Finding Happiness & Success At Meta

People ask me how it is to work at Meta.

So I’m sharing a version of the Badge post that I shared internally with Metamates, with minor edits to remove any confidential information.

Finding Happiness at Meta

"You all got it good" - Adam Mosseri (Head of Instagram App at Meta PM Con 2023)

6 years into my time at Meta, I absolutely agree with Adam. Meta is an incredible place to work at. This is the place where I felt the most at home and accepted. Even then I made myself unhappy for the first few years here. I had to make some mindset shifts to find happinesses and bring my best self to work and home.

1. Build great Memories:

The Unique Stories from my experience here are what I will remember when I look back.

• Lori Hokeness (my recruiter) calling me on Sunday morning from her friend's wedding to prep me for my on-site interview the next day.
• When Chris Cox (Head of Family of Apps) filed a Bug Report in my first half at Meta and I responded back with a "Won't Fix - Wait Till We Launch", then we launched bookmarks changes after 3 years of there being no changes.
• I found out I would present to Mark Zuckerberg after walking into his office. I was sitting in the furthest corner and Tom Alison (my then skip and current Head of Facebook App) said "Satish why don't you come walk us through the proposal for bookmarks" and Fidji Simo (ex head of FB App and current CEO of Instacart) said "Come sit next to me" and made space on the couch. After a moment of panic, I pulled it together and got a clear decision from Mark.
• Landing a review with Fidji and Will Cathcart (current head of WhatsApp) about FB Discover in my first month on the team.
• Making a case to IG leads that we should build election results for the US 2020 elections, planning for a number of scenarios, and working ~48 hrs straight. And then all the worst case scenarios coming true and the team being prepared for them!
• Doing two IG Leads reviews in one week while on holiday at my in-laws place from a plastic desk and monitor bought from Walmart.
• Being the founding PM for two orgs as they were being setup - IG Youth and Gen AI. Bringing clarity on what is being built, breaking down into work streams, ramping up lots of new people and starting to execute smoothly. Learning to do it from Max Eulenstein (Co-Head of product Instagram) and Miki Rothschild (Head of Well-being) during IG Youth and then applying those skills to Gen AI - AI Agents early days.
• Doing a series of Cox and then a Mark Review for AI Agents after being on the team for only a month. :-) I will forever remember these and many more stories for a long time!

2. Seize unique opportunities

At Meta we get to work on a wide spectrum of products across: consumer, advertiser, integrity, hardware, platform. In my time at Meta I have shipped/unshipped products on FB, IG, MSGR, WA spanning consumer, advertiser, integrity and AI first products. There are only a couple of other companies in the world where I could have had that variety of experiences! While delivering impact in all of these roles, I leveraged these experiences to learn more about what mattered to me at work and in life. I am grateful for that opportunity to work on these teams and with diverse sets of leaders.

3. Play Alien Chess Well aka adapt to changes fast

In 2018, I moved to the Messenger app to work on Community Messaging. We launched the product (Chats in Groups) and within a month started to roll it back as the Messenger org aligned on a strategy to focus on simplifying the Messenger app. I had to find a new role, went on to lead FB Discover. In 2020 I moved to IG to work on Teen Social comparison. My team was asked to support COVID and then US 2020 elections. I seized the opportunity and knocked it out of the park. The alien (change) comes for the chess board all the time. When it comes you have to let go and play the new board. I can go on about the times that thing changed and adapting to those changes earned me Greatly Exceeds ratings. In addition, getting better at Alien chess (adapting changes fast) made me a happier and better leader.

4. Learn from everyone

People at Meta have a unique combination of three characteristics: immense kindness, world class talent and insane ambition. This shows up from the moment a recruiter reaches out through the interview process and every day we work across all of the areas / orgs that I have been a part of. That is what makes this place magical. I embraced this and tried to learn from everyone around me, whether it was a fresh out of college engineer, an IC8 designer who is almost operating as a PM, that rockstar data scientist who is just about to blow up, that PM peer who I was in a tough negotiation with or a VP that we were doing product reviews with. Most of the time you can learn by just watching other people operate. I learnt to write well, moderate reviews smoothly, negotiate constructively, listen deeply, speak precisely, move fast on a number of dimensions by watching Metamates across functions. Thank you all!

5. Focus on Doing Work that is next level

For the first few years at Meta I felt I came in under leveled and I needed to reset my career by getting promoted fast. I spent too much time thinking about it and too much time talking about it with my managers. I made mistakes from the pressure I put on myself and the place of fear I was operating out of. Eventually after some organizational mistakes, I went back to a manager who trusted me and reset my mindset. I focused on finding and doing work that (a) I found intellectually curious (b) was important to the company (c) was ambiguous. By doing that I was ensuring that the problems / scope I was working on was next level complexity and I would run through walls to solve them. And if I did that and make sure people knew about it, I would get rewarded. I became a much more happier person from that point forward. Not only did I bring my best self to work I also took back home my best self! And eventually I got promoted. :-)

