👋 Hi, I’m Jeff. I coach senior product leaders through the moments their playbook stops working — drawing on 25+ years building at LinkedIn, Facebook, Headspace, and Included Health. If that’s you or someone you know, ping me.
This week I wanted to share something from the archive. When I was at Facebook leading a mid-sized team, a Business Lead at the time (equivalent to a Chief of Staff) asked me for hints or tips I could send her for what made effective PMs at Facebook. Below is what I sent her – along with a batch of links.
Reading this back years later, most of this still holds — and the one I’d underline now is communicating. Mainly because that’s what I often saw PMs struggle with. I also think these skills are extremely relevant and helpful as product development evolves given AI tools -- if anything these skills matter even more.
Give it a read -- and curious what pops for you.
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Top 5 Facebook specific hints for PMs
Impact -- coming from user empathy -- is key. Near, medium and long term. What are you spending time on — does it match where your impact is coming from? Do not focus on activity and think that that is impact. Try and nail the root user problem. What problems matter most to actual users?
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate. Vision, talk in stories, write well, speak persuasively. Communicate what your team is doing at all times. What’s the one liner? Someone not getting it is not their fault.
Vision is especially important at FB — because the company operates in 6 month planning cycles. So, create a narrative that spans across 6 month increments. Remember to show your team the progress vs that vision from time to time.
Push with warmth — the best PMs have teams moving very fast and the team has no idea what they are doing is hard because the pushing feels like a normal pace being created by a warm, collaborative person. Create a cadence that feels normal but is actually faster than that.
Build relationships. You want to be collaborative before you need someone. Help people.
Links I found helpful from outside Facebook
Sense of urgency - Boz. (Bonus is if you can go see these wall clocks live. :-))
LinkedIn Course on leading from Jeff Weiner - Bite size version of how Jeff ran LinkedIn. You can cherry pick areas -- but worth a watch end to end as well.
The Future of LinkedIn | The Vision for the Next 10 Years. (Old LinkedIn preso at JP Morgan conference in 2014. Learning: Can you be this clear when you communicate? Also: rule of 3 in action.)
How to Hire a Product Manager. Who: Ken Norton (Formerly Google, Jotspot, Yahoo!, then Google Ventures.)
Strategic AND Tactical Who: Scott Gatz, (formerly Yahoo! — Now CEO/Founder, Q.Digital.)
What distinguishes the top 1% of product managers from the top 10%? - Ian McAllister
How to Spot the Five-Tool Superstar - Jeff Weiner
So, what do product managers do? — Hunter Walk (Formerly YouTube, Google — Now Partner, Homebrew VC)
‘We Don’t Sell Saddles Here’ by Stewart Butterfield. Build something people want.
How to resolve conflict at work in just five days (getting to alignment faster)
‘The Art of Being Compelling as a Product Manager’ by Sachin Rekhi
Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager - Ben Horowitz
Be a Great Product Leader - Adam Nash
The CEO as Chief Editor - Jack Dorsey
The Silent Partner — Buzzfeed. About Jason Goldman — he helped build Google and Twitter — but few know his name.
1:1 Coaching: I coach senior leaders through the moments their playbook stops working — drawing on 25+ years building at LinkedIn, Facebook, Headspace, and Included Health. If that’s you or someone you know, ping me.
Thanks for sharing, Jeff! So much of this still holds.
On impact: the line between activity and impact is one every leader has to keep revisiting and redrawing. It's easy to feel productive — especially with all the corporate noise swirling above you. You're spending hours each day playing internal politics and process whack-a-mole, staying very busy but circling the wrong problem. Having that conversation with ourselves regularly — in some cases daily, depending on the organization — is critical to ensure we dedicate our time to the problems and opportunities that actually matter versus the noisy overhead.
On communication, I'll be honest. I can think of plenty of moments I'd handle differently if I had them back. What's changed is that time is no longer the real barrier. With a good human-AI collaboration, the upfront investment gets easier. I can draft, then edit, expand, and push back on my own thinking, and still come out communicating more frequently, more thoroughly, and more concisely than I used to. The bar for "communicate, communicate, communicate" just got reachable in a new way.
And "push with warmth" is the one that speaks to me most of all. We're the accountable party, yes, but we're also part of a team. Pushing with warmth means knowing your teammates well enough to know what context, information, and communication actually spark them. It says — I see you. I understand how this work will uniquely challenge and excite you. And we're in this together. That's what makes a faster pace feel normal instead of frantic.
Thank you for this, Jeff, and for the reading list. I've added several I hadn't seen to my own to-do list. Posts like this keep us focused on what matters.