Take risks to scale engineering and product teams

Building engineering and product teams at scale successfully means breaking away from traditional ways of working, said Nam Nguyen, VP of Engineering, Instagram at Facebook iD8 in Singapore.

At Facebook, the engineering culture is geared towards taking risks in four ways.

Nguyen, who has been with Facebook since 2011, spoke about candidates at boot camps that he ran who are given the freedom to decide on which teams they want to join, instead of the company making the decisions for them.

"I’d never seen that before,” he said.

Facebook also encourages a collaborative atmosphere. "At Facebook we are trying to train our engineers/managers to always assume best intent. If you don't understand your peers how can you have this constructive conversation?" Nguyen asked.

"We always put ourselves in the position of the other person."

In one anecdote he spoke about a colleague who suggested cancelling another team's project to move the resources to his own team.  "And I'm like, really? Okay, let me do a test: if I put you and the other director into the room together, can you tell me the argument that the other director would take?" he said. Most people would only know what arguments they would make, not what their peers would say - but that means they have failed to understand their peers, and would not be able to carry out a constructive conversation.

Failures are celebrated as lessons, instead of being swept under the rug. Engineers will write a post-mortem report about a failed project that is shared with the company, Nguyen shared. "It makes engineers feel like they can take risks, and when they fail at something, the company doesn't look at it and say 'you're fired'," he said, in addition to preventing more mistakes.

That said, Nguyen tells his teams that it may be ok to make a mistake once, but not to make the same mistake twice.

Facebook has also replaced the traditional hierarchical model with a flatter organisation that has more decision-making powers at lower levels. A hierarchy, Nguyen explained, means that people at "leaf nodes" are typically too far away from the people at the top. Information takes time to flow down to the nodes, and there is room for misunderstanding at each level.

"When I was VP at Yahoo, there was never a single week which went by, without certain decisions being made by me...I joined Facebook in 2011, and four months into my joining - four months, nobody in the team checked with me on any decision," he said. "I looked around and I was like, why did they hire me?"

While this is Facebook's way to scale and grow, Nguyen stressed that different companies have succeeded with different cultures. "There's not really one formula for success. There's not really one single culture that you all have to copy," he said.

The culture is still evolving as well. "We are learning each and every day," he said.

"The thing is this, you are the one who owns the culture of your company, you have to define it. You have to be active in defining it. You have to figure it out," he said. "Which engineers do you want to bring to your company? How do you want them to work there, you have to create that culture. And you have to ask yourself, do we have a culture, and does the culture of the organisation serve the interest of our company?

"My hope is that you take a little bit from what I'm telling you, learn a little bit from many other companies, and hopefully you'll build successful organisations, successful companies. I wish everyone the best. Now you can go on and do it!"