Facebook changed the game again today. While you’ve undoubtedly already read about the game-changing updates to the Platform and what they mean for users and brands, you most likely have not read anything on the principles that define Facebook’s product development process and culture. How is this applicable to you? Facebook is the new breed of company and every company and person within a company that wants to win in the 21st century will need to adopt and adapt to moving fast in the face of ever-more rapid market changes.
In his presentation, Andrew Bosworth (known as Boz), Director of Engineering at Facebook, shared invaluable insights into what enables Facebook to move so quickly. The presentation started out by honing in on how Facebook views hacking and the importance that a hack can have on a product and company. The ability to tag people in photos was used as an example of a minor hack, to a well-defined product category (photo sharing apps), that had a major business impact and ultimately reshaped a product category.
A memorable line from the presentation was “find the unexpectedly effective solution” – this tied into moving fast and never being afraid to abandon a good solution to go after a great solution. Bosworth spoke about setting a goal to climb up a large hill and then when you get to the top of the hill you realize that there is a much larger mountain on the other side of the hill that only became visible from the top of the hill. You have a few choices, celebrate your climb up the hill, climb back down the hill, or start the journey of climbing the larger mountain. Facebook’s philosophy is that there is always a larger mountain to climb. As a business, the work is never complete – there is always more to do.
The most poignant depiction of this philosophy at work was a recollection of a meeting that took place towards the end of 2010 with Mark Zuckerberg to discuss the highly successful launch of the new Facebook profile. Bosworth described how Zuckerberg seemed unfocused in the meeting and that when asked the reason for his boredom, Zuckerberg spoke to how the next version of the profile (officially launched today and now known as Timeline) was ten days behind on schedule. This was on a Monday, only four days after the launch of the then newest profile iteration. It takes a serious discipline to continuously improving at a monumental pace to focus on the next, better version of a product when you just launched the newest version four days ago.
A core tenet of the Facebook culture is that the job is only 1% complete. This is reverberated in every way throughout the company. Where is your company and where are you in terms of doing the necessary work that it takes to transform into a social business that moves quickly enough to stay ahead of competition and the market? With technology and markets moving at breakneck speeds, it’s not easy to keep up. It takes a coordinated effort from the entire organization. Everyone needs to be on board from the CEO to the rank-and-file.
Only a business that is designed to be a social business will win in today’s world. As Bosworth, Zuckerberg, and now myself, will say, if you don’t put in the work, someone else will. Social businesses FTW!
