This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background.He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Now Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage startups with traction called End Game.
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
How did it get this way? Ken explores this question.
So for the past couple of weeks I have had the “pleasure” of trying to use Facebook advertising again. And all I can say is… it’s like trying to navigate a complete maze of different interfaces and products.
You have a “Meta Business Account” that looks like this.
Meta Business Account
And you have advertising accounts.
And you have a Facebook page that you can then attach to an Instagram page and a Whatsapp account.
And that Facebook page is owned by an account owner. And one or both of those need to be attached to the business account.
But then does that also attach it to the advertiser account? haha
And you have tons of other interfaces that you seem to switch around between as you navigate around trying to achieve the simple thing of advertising your Facebook page.
But when it got down to achieving what I wanted to, which required detaching my Facebook page from the old business account..
…apparently I was blocked by this query error. Which I’m guessing is a bug in their system.
I couldn’t detach my FB page from my old Business Account
And so then I looked at how I could get some customer support…. after another 15-20 minutes of browsing it became pretty clear that getting a human would be impossible.
From a logic and structure point of view I consider the whole experience a complete mess.
But wait…. doesn’t Meta hire a ton of some of Silicon Valley’s most expensive tech folks? How can this happen?
I can tell you how I think it happened.
It’s called too many teams working on their own priorities and not talking to each other. And thus creating a complete mess in terms of experience.
It is exactly what Brian Chesky talked about in his interview on Lenny’s Podcast a month back. It is what Brian felt creeping into AirBnB around 2021 but then he took a sledgehammer to.
I even wrote an article about it (below).
My article summarizing Brian’s new ‘get in the details’ approach to managing AirBnB
And honestly you can see it when you’re using AirBnB. It’s just so much more logical and simple to use… both from the customer and the host side.
Mark vs. Brian… which archetype does the modern day Meta need?
I think Brian Chesky would make a far better CEO of Meta than Mark Zuckerberg.
Why? Because Mark is off chasing shiny objects like the Metaverse while all of his core systems have become a complete nightmare to use.
What would Brian do? He would cut tons of people, streamline decision-making to be much flatter and more coordinated.
And make the entire experience much much tighter.
Thereby turning around the sinking ship that is ‘Meta’.
Does this require hiring the world’s best engineers and designers? Absolutely not!
It requires a leader with balls doing what obviously needs to be done.
And I only bring up here Facebook advertising as an example. But let’s look at the history of Facebook.
Tons of startups were built by disaggregating Craig’s List
I think Facebook will be considered the ‘Craig’s List’ of this era
Lots of folks like to make the example of just how many startups have been created out of ‘Craig’s List’. Craig’s List was the ‘free eBay’ that was founded all the way back when I graduated high school in 1995.
Millions of people used it to source all kinds of products and services.
Till eventually hundreds of companies did each of those things better. And Craig’s List is a small shadow of its former self in terms of significance.
The same is happening to Facebook:
Social Media: Less and less people are using Facebook as they’ve hopped onto Tiktok, X, Linkedin, etc because those guys just did it better.
In my view Linkedin newsfeed took like 98% of its share from Facebook. Around ten years ago in 2013 you would see the exact types of posts you see on Linkedin today on Facebook.
Could Facebook have done something to protect it? YES! They should have.
Messaging: Facebook’s Messenger was one of the first widely used messengers out there.
Arguably they stopped investing because of Whatsapp… but still I think if they had done a better job here than lots of competitors like Line would have never gotten to critical mass.
Community Groups: Facebook Groups were the OG’s of community. Now its all happening on Discord, Slack, and other community platforms.
And most Facebook Groups are just SPAM-a-thons.
The Meta Org Chart
Today’s Meta is an example of what happens when you build a tech org the traditional way
By ‘traditional’ I mean you let lots of teams run in their own directions. With the only alignment happening during quarterly roadmapping processes, etc.
These high-level planning processes are not sufficient to align these beasts.
You essentially need one person that is a very solid, structured thinker thinking about what the overall experience should be. A person with a knack for customer experience, like Brian Chesky.
And than you need that person to have his hands inside all of those teams. Steering them on an almost constant basis.
Basically taking a giant axe to this org chart above and behaving more like a startup again.
Meta is in stormy waters
Influencing the small, key decisions that end up making massive impacts on the user experience.
Mark is just not a customer experience person. It’s obvious from the mess that Meta has become.
And if he’s truly as visionary as many folks once thought he once was.. he’d recognize that he needs a Brian Chesky-type person to come in and take back control of this ship.
Before its too late.
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