,
15 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
1.1/ Today’s installment from the @software_daily /Facebook podcast series: Mike Vernal (@mvernal). softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/05/17/fac… As a reminder it is part of ongoing series interviews about the Facebook’s engineering culture and practices.
1.2/ First some context on Mike. Mike doesn’t brag, so I’ll do it it for him: He was one of *the* most influential execs at the company. Ran huge swaths of the co., and he reported to Mark directly for years. He was on M-team, the “strategic high command” of FB so to speak.
1.3/ Shift to Mobile, Innovator’s Dilemma, and Google+:. Jeff asks Mike about Mobile transition in 2011. Mike describes how his teams went heads down for 9 months leading up to F8 in 2011. I’d like to add that F8 is one of the few cases where FB had rigid deadlines.
1.4/ After launch they realized that this was all for desktop and they were caught totally flat-footed on mobile. At the time, mobile was treated as a *tax* rather than an *opportunity*. This framing explains a lot of behavior at the company in that period.
1.5/ It was classic innovator’s dilemma. He recounts at Microsoft when he was in meetings with Ballmer and he would say he doesn’t care unless it’s a billion dollar business. In this framing smaller projects that have massive, unpredicted *growth* potential often get ignored.
1.6/ Desktop/mobile was sort of like that. Desktop usage dwarfed mobile usage. In the short term “it was easy to anchor on desktop really being the focal point of the business.“
1.7/ You have to fight this by having a culture where you “find a way to shield them from the inertia and just politics/...bureaucracy”. Second if you’ve been caught flat-footed, course correct “with all your might”
1.8/ Big mistake is that companies try to “have their cake and eat it too.” He continues “You really have to burn the boats and move over to the other thing with all of your might and make that bet.”
1.9/ Mark did this in a real way. If you showed up to a review with no mobile mocks, the meeting ended, immediately. “Zuck reviews” are very high stakes things for teams. Ending that meeting is a *huge* body blow. It’s a bit of a myth at this point but it was real.
1.10/ Jeff asks about Google+. Mike: “I think the Amazon, Jeff Bezos’ view would be – you should be customer-obsessed, not competitor-focused“ Implicit claim is that Google+ was more about FB and not about Google customers, in the end.
1.11/ Jeff asks Mike: What would you do if you were in charge of social @ Google. Mike immediately notes that this is totally unfair because of hindsight.
1.12/ Mike: “The most obvious thing is Google owns the most popular operating system in the world by a factor of four or five.“ He also notes that even now “it would be hard for me to today articulate what their messaging strategy is.”
1.13/ With the benefit of hindsight, leveraging OS dominance to built coherent messaging strategy would have been the obvious move. Look at WeChat, WhatsApp. Google was in the position dominate messaging with a coherent strategy.
1.14/ Aside/my 2 cents: Remember the stakes/scale here. WhatsApp was acquired for 19 billion in Feb '14. Everyone thought it was crazy. But it’s more crazy than that: Feb 2014 Market Cap. ~170B. Now: ~520B. About 3x. So in terms of % of company price would be ~60 billion today.
1.15/ Next tranche:
