Solutions Engineering — The School for Entrepreneurs
Since childhood, I’ve always enjoyed programming, and thought about what I could build and how I could sell it. The idea that anyone with coding skills could sit in their own home and develop something that could generate money was astounding to me. Time and again, we read in the news about someone who was almost broke and became a millionaire. However, we rarely hear about the one who failed or about the journey the ones who succeeded took.
What if I were to tell you that in order to win $1M, you have to hit a target with a bow and arrow from 70 meters, and you only have one shot? Would you try immediately or go and practice a bit before you try? Sure, a few people might hit it in one shot, but most of us will probably be far away from the target, if not making any damage to the bow, or God forbid, shoot someone in the foot.
I believe that, like many things in life, an entrepreneurial mindset requires practice. In this blog post, I share my own experience and why I think working as a Solutions Engineer (SE) at Facebook is an amazing experience to practice with almost all aspects of entrepreneurship.
Ideation & Research
Finding an idea is hard. Finding a great idea is even harder. Finding an idea that solves a real problem, has a reachable market, and has a financial plan on how to generate money is a whole new ball game.
Facebook SEs work with our advertisers and partners. Our job is to recognize and generalize problems, and propose a tangible solution.
As an SE, you have to identify problems, prioritize them based on the potential impact and scale, and focus on the one you want to solve.
This process requires a business understanding and an opportunistic mindset. Not all developers have a business orientation, and this is where working as an SE at Facebook can get you into this mindset. You have an opportunity to work with amazing, creative people on your team who have a wide net of experience. It’s a team mindset: if you’re willing to ask for help, your team is there to guide you. As an SE, you don’t work in a silo or as a lone wolf. Instead, you work in collaborative and diverse teams, which provides an opportunity to learn different and fresh perspectives and feedback about your work; likely aspects you wouldn’t have thought about yourself. Over time, as you see how these different perspectives can add value to your projects, you learn to incorporate this new thinking into your own.
Ok, so you have a problem, you think you have a good solution for it. Now you need to do some homework.
Building a Team
I once met an investor who told me that (for him) 90% of the decision whether or not to invest in a startup is about the team. The idea is not as great of an issue to him. A good team can navigate through the difficulties of building a business and eventually find the right product; however, a great idea in the hands of a weak team will most likely crash and die as soon as they hit a wall.
I have to say that back then I thought that he was overrating the importance of a team, but today I totally agree with this approach.
As an SE, you need to build a team around your project. That team can be additional SEs to help you implement the code, or other product or cross-functional teams within the Facebook ecosystem, where you need their support along the way.
Building a good team is a critical part of your project success, and can give you some signals about your project priority and impact. It’s also a great opportunity for you to become the first salesperson of your idea, as you recruit people to work with you.
Learning this skill will definitely help you in the future — building your next startup and gathering great talent around you, or continue building amazing projects within Facebook or at future companies.
Fundraising
You have a great idea, you have an amazing team — now you need the funding. When you’re talking to an investor, you have to speak their language, or at least understand it. That is, you need to forget about the technology and how cool your idea is, and you need to speak about revenue, growth, and cost of user acquisition.
Investors get pitched a lot, and they hear a lot of great ideas, but in the end, they need to take a risk on the startups they think have the best chances to succeed. This is a very similar process you go through as an SE at Facebook. Before you can start working on your idea, you have to pitch it to the SE management team, and believe me, they will grill you with tough questions as you would probably get in a VC meeting.
Over time, you learn how to prepare for these meetings, and how to focus on your business aspects of your idea, and be prepared to defend your idea with supporting data to explain why your idea has a good chance to make a big impact.
Unlike meeting with VCs, as an SE you don’t have only one shot. Even if the meeting didn’t go your way, you get valuable feedback, where you can go back to your idea drawing board, make adjustments, improve your pitch, and try again. This experience is priceless, at least to me.
Development & Marketing
As an SE and owner of your project, implementation is just one part of it. You also need to manage the marketing aspects of your project, like a “go-to-market” strategy and getting users to onboard your solution. As your support net, you will have a vast amount of resources at your disposal. You will get to work with experts in these areas of expertise, and learn how to drive users and impact your project.
We work with an internal social network called Workplace, where you can ask any question about almost anything, and someone will fairly quickly offer to help.
Even if you have zero experience in marketing and business development, working as an SE at Facebook supports and fosters growth in these skills by learning from the best of the best, if you only dare to ask for help.
Measurement
Working in a startup requires ruthless prioritization. You don’t have a lot of resources, and you have to make a lot of decisions. How do you decide what to focus on, and what to keep for later? This is probably one of the most important skills a startup CEO needs to have.
As an SE, you will develop this skill as everything we do we try to measure the impact it has. Working at Facebook has taught me how to track my progress and decisions by setting measurable metrics along the way so I can have data to make better decisions and validate if I’m on the right track.
Scaling & Growth
So you launch your project and get a few users, great! — but there is still a lot of work to do before you can call it a day! As an SE, you are also responsible for growing your project and making sure it is being adopted by a large group of your target audience. At Facebook, we work and think at scale — and as an SE, you will learn how to think and execute to work at such a scale.
This very important part of building a startup helps maximize your product adoption to be able to show huge growth. Growth data can help you get to the next finance round, or maybe to an IPO, or maybe sell the company and become a billionaire!
Why You Should Join Us
If you love building stuff and want to learn and experience some of the required processes and skills to build startups and new projects, Facebook Solutions Engineering offers a great opportunity to experience it while working with the most talented people in the world. What are you waiting for?
