Designing for 3 billion people at Facebook
In 2019, I joined Facebook and saw how the company approaches designing products for the over 3 billion people who use Facebook’s apps each month.
Here, I’m going to share the company’s unique approach to designing products that enabled its global adoption. This approach is worth studying because Facebook owns the four most downloaded apps of the last decade.
At Facebook, I was on the Growth team. The Growth team is often attributed to being responsible for Facebook’s global adoption. The mission of the Growth team is to connect everyone on the internet to Facebook. The team is responsible for scaling the user base across the world. The team focuses on designing experiences for people who are new to the platform. Over a decade ago, that meant designing for people signing up on Facebook in countries outside of the United States such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. But today, much of the Growth team’s focus has shifted towards growing the user base in emerging markets like India, Mexico, and Brazil.
Here are some takeaways from my experience on the Facebook Growth team:
Takeaway #1: Obsessively focus on one metric
Something surprising about Facebook is the level of focus that exists within the company.
For over a decade now, the entire company has been guided by one metric: retention. At Facebook, it’s referred to as monthly active people (MAP) or daily active people (DAP).
New product ideas at Facebook come from looking at correlations in data and seeing what aligns with the company’s north star metric: retention.
Example: The idea for the ‘People You May Know’ feature was based on an insight from data. Years ago, the company discovered that having more Facebook friends was highly correlated with higher user retention. This makes sense because when you connect with your friends, there’s more content to discover and interact with. Based on this, the Facebook Growth team formed a sub-team focused on one concept: ‘7 friends in 10 days’. The sole purpose of this sub-team is to help users find at least 7 friends within their first 10 days of signing up on Facebook.
When a company grows to thousands of employees like Facebook, it can be difficult to create alignment on what everyone works on day-to-day. Focusing on one metric, like ‘monthly active people’, aligns everyone at the company to work towards a shared vision.
More generally, a north star metric is:
- A simple, quantifiable number
- That is correlated with the core value of your product
As mentioned by Alex Schultz, former Facebook VP of product growth, while Facebook uses ‘monthly active people’ on the platform as its north star metric, other metrics may work better for different companies. For example, Slack’s north star metric used to be getting customers to send at least 2,000 messages. After 2,000 messages, Slack knew with 93% confidence that their customers would continue using Slack.
Takeaway #2: Move fast and consistently
Moving fast is inherently part of the design process at Facebook. But what does moving fast look like?
At Facebook, as a product designer, that means spending less time documenting the competitive landscape, creating wireframes, or planning ambitious projects. Instead, it means putting a higher priority on reviewing data, coming up with hypotheses, and creating realistic goals.
Product designers at Facebook realize products will never be perfect at first. Instead of spending time debating new feature ideas, at Facebook, products are shipped and afterward, the team looks at data to determine whether a feature is actually useful to people. By doing this consistently, the right solution emerges faster.
In addition to shipping fast, the design team puts a strong emphasis on shipping consistently.
Facebook doesn’t aim to design a 20% improvement to the product all at once. Instead, Facebook aims to improve by 1% consistently.
By making small but confident improvements to the product, over time you can expect to see a significant compounded effect.
While there are downsides to moving fast, Facebook’s success at onboarding billions of people to the platform shows the value of moving fast.
Takeaway #3: Focus on impact
Focusing on impact is one of Facebook’s five core values. Whenever making product decisions, Facebook designers are pushed to think about the most impactful way to approach that decision in order to serve the greatest number of people.
The best way to make a big impact is by working on big problems that billions of people face.
Example: A prime example of focusing on impact is when Facebook wanted to grow internationally to non-English speaking countries. Usually, when companies decide to grow internationally they will pay experts in different countries to methodically translate their products to different languages one at a time. However, when the Facebook Growth team thought about how to approach this in terms of optimizing for impact, they came up with the idea for the ‘translation project’. The translation project is known for being one of the most impactful projects on the Growth team which helped Facebook achieve 500+ million users. The project involved a tool being built to enable users to crowdsource the process of translating Facebook. By distributing the effort to Facebook users who want to volunteer as translators, Facebook was able to translate the site to over 100 languages, while saving money and time hiring language experts.
Takeaway #4: Delivering core-product value as soon and as often as possible
There are three important challenges that every consumer product needs to solve, as described in a talk by former Facebook VP of user growth, Chamath Palihapitiya:
- “How do you get people into the front door?”
- “How do you get people to an “Aha” moment as quickly as possible?”
- “And then how do you deliver the product’s core value as often as possible?”
Also known as acquisition, activation, and retention. Within the Facebook Growth team, sub-teams are assigned to consistently address each one of these three challenges individually.
By organizing sub-teams to focus on one of these three challenges, designers are able to have clear goals and success metrics. Teams within Facebook Growth have systematically tested different user flow variations based on these three challenges repeatedly for over a decade. Since the creation of the Growth Team in 2007, Facebook has grown over 30x. From 90 million people on Facebook in 2007 to over 3 billion people today.
To learn more about Facebook’s design process on the Growth Team:
- How to Get Users and Grow — Alex Schultz, former Facebook VP of product growth
- Path to 1 Billion Users — Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook VP of user growth
- Building a Growth Team at Facebook — Mark Zuckerberg
Daniel Heintzman
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