A quick briefing about myself - I joined Facebook in early 2007 and have been through many challenging projects. A lot of problems were new and unseen. A lot were above the scale history has ever seen. A lot of hard times but also great times. By the time I left, I was managing the risk engineering team that was in charge of payment fraud and customer service tools. Right now, I am doing some angel investment work for fun, while preparing to start up my own company. See more of my background and interest at linkedin.com/in/hwang123. There are a lot of things I learned during the last few years at Facebook. I am going to share the most interesting 10 lessons in 3 posts. 

Before we start, here is the disclaimer :)

1- Everything here was derived from my belief and practice from my 4.5 years at Facebook. It worked fine for me within the Facebook culture. That doesn't mean it will work for you. All seeds need the right soil.

2- I would not try to convince you this is the best practice. It's not. 

3- The reason I wanted to write this was because I wanted to share. It helped me distill my life experience. It simply reflects what I felt, and what I want to share with you, in a genuine way.

4- A lot of these may not be new or useful at all to some of you, but I hope some do. 

OK, let the lessons unfold. 

1

Hold on to your vision, but be flexible on the details

As a leader, you will have to rely on yourself on the vision (at least for the scope of the work you are charged for), and these who work with or for you will rely on you for the vision. What is a vision? It's a depiction of the end state. It is where you want the team to land. It is the new life after effort. It is the north star, the direction. Here is an example. When I started the payment risk team, we only had rules engine. Rules were human written. A rule is a simple logic with very limited variables in it, such as "if registered < 30 days AND spending > $100 AND first_time_spending is TRUE AND user is from Indonesia, then reject the transction." Humans cannot deal with more than 10 variables, effectively. We wanted to be much more scalable. We wanted to automate a lot of things machines can do better than humans. So we set a vision that we would want to replace majority of rules to be machine learned models. The vision allowed us to add a research engineer who has a PhD in machine learning and another engineer who had similar hands-on experience before joining Facebook. The bet was bold, but the future needed it.

But you need to be flexible on the details. There are ALWAYS multiple ways to reach a destination. You need to learn to give your team enough wiggle room, as long as the team is heading towards the right direction at the right speed. Another story. There was a time I was more fascinated with decision trees than regressions. But the engineer who was experimenting on the algorithms told me there's only negligible difference in a selected set of algorithms. I could have insisted my preference (which was my then true belief) but I trusted the person and left it to him to pick the right algorithm. There were also interesting times working with designers, who had their nitpicky taste on font/color/margin/etc. I usually let them have their ways as long as the main purpose of the feature was well served. We wanted to pick the right fight, the fight that matters for the victory of the war, not one battle. 

2

ONLY work with the best people

Great people only want to work with great people. They become better by being together. A-players have very low tolerance on B-players. What defines "best people?" My understanding is that someone who can quickly utilize what s/he knows and learns what s/he doesn't to get things done to an extent that exceeds expectations. It's their basic instinct to beat expectations, their own expectations. For them, good enough is never good enough.

There are many benefits of having only the best people in place. 1) It makes you much more willing to delegate. From my experience, great people don't trust unfamiliar people. They need to know you are as good as or even better than them, before accepting your help. Otherwise, they'd rather burn themselves to do the work. But if you have proved to them, they would trust you a lot and are much more willing to delegate. A great team with effective delegation can do way more. 2) They set examples for each other, and by doing so raise the performance bar. It's amazing peer pressure. If it's utilized properly, it creates benign cycles in the company. 3) Great people challenge each other. I remembered one director of engineering challenged us that if we could finish the code changes to enable site translations by a certain date, he would dye his hair blue. Challenges like that make "boring" work more like a game. It's fun to be part of a game. Of course there were more serious challenges, and great people just love challenges (either challenging others or getting challenged) 4) Great people learn a great deal from each other. I would not have been in Facebook for more than 4 years if there were not much to learn. For inexperienced people, this is even more true. We have hired very smart graduates who were motivated to prove their awesomeness. They didn't want to come to a company to have a comfortable and not challenged life. They wanted to learn a great deal to nourish their experience, to accomplish missions impossible and advance their career paths. They want to prove yes, they can. They want to be with great people to make all this possible. 

You don't want B-players but how to not have them. First, hire slow. Be very stubborn in holding your hiring bar. I have seen many times in the hiring discussion meetings where candidates with fancy resumes don't get hired because one of the interviewers thinks this guy doesn't impress him. In other cases, candidates with all hire recommendations don't get hired because everyone thinks s/he just barely meets the bar. In hiring, most of times, you want to be risk averse. (Wanna also mention that we also hired people without all-hire recommendations but there were always one or two strong advocates from interviewers - you will want to take risk on trusting your employees.) Second, fire fast. Having B-players in place is like taking small poison. A bit a day; gradually but eventually you will die from it. You need to put the B-players into the exit track as soon as you can (in certain cases, the law limits what you can do). I had seen a case of slow firing, and the negative impact to the rest of team was no kidding.

3

Set high expectation and measure it

As a leader, you need to set your expectation high but still realistic. High enough so your team doesn't get bored. Realistic so they don't get burned too badly. You want to create an experience for them so when they look back at the end of the journey, they could say: hell, I didn't know I could do this. This is awesome. In Facebook, like most other Silicon Valley high tech companies, expectation is also linked to compensation, so it's very important to set up the expectation clearly ahead of it. 

And you need to find an undisputable way to measure it. I spent a lot of time working with the team to figure out what are the top 3-5 goals for the coming quarter and what the metrics should be to measure the goals. Thus we have measurable goals. The goals are assigned to or grabbed by individual engineers or a group of engineers and their partners in other functions. In this way, we not only have a list of 3-5 top metrics we can always rely on to quickly tell how we are doing, but also know who is behind each goal. The team success is well linked to individual performance. For example, the biggest achievement of my team was to reduce the dispute rate of credit card payments by 75% in 1 year's time through multiple measurable goals in each quarter. 

One thing to emphasize - you still have to be realistic. Having a 10X revenue boost when you only have a 10% market share is probably not realistic. Steve Jobs is really good at pushing his teams beyond their potentials but they got burned badly (even though they were really proud of what they had achieved). 99.9% leaders are not Mr. Jobs, and they don't need to be him. You can still achieve a lot by running a sustainable team while realizing your team's true limit.

In #4-#10, I will share my thoughts on the following points:

#4 Listen to the data but don't just rely on it

#5 Avoid the time suckers

#6 Affinity is effective for reducing people tension 

#7 Delegate and validate

#8 Feedback is a continuous process, not a once or twice a year event

#9 You can do more than what you think you can

#10 Don't over-design or prematurely optimize