com