6. Stop comparing and embrace talented people

We all are on different career arcs and you never know who is going to be the next amazing leader at Meta. Asha Sharma (current COO of Instacart) was in my bootcamp class (M2 then) and was trying to recruit me to her team. I didn't want to join a new to Meta manager. She then went on to have the most incredible run as a product leader at Meta going from M2 to VP in ~3 years. Fortunately for me she recruited me for a full year and convinced me to join Messenger as her first hire. When I was in bootcamp in 2017, Ashley Yuki Alexander (then an M2) had a role on her team that I wanted. I remember going to Deb Liu (then Head of FB marketplace and now CEO of Ancestry) and asked her for advice. I said "I loved my conversation with Ashley and the role. But I am apprehensive of reporting to someone who is just 6 years out of college and much younger than me." Deb told me "Do you think there are things you can learn from her, if so you should not worry about age. And Mark is younger than most of us anyways and he is our boss." Unfortunately Ashley offered that role to someone else. But I reached out to her every year for advice and opportunities to work with her. Ashley always was generous with her time, shared fantastic advice and her own journey. Finally in 2022 I worked on her team on IG Intent Aware Ads but a couple of levels apart (Ashley is Co-Head of product for Instagram App now). :-P We are all on different journeys. Radical acceptance of that helps us lead a much happier life and make better decisions in life.

Finding Success At Meta

"Your technique is aggressive, You are not" - my tennis coach

Early in my time at Meta Miki Rothschild (my manager then and now Head of Social Impact & Well-being) said to me "Satish I can drop you in any part of the company and I know you will produce results. The question is can you produce results while strengthening your relationships with your peers and those between the organizations. At your level it is not just about the results you produce but it is even more about how you produce those results". I had early success at Meta by shipping FB App navigation changes, Time In App, Messenger Chats in Groups and testing FB Discover. But I was not as smooth while operating, I was not efficient, I did not bring people along, I hurt some relationships along the way. I then had to make a series of mind set shifts to start operating like someone at the next level.

7. PM Role comes with deep responsibility

Meta's products impact people's lives significantly. Every single product I worked on had/would have had a meaningful impact on an insanely large number of people and businesses. For example: Navigation determined our ability to connect people with the services they loved, Discovery helped people connect with the content they weren't yet connected to, Time in App / Take a Break / Hide Like Counts gave a users a choice in how they used our apps, Voter Empowerment helped turn out the vote in US2020 & navigate post elections chaos, New Real-Time Intent ad formats help with providing advertisers higher ROI. Everything we work on, even when it looks small on the surface, impacts a large number of people's lives. This comes with a deep responsibility for each of us to make sure the right decisions get made and the right product changes happen. I tried to do my best to represent the people who use our products even if it hurt my career sometimes in the short run and I am proud of it.

8. Influence Without Authority

Influence is what makes this place run. It is necessary to earn every single decision and bring any idea to life. There are no freebies. I have been reminded of this every single day at Meta in the form of small wins and losses in daily interactions. It requires having the right mindset, building strong relationships fast, understanding decision complexity, building the right processes, and developing interpersonal skills and operating with high levels of emotional/positive intelligence. Executing an Influence Without Authority playbook in a disciplined manner has been the single best indicator of success on my projects. I now have a playbook as a reminder for me to stay disciplined. [Influence Without Authority Deck]

9. (Re)Defining the PM Role and Scaling Myself

I came from smaller companies where PMs wore a lot of hats. At Yelp I did my own user research, did my own data analysis, wrote my own copy, did my own mocks, sent my own email marketing campaigns, tested my own food delivery orders, and also did product reviews with the CEO. And then I joined Meta, where we had a specialized XFN partner who was 10X better at each of those and engineers who were product archetypes. I hit some walls early on before deciding that I need to redefine the role of a PM [10 PM Principles Deck] at Meta for myself. The next lesson that I learnt was the PM role looks very different in different orgs within Meta. This comes in form on which function takes the lead and how much power they exert in decisions. Then I had to find ways to scale myself by learning from all the awesome PMs at Meta [Scaling Yourself as a PM Deck] . These two things took time and effort to first understand and then be able to operationalize in a disciplined manner. But were absolutely necessary to be successful at Meta.

10. Embrace the chaos that comes with moving fast

The speed of execution at Meta is unlike any other place I have worked at. This velocity is apparent across all functions and all types of work. I was shocked when I saw designers do amazing prototypes over night, engineers build proof of concepts the same day, user researchers run quality tests with results turned around in a couple of days and VP/Mark level reviews prepared in 1/2 weeks notice. This level of intensity and velocity feels chaotic at first. I learnt from the very best PMs to start embracing this chaos and bring organization / clarity on a daily basis. One of the most important jobs as PMs at Meta is to constantly bring clarity to these situations about what are we doing, how do we break this work up, who is doing what and what are out check points towards a final date. Learning to stay calm and keep doing it repeatedly is what earned me trust by leaders.

11. Work is a chance for Deliberate Practice

The intense speed of operation with a diverse group of high performers across different functions is an opportunity to do deliberate practice on skills (presence, listening deeply, speaking precisely, difficult conversations, negotiations, emotional intelligence, positive intelligence) that will make you a better leader and human being. And I have taken that approach every single day through an absolute growth mindset and learning from outstanding leaders. I can proudly say Satish V.2023 is a better leader & human being than Satish V.2017. For this I am grateful to my managers / Skips / Leads who have helped shape my growth plans, taught me things directly or though just watching them operate. There are some other people who have left an indelible mark through their extensive writing.