My time at Meta cycled me through five teams in four years. Reflecting from a distance, I think I understand what Zuck was doing: In a hands-off environment like Meta prior to 2022, if a team or org hasn't figured out alignment, execution, and market fit after ~12-18 months, it never will. Rather than struggle along trying to dig out from accumulated organizational debt, it's more efficient to hit reset, randomize, and try again. It's a chaos monkey approach to building orgs that depended on an excess of available staff/ goodwill and the luxury to frequently fail / restart even critical projects.
I only worked on one public product team, which ironically had the longest run. The rest were things like infrastructure or developer tools. Note that Meta is large enough that concepts like market fit still apply to internal projects, though.
And it depended in part on access to cheaper money than is available today.
I’m in my 5th role in 6 years at Meta. You just learn to always expect change and when I started I found that hard but now it feels like the this is norm for many industries.
I would be surprised that this premise is supported by evidence. I think I've read many accounts of teams changing course and learning from their mistakes, so that's certainly possible. They may need the proper environment to be able to get better after failing, and I would suspect you may be describing an environment that just does the opposite. I'm not sure it's great for personal growth either. I certainly grew a lot from having the room to learn from my mistakes. That's one of the great thing at my current company, actually.
That's an interesting point, and it highlights the critical balance between autonomy and strategic oversight in organizations. The 12-18 month window makes sense—if a team hasn’t achieved cohesion or market fit by then, it suggests deeper structural or strategic issues that need intervention. Another crucial factor is building a strong feedback loop directly into the product. Getting real-time feedback from users on newly launched features or products can significantly accelerate progress toward achieving PMF. Additionally, rather than passively waiting for market fit, it's often a smarter move to proactively rethink, dismantle, and redistribute the team's intellectual capital. This agility allows teams to pivot more effectively, avoid sunk cost fallacies, and ensure that talent and expertise are directed toward areas with higher potential impact and broader business goals. I love your post!
- Food for thought, Tony Embracing failure and restarting critical projects can foster innovation... .....
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3moThis also explains why three of the four disbanded teams were reconstituted elsewhere with other staff within a year. From a labor perspective it's incredibly disruptive and inefficient. From a leadership perspective, it's just rolling the dice over and over with minimal investment until you win. (A very ZIRP-era approach...)