Naomi Gleit: belief

Transcript context

…Along those same lines, just maybe a last question around the growth stuff that you worked on for folks that are thinking of driving growth, working on onboarding maybe specifically just are there any lessons from things that worked super well when you were looking to accelerate growth of the Facebook early on that you think people are maybe sleeping on as lepers and tactics that worked back then that might still be really powerful today? Well, definitely the understand, identify, execute. I would just ask yourselves, do you have the data that you need to know what you need to do on growth? And if not, definitely take the time to instrument that data. The thing that, I think we were relatively lucky, I talked about why I was bullish on Facebook in 2005 even was because there was product-market fit. And so for us growth, as much credit as we give to the growth team, I'm actually not sure how much credit we deserve and how much incremental growth we drove above and beyond the fact that this was a product that had product-market fit and we benefited in a huge amount from having high demand for the product. So at every step, and I talked about the growth team, the projects that we were working on were really at a high level around removing barriers. There were macro barriers, like the first project I worked on was high school students on Facebook, which is an interesting story in and of itself because at that time we almost created a separate website called Facebook High just to keep them separate from the college students. But at that time we were like, "No, this is one graph. This is one community. College students have friends and people they're connected to of all different ages. Why bifurcate the graph?" And obviously we've maintained that principle ever since. But it was about removing barriers. So you had to be a college student, then you had to be a high school student, then you had to be in a work network, then you had to have any email address. One of the next projects I worked on was not everyone has access to a smartphone, how can we remove the barrier of having access to a smartphone and building more of a rich Facebook experience for someone that was using a feature phone or a lower-end device? Internet.org, what about removing the barrier of having access to the internet or being able to afford a data plan? And so those are the macro barriers that thematically the growth team has worked on. What I would say is maybe applicable is really the micro barriers. All of the work that we did on growth around optimizing the flows were really about removing micro barriers. One of the things that I thought was just so elegant was after we did that 2009 instrumentation of all the flows, the product flows relevant to growth, what we found is 20% of people aren't actually confirming their email. We tried sending them an SMS, so maybe they would confirm the SMS instead. What we found was a lot of people are actually still clicking on notifications that they're getting, but because it wasn't the specific confirmation email, we weren't able to confirm the account. And so what we did was allow people to get notifications even as an unconfirmed account, and then if they clicked on any of those notifications, that would count as an account confirmation as well because they proved ownership of the email. et notifications even as an unconfirmed account, and then if they clicked on any of those notifications, that would count as an account confirmation as well because they proved ownership of the email. It's just removing a micro barrier of having to go find the confirmation email, click it before you can do anything on the site. So I do think we've been relatively lucky in having a lot of high demand That meant that we could focus on just removing micro barriers. And then on the growth team, a lot of the iterations and optimizations were about removing just sort of friction.…

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