Introducing - The Posters of Facebook
I've worked at a lot of cool places (including Microsoft, Facebook and Stripe) and learned a lot at each, but nowhere was the learning curve so steep and rewarding as my time at Facebook (now Meta). The culture at FB wasn't perfect - nothing is - but it was by far the most impressive product and engineering culture I've witnessed. I arrived thinking I was going to teach these kids a lesson, but promptly got my butt handed to me on a daily basis.
Growth is painful. This is growth.
One of my favorite things about the culture at Facebook was their love of posters. Some would call them propaganda, whatever. But they were great. I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of their faves and talk about it here in our blog and on our YouTube channel.
Then I was struck by another idea - what if we got my old Facebook sparring partner and friend Josh Williams to come and talk about it with me... and so this video interview (coming tomorrow; Weds July 26 at 8am PST) was born.
In the interview we pick our 10 favorite posters; Josh W picked his top five posters first and I added five more. It's a fun conversation, hope you enjoy it. Here's a video the full interview:
We're going to look at each poster quickly with a written teaser each day. But since today is Tuesday, we spoil you and give you two. Here goes!
#10 MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS#
Undoubtedly the most famous of the facebook posters, we felt we had to include this. A common misapplication of this poster is the idea is allows you to be careless. Our take is that the goal of this poster is to show that sometimes, you have to break expectations to move forward. You are not bound by the lines of the product today.
My favorite application of this was that we regularly updated and changed the Ads Manager UI which annoyed many of our enterprise customers. However, they also felt we continually had a better UI - so this was definitely the right trade off. This definitely broke the mold of how people thought about B2B UI at the time and is something we think about at Zuplo often.
#9 WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU WEREN'T AFRAID#
Getting out of your comfort zone and the notion that growth is important but painful is perhaps the most core theme of Facebook's culture, one of constant energy to improve - one's self, the product, the culture (how meta).
This poster is a challenge to the ready. What makes you uncomfortable and what would you do differently if you removed that discomfort or anxiety. A challenge to rationally prioritize being your best self and building the best product.
