Facebook Intra-Team Switch

It is often said that to understand a company, one needs to understand the hierarchy. I have followed this advice this diligently for some time in the last few months. I managed to secure a stellar record at Facebook - having TNTE (too new to evaluate), then two exceeds expectations performance ratings and promotion with a massive 50% basic pay hike till now. I found myself at a point where either I can continue to do the same things in a loop and make myself more efficient at it and scale my work OR move fast and jump to areas where I can have a higher impact for the company.

I want to digress slightly from our main topic and dwell deeper into this, I found it an amazing recipe for success! In a nutshell, Facebook Categorizes their advertisers by how any typical management student would structure their business - with an added flavour of multi-nationalism to it. On the ground, each advertiser is either managed or unmanaged - when they are managed they get extra support for their efficient spending to say things like how to design better looking and attractive ads so that more customers can see my ad per dollar or rupee. Facebook’s sales org hopes that providing such support and building a social value around their offerings will entice advertisers into spending more - a common thread among most digital-first or digital-only companies. As Facebook scaled, it’s clientele grew crazily and it became apparent that it cannot keep up with providing deep engagements with everyone on board to continue to provide quality value. Hence, within the managed clients, it splits advertisers into the Head (called internally as in-market advertisers), Torso (called scaled advertisers), and Tail (agency driven) clients. This structure is pretty much constant and helps Facebook scale across verticals, countries and continents. I was startled to realize that being an engineer for managed in-market advertisers, my role is supercritical yet super responsible to help advertisers grow and bring good repute to the company by aiding our country’s growth.

Move fast - Build Social Value - Strive for Impact: Mark Zuckerberg

Towards mid of April, my manager expressed his desire to open up a new role reporting to him for expanding retail business advertising in South East Asia. I got excited and have opted to interview for the role which was smooth because the hierarchical structure familiarity helped me grab that role for myself. Needless to say, like most decisions these days I had some reasons which I want to share which may help others decide their internal transfer. First of them getting a chance to grow Facebook Messenger to newer heights and opening up new avenues of growing conversational commerce. I want to cut myself short from saying that I would be alone handling this initiative - since there is a WhatsApp org as well which is also working towards similar ideas maybe, but I want to stress that I would support and focus of star engineers at Facebook towards pushing Facebook Messenger now. Second, I have been always fascinated by the immense depth of retail in India and even with my 2-year stint helping Facebook’s advertisers grow bigger and reach more audiences. My parents would trust a single person shop for their daily grocery needs than a six-sigma business which is almost a guarantee of flawless service. I realized that to grow retail in India, I will have to look outwards and come back to our country later when I have the necessary knowledge and skills. In India, we did not have many managed retail advertisers like the ones in South East Asian countries where big multi-malls and retail chains like Walmart rule the roost. Third, I would get new problems to solve - means new ideas to share - new impacts to have - more influencing - more sharing - more collaboration. I see it as fresh air. Forth, I want to mention that working in India is not the same, especially if one is tied to sales org. Market expectations are that we are eager to come on late night calls irrespective of timezones were taking a toll on me and I decided to hand over my responsibilities to someone else who could carry it far and strong.