Thoughts on being a Facebook PM, six months in (THREAD)

For context: I spent 2017-2020 as an entrepreneur. @WayneGrrard and I built @Headlight, a better tech hiring platform (acquired by @woven_teams) & @midgameGG, building voice enabled products for gamers & esports teams. We were backed by BBV, Techstars, Amazon, & Betaworks. 2/x

Our spring 2020 fundraise (kicking off right as the pandemic hit ) split into a parallel acquisition process. Long story short, the Midgame team ended up at Facebook, full story here: https://link.medium.com/i6kwXP1Lhdb  3/x

Facebook is huge. 50k+ full time employees plus another 20k+ full time contingent workers (contractors). Beyond the product & eng teams, there are massive sales & marketing teams, as well as all kinds of operations teams to keep this ship running. And we’re still growing. 4/x

I work on a product called Knowledge Base - an internal tool to store articles and documents to be referenced by support, content moderation, marketing, privacy, & operations teams. Our group also looks after our internal wiki, rich text editor, and search infra. 5/x

Our parent org is called Enterprise Products, a division of Enterprise Engineering (effectively Facebook’s IT department), which rolls into the CFO’s office. So some of my exp differs from PM’s on the consumer side (FB, IG, WhatsApp, Oculus, etc) 6/x

Impact is a special word at Facebook. For everyone at the company, being able to make Impact - definitive, measurable benefits for the company - is how you’re evaluated, paid, and promoted. I’m writing this at the 6 month mark b/c that’s when we do our performance reviews. 7/x

What impact means depends on your role: sales people can drive direct revenue from increasing advertiser spend, operations teams can make processes faster or more efficient, HR can improve retention. The key is that it’s measureable & improving off of baseline. 8/x

For product teams, Impact is further broken down into product goals. Every 6 months (Jan-Jun, July-Dec) teams set Goals (another special word) for your product. These Goals are the specific metrics your product team will use to evaluate its Impact. 9/x

Everyone weighs in on what those product Goals should be - PM’s, engineers, eng managers, designers, user research, and especially data scientists (DS), who ultimately are the keepers of Goals. E.g. “grow weekly active creators” or “increase search CTR”10/x

Eventually you boil it down to 2-3 metrics with an established baseline + targeted increased calculated by DS. This is your “quota”. Your roadmap should align against these Goals, meaning you need to believe that shipping that work will meet and ideally exceed the Goals. 11/x

This may sound scary or onerous but for the most part, I’m super impressed by this system. The focus on Impact mostly clarifies convo’s + aligns teams. Everyone wants to work on / contribute to the most important thing, not just the new shiny thing or a VP’s pet project. 12/x

Outside of the Goal system, teams have a lot of latitude to run their process - how they organize their work and deliver products. On the consumer app side, most new features are done as an experiment to prove that it’s your team’s feature that’s driving a metric’s growth. 13/x

On the Enterprise side, depending on who your customers are, you might be able to get away with just directly shipping to everyone since there might be no one else working in your area. 14/x

Consumer side (FB, IG, etc) means building for a much bigger audience and visible features your friends can use, while Enterprise has greater latitude in terms of product scope and direct lines of communication to end users. 15/x

It was ofc weird onboarding / working remote but btwn the Portal (handy video call device) and Workplace (“FB for work” product that we sell to thousands of businesses), I’ve gotten by. I did have way too many mtgs last half, but it’s looking better this half. 16/x

The people I’ve worked with have generally been great. Everyone is bright, fast learners, thoughtful, and collaborative. Still really missing those in-person brainstorming / lunch / happy hour vibes. 17/x

There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Facebook and I see them brought up everyday in Workplace posts and comments. Hard to address in a public thread but I’m inspired at how much people care about improving where we’ve gone awry. 18/x

What helped me get up to speed quickly was my broad skill set as an entrepreneur. Having designed mock-ups, done guerrilla user research, written blog posts, whipped up decks, all under time pressure, really came in handy. 19/x

That said, every day for 6 months felt like a sprint from 9 to 7. I ended the day drained and more exhausted than I’ve had at any job as founder or PM. WFH & being in mtgs all day in a 1 bd NYC apt was tough for me & my wife & made it hard to decompress after work. 20/x

I learned a ton about how to operate in a bigger environment and deal with competing org expectations/ needs. (Meet everyone, learn the history, understand their Goals, document your stuff religiously) 21/x

Also learned the value of establishing a metric that’s tied to product work AND indicates business value. It’s like a detective investigation with your data scientist. 22/x

These past 6 months were about surviving and taking what was thrown at me. The upcoming 6 months I’m hoping can be about working personal taste / approach of building into the FB system. Looking forward to it. 23/x

Anyway that’s all I got for now. Let me know if you have questions. And sign up for my Substack! https://jasonshen.substack.com  24/fin