What does a product manager do at Facebook

This is a question from Quora. The author is a product manager at Facebook Pages and now CEO of startup DocSend. What does a Product Manager do at Facebook?

The high level product manager is responsible for the effective collaboration of the team and ensuring that the product is delivered with great functionality and usability. I was a product manager on Facebook’s Pages team for 1.5 years, so I’ve had a lot of zero-to-one project experience. During my time there, the Pages team went from four engineers to 36, and from one product manager to four. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a very challenging position and I highly recommend it.

What the product needs to do is completely different in the following ways:

The responsibilities of product managers vary from department to department

The PM of the Site Integrity department is completely different from the PM of the Timeline or Growth department. For example, spam prevention’s products try to identify and remove fake users and motivate users to use Facebook properly. They create and monitor robust internal systems to track and identify bad behavior. The PMS on the growth team try to get as many users as possible and get them as active as possible, and they monitor specific effects through a number of small experiments. Some PMS need to be more focused on product design, while others need to be more data-driven. If you are the PM of an AD product team, you need a lot of knowledge about digital marketing.

Product responsibilities vary from project stage to project stage

At the beginning of the project, it was unclear exactly what to do and why to do it. For example, should Pages use a timeline design or other product design? Are timed messages more important or targeted messages to specific users more important? Early definition is very important, and not getting it right can mean wasting a lot of time later on. Once the project is defined, project management becomes more important. What the timeline will release, what resources the other teams have to coordinate, etc. Responsibilities will then evolve into product quality assurance and start-up. What are the conditions for product startup? When/how do I start it?

The composition of the team also affects responsibilities

The main roles in Facebook’s product team include engineers, technical managers, product managers, designers, product marketing managers, product specialists, and data analysts. If you are the PM of the team and the team is missing a role or understaffed, you need to fill the gap. PMS sometimes have to do design, code, data, test, and recruit more people to the team (including team mergers). These positions are indispensable for any department that wants to create a great product (so the product has to fit into a position if the position is open).

Engineer: Implement the product. This is the largest number of jobs at Facebook, and it’s no surprise that the company is built on an engineering culture. The company has maintained its culture for an incredibly long time, and all of Facebook’s engineers are great.

Technical managerAllocate resources (who does what), hire more engineers, keep the team happy, and keep the code clean. Describing the responsibilities of the role is also related to the position itself, as well as many other things. Technical managers and PMS work closely together. As a PM you have to get along with the technical manager or you won’t be able to do a good project.

The designer: When I first joined Facebook, one of the tech managers joked that at the end of the day, we’re all just pawns in the designer’s game. With some experience, I’ve found that makes a lot of sense but it’s a good thing. At Facebook, the design team is consistent, and the company checks itself. PMS may say we’re going in this general direction, but designers decide what the product looks like and how it works, and it’s a collaborative process.

Product Marketing Manager: This role is the official liaison with the rest of Facebook and outside markets. They will do market research before deciding on product direction and will be responsible for all product marketing (including overseas markets). They often meet with customer service (at least in the Pages and advertising departments) and spend a lot of time communicating with sales. PMS and PMM work closely to determine what needs to be created and to gather demand in the marketplace.

Product Specialist: This is an evolving and ambiguous role, but nonetheless a crucial one on the Pages team. Facebook doesn’t have an official quality assurance department, and this is the closest it comes. Product specialists manage and file and classify all bugs and are responsible for overall regression testing when the product is ready for release. As the job title implies, this role must know what the current state of the product is. They make sure that no policies or features are missing.

Analyst: When we get carried away in a debate at a conference, tech managers often remind us that we’re in data-free territory. That means there’s no clear data to support the idea that we’re just talking about opinions. Analysts at Facebook play an important role in enabling everyone to be driven by real data. How good or bad are we doing? How should we measure success? How do we express product failures? As companies get bigger, analysts play more and more important roles.

When the function is engineer driven

Engineers at Facebook can move quickly and can be empowered to do what they want, so there may be many projects going on at a given time. As a PM, it’s your job to make sure everything starts to make sense and everyone works together. Next, you may work on many different projects in a given time (although the projects you work on May be completely different). Deciding how to spend your time is very important, because there won’t be enough time to get involved in everything. There are also times when a project may need to be modified or suspended if it doesn’t make a significant difference in the overall direction (this happens regularly in Pages).

Critical features require a review process

For small features, it may not be necessary to review them with anyone other than product designers and engineers. PMS have enough decision-making power to decide something. Bigger projects require Zuckerberg’s review, though sometimes it’s just your product modification decisions. Zach remains personally involved and is involved at key points of project review. In addition to setting the overall vision for Facebook, he made sure that projects in different areas understood each other. Because of the size of the company, it’s hard for an independent PM to know everything that’s going on.

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