Marco helped the Home team understand the expectations people might have for the product and identify potential interaction issues. He collected and analyzed feedback through interviews, diary studies, surveys and discussion groups. […] Anything that changes the deep relationship people have with their device is really challenging to design for. You can’t predict what people will expect and how they’ll react.” […] “We acted quickly and used quite a few different research methods and approaches to mitigate not only the fact that the phone is so personal, but also that we wanted to cover different contexts and situations of use. Doing this also allowed us to gather data and feedback at different paces, and to have a solid sense of patterns of behavior from an early stage.”
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the first major redesign of its popular News Feed … was the culmination of one long year of work by 70 engineers and designers.
[…]The social network surveyed hundreds of thousands of users, and many responded with the same request.
Jane Justice Leibrock and her team of researchers also conducted dozens of face to face interviews on the Facebook campus to get feedback from users.
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When I first joined Facebook, one of the engineering managers jokingly said: “in the end, we’re all just pawns in a game of designers.” After more experience, I found this to be somewhat true although it’s ultimately a good thing.
— Russ Heddleston’s answer to: Facebook Inc. (company): What does a Product Manager at Facebook do?
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“Pushing” a piece of new code live to the desktop and mobile Web is a much faster process than making changes to a native iOS or Android application. …
Previously, Facebook split dealing with these problems in two. Desktop coders were part of one group, while the mobile apps teams were separate. In fact, as product manager Dirk Stoop told me, the native iOS and Android apps were so small in the early days, only a handful of people were responsible for maintaining the iOS and Android applications — two of the most-downloaded apps in the entire world.
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The Facebook product structure of today looks very different than it did before. Teams are separated across the company by product rather than platform.
So, for example, the Facebook Messenger group, led by Facebook veteran Peter Deng, is one team composed of desktop, mobile and native engineers who create features for every place that this product appears. This is the same for Photos, the team which Stoop leads.
— “Own Your Code”: Facebook’s Engineering Shift Tackles the Problem of Mobile
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Give Teams Ownership of Goals & Problems, Not Features
When teams own goals they constantly optimize for the best way to achieve and are able to make the tradeoff decisions between continuing work on an existing feature versus new projects. For example, at YouTube our Creator Uploads team doesn’t think about just owning individual features on the site but continued growth in the hours of video uploaded to the site each day. This allows them to shift resources between, for example, mobile video upload versus site uploads. Or working with outside developers via API versus making it easier for novice YouTube users to upload their first video. Overall they are making the decisions about what’s best for the health of their area.
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I work with a team of content strategists. You don’t really hear about that. When I was at Apple, I was alone for much of the time. A few other writers joined me on my team. But generally content people are on their own. Maybe there are one or two. [laughs] Here there are 11 of us on my I team and then we have Kenny, who is our engineer.
— Nicole Jones podcast interview: content strategy at Facebook
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We used to have one head of engineering, one head of product. Now there’s a newsfeed group, an identity group, etc. Now there’s a person who owns each one of those. I said in two years, we want to be world-class in each of these. So these folks stepped back and had to rebuild infrastructure and organization to do that.
— Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: We Burned Two Years Betting On Mobile Web Vs. Apps
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In what is now known as the Ringelmann Effect, people’s efforts quickly diminish as team size increases. Eight people, he found, didn’t even pull as hard as four individuals. He rationalized the decay in effort by suggesting it was difficult for team members to coordinate effort, and left it at that.
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Ingham and his colleagues had demonstrated that loss of effort could not be explained by lack of coordination, as Ringelmann originally thought. Their experiments instead illustrated the problem of social loafing — when team members reduce their effort because they feel less responsible for the output.
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The Camera app was built by 7 engineers, 1 pm, and 1 designer. The first version of our Messenger app was built by only 4 engineers, and they built the iOS version and the Android version simultaneously.
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The growth team was formed in late 2007, when Zuckerberg decided expansion was so important that it warranted a unit with its own resources. The site was approaching 100 million members, but its growth rate had cooled. […]
Within two years of its creation, the team had expanded Facebook’s roster of users sevenfold, to 360 million. […]
Recently, his team was renamed GEM—an acronym for growth, engagement, and mobile. Facebook’s new priority is keeping existing members active and logging in from mobile devices.
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Ashish Thusoo joined Facebook in 2007 when the company had 50 million users. He left when it had some 800 million. During that time he managed Facebook’s internal data analytics team…
”We invested in making our tools more and more collaborative so that users could share analysis with each other and discover data by getting connected to expert users of a data set.” With Facebook’s hyper-growth and data that was changing all the time, a collaboration approach “worked better than creating knowledge bases around metadata.”
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Pinterest’s small team of 20 people is not driven by engineering. The company is split into three divisions: Engineering, design and social — with “social” a combination of quantitative people and community people, who try to understand how and why people use Pinterest, how social groups form and how social norms propagate.
— Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann’s Lesson for Start-Ups: Go Your Own Way
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In the past three years, Facebook’s design team has grown from 20 people to 90.
— Thank Facebook’s Design Team For Every Warm And Fuzzy Moment You’ve Ever Had On The Social Network
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At Facebook, we believe in particularly small teams. Most projects are about six or seven total…
Our team structure:There’s always a designer. Product designers at Facebook are responsible for visual design, for interaction design, also for what we call product design, which is essentially product strategy, and we even do some front-end implementation as well.
There’s almost always also a researcher. This wasn’t the case two years ago when I started at Facebook. Researchers were involved in some projects, only the biggest, but not a lot of them. But over the past two years, I’ve seen us grow to accept the importance of both qualitative and quantitative research, so this is now an integral part of our team.
We also have an engineer, usually between one and four.
And then product managers. Product managers at Facebook are responsible not just for project managing, not just for making sure things ship on time, that everybody has what they need, but also for the quality of the product. They’re sort of like mini-CEOs within their projects usually.
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All of this is shored up by the tremendous analytics [Twitter] has. You have ways of deeply understanding the varieties of engagement and the levels of engagement that people have … And those folks are embedded with each of the teams, so each of the teams can really understand whats going on.
— Mark Trammell & Jesse James Garrett | Creating Engagement on Twitter
