Growth as a Mindset

Twelve Principles Used to Grow Facebook Marketplace that Every Product Can Use

Facebook Marketplace launched in 2016 to make it easier for people to buy and sell items within their local communities. Today, it’s a top visited online marketplace used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. As the product leader for Marketplace since it started, I’m often asked how we grew it. The good news is that many of the principles used to grow Marketplace can be applied to any product or company looking to expand. 

What Growth Is Not

Sometimes growth work gets a bad reputation in the industry. Growth work is a powerful tool, but it’s important to remember what it’s not. 

Growth does not drive product-market fit. A growth team focused on growing a product with poor retention is fundamentally flawed. Great growth efforts on top of a leaky funnel mean more people having a poor experience. This burns through potential customers who don’t find value in your product. Instead, wait for retention to stabilize or start increasing before investing in growth.  

Growth is not about manipulating people. In testing growth tactics, it is important to stay true to the job the product does. People signing up and using a product that they don’t understand is a long term negative for both your brand and those who use it. Using tactics like hiding a “dismiss” link or s-out may help your growth metrics in the short term; but they will not help you attract and engage people who actually want to use your product, which is what you need to build a healthy product over the long haul.   

Growth is not scattershot “growth hacking.” Spraying and praying can yield short-term gains and move metrics, but without a clear hypothesis of why something works these ephemeral gains will likely fade over time or be unsustainable. Think of growth work as an investment you are making to improve your long term product performance. At its core, growth work is about making it easy for people to use your product and get value out of it. 

Best Growth Practices

Organization

1. Create a growth team for each product. Once there’s product-market fit, a growth team at a minimum should have a product manager, data scientist, and three to five engineers. If you have additional capacity, adding a growth-oriented designer or content strategist can help drive incremental gains. The goal of the team should be achieving a certain outcome (e.g. grow transactions to X). On Marketplace, there are product teams focused on buyer growth and seller growth. They take numerical goals in driving product usage with the ability to test across the breadth of the product experience, wherever they estimate growth opportunities would be most fruitful. 

2. Create a team of growth experts across your company. If you are at a large company, create a centralized Product Growth team. At Facebook, the Product Growth team embeds analysts in the Facebook app, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Ads, and many other areas. Since Facebook now has more than 50,000 employees, it’s impossible for any product team to keep up with what growth wins are happening even in adjacent products, much less in other apps. The centralized Product Growth team allows the company to cross-pollinate wins across multiple products vs. each product team re-inventing the wheel. For example, the team running a popular unit in News Feed made some design changes that increased engagement. They shared this win with the Marketplace product growth team, who then quickly leveraged those improvements in Marketplace’s feed unit as well. 

3. Be thoughtful in selecting a goal metric for the team. One of the more important strategic decisions is what metric to set for the team that best represents your overall business goals in a healthy way. First, the goal should be easy for teams to understand. Avoid fancy composite metrics that combine multiple different actions since it will be difficult for teams to understand why the metric is moving up or down. Make sure your metric is also tough for teams to “game” (intentionally or unintentionally) with bad growth practices. Earlier in Marketplace’s history, the team was goaled on getting a buyer to send a single message to a seller. We saw a lot of growth, but we learned many of the incremental interactions weren’t high intent. So we updated the metric to require multiple back-and-forth interactions between a buyer and a seller, resulting in more meaningful interactions on listings. 

Mindset

4. Be willing to reconsider all your assumptions. A growth-oriented mindset is all about looking at possibilities. At Facebook, we had a saying on our team called "no sacred cats". When the original members of the team took on more products and started leading multiple teams, the newer team members went back and tested many of the growth experiments. We saw something interesting happen. Features and tests we ran before with a negative result ended up with a positive one from the new team. To celebrate those moments, we started the hashtag #nosacredcats in our Workplace groups each time we had a growth win that was revisiting an old idea. Many teams have a sense that products are immutable, but things that have been tested can be iterated on with fresh eyes. Proactively rotating team members helps bring in new perspectives. A growth mindset means being willing to challenge the status quo and seek improvement without prejudice.