The Head of Facebook on Shifting Long-Term Strategy
Facebook still services 1.9B DAUs. Tom Alison, Meta's Head of Facebook, outlined their forward-looking strategy in this memo to employees.
Much ado has been made of Facebook/Meta and its transgressions, real or perceived. The $36B spent on Metaverse projects is eye-popping to most observers, especially when contextualized. It took Tesla $25B to get to cash-flow positivity, and Apple spent merely $3B building the first iPhone.
Elsewhere in the org, product prowess is slipping. Instagram is not cool, even though its metrics are good. Facebook has essentially no organic human content, and is full of memes and marketing posts. But internal failures are not the problem: TikTok is eating Meta’s lunch with the younger generation.
So, what is Meta doing about that? In my post a couple weeks back, I covered Evan Spiegel’s leaked email to show how business is actually conducted. Today, I’m excited to dive into a memo published by Head of Facebook Tom Alison in April of this year meant to align the Facebook team on the coming product direction. You can read Building the Discovery Engine at the linked site, and I’ve pulled the relevant quotes below.
The memo
Alison begins with a summary. To communicate most clearly in a written format, it’s prudent for leaders to frame the topic at hand before getting into details.
In this note I want to introduce the concept of Facebook as a “discovery engine,” which is a helpful mental model to frame the current focus of our long-term strategy.
It also helps contextualize our product priorities, which we’ll continue to evolve over time to emphasize our near-term focus areas. I encourage you to read the entire note, but if you just want the TL:DR here it is:
Our vision is for Facebook to be a place where everyone can belong, though the power of community. We define our four durable strategic pillars to accomplish this by helping people:
Find, enjoy and create interesting content.
Strengthen their relationships.
Create communities - both big and small.
Realize economic opportunities.
While our strategy is designed to stand the test of time, our execution and focus must be responsive to the needs of the current moment. Today we see a shift towards social media products serving as “discovery engines.”
We’re sharing an updated articulation of our near-term priorities that are aimed at strengthening the Facebook discovery engine. These are:
Make Reels successful.
Build world class recommendations technology.
Unlock messaging-based sharing.
Alongside our product priorities, we’ll continue to prioritize culture changes to support the “Trustworthy, People-Centric, and Unified” approach to product development that we announced in January of this year.
One of the LPs in Contrary’s funds is the founding engineer and early VPE at Facebook. He always described Facebook to us as a “Social Graph.” In fact, he commented that Mark staunchly opposed the framing of Facebook as a “Social Network.”
A social graph maps out your real-life connections and makes them more actionable, deep, legible, etc. A social network however is more focused on virtual-first serendipity and networking. Facebook was focused on taking your real-life and putting it online.
in this sense, the “discovery engine” is a major departure from the original “social graph” product principle.
This is referenced in this part of the memo:
Historically, Facebook has taken an entity-centric approach to discovery. We help you connect with the friends, groups, and pages you care about most. Then updates from those connections are ranked in Feed. Unconnected content in Feed was surfaced via reshares from the friends, groups, and pages you follow, but unconnected recommendations weren’t historically a core part of the Feed experience. However we did invest heavily in unconnected content discovery on adjacent surfaces, i.e. through search queries or recommendations-first products like Watch, News, and Marketplace.
Today this is changing. Social media products - including our own - are delivering value by investing more in discovery engines that help people find and enjoy interesting content regardless of whether it was produced by someone you’re connected to or not. We see this both in research as well as in the growth of products like Reels, Watch, and In-Feed Recommendations (IFR).
The conflict between the historic approach and the new one is addressed here:
As we lean into public content and recommendations and evolve our discovery engine, a natural question to ask is whether this will dilute our focus on connecting people. Facebook is - and will continue to be - a product known for creating and strengthening connections. We state this directly in our strategy through our intention to help people strengthen relationships, as well as create communities - both big and small. If executed well, investing in our discovery engine will enhance people’s ability to connect with friends, pages, and communities, and facilitate new connections. Shared interests and identity are often the foundation for friendship and community, and sharing and discussing interesting content you discover on Facebook with your friends and communities can strengthen those bonds - this has come up again and again in our research on the “community journey” toward belonging. That’s why our job doesn’t stop at helping people create or find great content - it requires us to continue building products that allow people to share with one another and deepen friendships and community connections throughout their journey on Facebook.
From my perspective as an outside observer with no internal knowledge, this seems like leadership just rationalizing a departure from the old philosophy. Which is not good nor bad necessarily. I say that as a statement of fact. Managers have to get teams on-board, and Alison gets ahead of any issues here by fitting the new direction into a framework that the team already understands.
“Give up” may be too strong of a phrase, but it seems clear from the memo that Facebook is “evolving” its model of why people should and will use the product.
TikTok (and YouTube) are winning with “discovery” driven products that serve global content, not social graphs. And ultimately Facebook will find more engagement, retention, and monetization doing the same.
The anatomy of an executive memo
If you haven’t already, I would again urge you to check out the original memo. Alison does a great job clearly communicating the big picture with repeatable structure:
Bullet point summary of Facebook’s mission
Bullet point summary of the new product goals servicing that stated mission (with comment that the rest of Meta’s leadership team is fully aligned on the topic)
A couple pages of long-form product writing
A reminder of product creation values
Offer to answer questions privately and in forum
Preemptive FAQ section
You can get a taste for the FAQ here:
This covers a handful of interesting Facebook-specific topics that go beyond the need to compete with TikTok, YouTube, and other content curators.
How does our “friend network” play in here, and how can we make use of that? What are we sacrificing by going in this direction? Do we still need to be social to the core?
Facebook has some tough days ahead of it, but it’s hard to fail with 2B+ users on a platform. The more interesting memo would be one covering the various attempts to become more TikTok like over time — Instagram Reels, Facebook’s infinite scrolling video features, etc — which have historically been disjoint or ineffective attempts at taking TikTok head-on in competition. Perhaps more info will come out here. If Facebook does ultimately win, it’s because creators are incentivized to cross-post to a bigger platform, and we will have to wait and see if Facebook can build a sufficiently competitive “discovery engine.”
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