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Fidji Simo is the Vice President of video at Facebook, who is responsible for virtually everything Facebook’s over 2 billion users see when they open the big blue app, from video to advertising. She has a very accomplished product career and an amazing story:
- She joined Facebook in 2011 as a product marketer
- in 2013, she pivoted to product management from a non-technical background
- in 2014, she got promoted to Director of Product
- in 2017, she became VP of Product
- She started and grown Newsfeed Ads, Video Ads, Facebook Live, Facebook Watch from zero to today
- She also co-founded Women in Product, which quickly became the most influential and biggest organization for women product managers worldwide.
During the fireside chat, Fidji did a Q&A with MBA students and here are the key highlights from the event:
On coming from a non-technical background: “Ask questions”
Initially I started to volunteer a lot of product management work and eventually half of my work were PM job
Q:
“You became a PM from a non-technical role. Was it hard to transition to PM? How did you earn respect from engineers?”
Fidji:
I did product marketing when I first joined Facebook. Initially I started to volunteer a lot of product management work to help where needed and eventually half of my work was a PM job. So the PM manager at the time told me, you should interview to be a PM and that’s how I did it.
Coming from a non-technical background, I learned some very basic coding myself so that I could better communicate with my engineers. But I focused on bringing value to them on things they didn’t know about: customer feedback, understanding of the market and competition, product ideas. In addition, on the technical side, while I will never be the person designing the best architecture for our backend for ex, I usually help by asking engineers questions to help them refine their thinking. And I learn a lot in the process.
On time management: “Intentional”
Fidji:
“One thing I find some people do is they would say they care about X or Y, but when you look at how they spend their time, they spend far more time on other things than things that are high priority.”
I am extremely intentional with how I use my time: I make sure that my calendar matches what my priorities are. Additionally, I’ve increased my efficiency a lot since having my daughter: since I have to leave promptly at 5:30pm every day, I make sure I optimize every minute of the day — like answering emails on my phone while walking to the bathroom!
On getting promoted: “Don’t ask, create new scope”
I was always pitching new ideas and willing to take on new things, and create additional scope for myself that way
Fidji:
I didn’t ask for an increase in scope by asking my manager “Is there any work that can be delegated to me?” In that case, he might just say “it’s all good”, and that’s it.
Instead, I figured out things to do that could be helpful and just started doing them. Additionally, I pitched new ideas that were interesting new opportunities for the company — it had the benefit of naturally creating more scope for me to stretch myself into without waiting to just “get” more scope.
On personal growth: “Get Honest Feedback”
Q:“How are you able to scale yourself so fast with such quick promotion?
Fidji:
Even when your title or your scope doesn’t change, you constantly have to realize when your job has changed and when your previous playbook doesn’t work anymore. For ex, managing a team of 300 is very different from managing a team of 700, so you need to constantly grow yourself. One thing I find very useful is always asking for feedback. I remembered after one meeting, a direct report of mine came to me and said “You looked stressed in this meeting, and now in your role you should know that the team looks to you to know how they should feel, and the signal you’re sending is that they should be stressed. I don’t think this is what you mean to convey. You need to fix this.” That was the most helpful feedback I’ve gotten. That’s why it’s very important for me to build a team where people trust me enough to give me honest feedback like this and don’t worry about how I’m going to take it, because you can only grow fast if you get direct and honest feedback. And I really appreciate my team for keeping me honest and helping me grow that way.
As for the promotions, the thing that’s important to understand is that promotions should be lagging, which means that you should already be doing the next job for a while before you get the promo; by the time you get the job, you should be figuring out how to prep and be ready for the next one. Every time I got a new scope, I was already occupying that scope unofficially for a while. That’s the best way to build confidence and make these moves seamlessly. I believe that an important role managers play is to help people identify the ceiling they’re going to hit in their next job 6 months before they actually hit it so they never bump into it; I’ve been lucky to be able to break through my ceilings ahead of them actually holding me back.
On female in tech: “Long-term, but we should start now”
Q: “You co-founded Women In Product, now the biggest organization for female product managers. What inspired to create this and how did you get it started?”
Fidji:
We need to get female leaders to the top of our organizations. Unfortunately, it’s gonna take a long time since we need to take the time to grow women into leadership roles, so it won’t happen overnight. But we are working on it and ready to look 10 years beyond to accelerate women’s trajectory and reach the state we want to reach..
Deb Liu and I started “Women in Product” with a bunch of female product execs to create a community of women in product who can support each other and give each other opportunities. We initially started organizing a few dinners for female product leaders and people start saying, “we have never had this before and it’s been so helpful!” That’s how we start getting more serious, and organizing more events. Our Women In Product conference has grown dramatically year over year, and we now have over 13,000 members in the facebook “Women in Product” group. We hired a full-time executive director to run Women In Product and I am super excited to see this grow to more female product managers worldwide.
“Break the Ceiling” with Fidji Simo was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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