Growth as a Product Feature
Zuckerberg: Making it so we could grow faster was the most important product feature we ended up building for Facebook.
The traditional approach to growing is you have a marketing team and you buy ads. Sometimes there's a place for that. But if you're actually trying to grow a product, the best levers are within the product itself — getting people in your community who enjoy what you're doing to evangelize that to their friends, as efficiently as possible.
The most important product feature was making it so we could grow faster. The best levers are within the product.
No Magic, Just Rigor
Zuckerberg: There's no magic in the growth group that other people can't replicate. It's just being very rigorous with data. Investing in data infrastructure so you can process all these experiments and learn what people are trying to tell you.
Then go invest engineering into actually growing the community. I think that's the most important feature for a lot of networks.
There's no magic. It's being rigorous with data, investing in infrastructure, and learning from experiments.
People You May Know
Zuckerberg: Look at specific features like People You May Know. A social product isn't that useful if you're not connected to the people you care about. Helping you go from signing up to connecting to the people you care about most — that's probably one of the most important things we can do.
Helping you go from signing up to connecting with the people you care about most — that's the most important thing.