The Developer’s Roundtable
Here’s a question for you, how does Meta participate in open conversation with its partners? Meta is a large company, constantly building new products and variations on top of its social graph. As a Meta partner it is difficult to engage in conversation with a company that not only works with your competitors but is, at times, your competitor itself.
Follow up question, why would Meta want open conversation with its partners? There is a constant stream of information flowing between partners, clients and platforms. It is in the churn of this data that new ideas and directions are created. Innovation is the result of numerous feedback loops and hard to predict. By being able to engage in direct and open discussion with our partners Meta can not only be aware of the new approaches and product concepts but be part of promoting that creativity.
So what’s a roundtable and why is it relevant. Big companies dominate conversations, when you’re invited to a Meta event it’s not unusual for it to be a series of Meta-employee led presentations with participants looking for some inkling of what our roadmap and direction is going to be. King Arthur’s roundtable is famous for the fact that it supposedly put everyone on the same level. With no head or bottom of the table there was no weight given to any seated knight over any other. A roundtable discussion “should” be similar. The goal is that every attendee feels similarly important and able to offer their insight and opinion. In theory, a roundtable allows us to have the open discussion we need by promoting a sense of camaraderie and equality.
Meta’s Developer Roundtables
With the goal of fostering innovation and sparking interesting conversation we’ve recently run a couple of small roundtable events. To explain something of the structure, there were about 8–10 participants at a time with a central topic to discuss. A Meta employee acts as a chair for the discussion, allowing us to make space if the conversation becomes dominated by a single participant and provide some open-ended questions if a topic runs dry. The first event was focused on the relatively recently released Facebook Business Extension and the second on the more open topic of best practises in the Creative Industry.
Both events have been interesting. The more product specific first one provided some great context on how our partners tend to interact with our products and how they view our relationship, as well as offering some useful suggestion on how we can better accommodate their needs. The open nature of the second one, in contrast, was (obviously) less focused on what Meta itself should be doing and what the industry as whole should be focussing on. Going forward we expect to be running more of these events, most likely in the same vein as this second one. If you are a partner, of any size, and you’d like to be involved in one please reach out to your contact at Meta and put your name down, we’d love to hear from you.
Why would you want to be in one? Good question, well this is your chance to be part of the conversation with your peers and Meta to help direct where we go next. We want a partnership that feels less combative and more one where we help each other to build better products and provide better services to our users. We want to nurture innovation and create best practises that maintain a healthy ecosystem, we assume you do too, come help us to do so.
