ALIVIA BLOUNT

What team or product did I work on?

Technically Developer Circles which was a part of the Strategic Partnerships Platform Team. The company META, or previously known as Facebook it is complicated to understand as a lay person because there are SO many subsidiary projects or teams and every acquisition just makes this even more complicated. The most visible teams to the lay person are:

Facebook Web or Platform
Facebook Mobile App
Whatsapp
Instagram
Messenger
Groups

There are MANY others but lets starat there. If you are using your mobile phone and download the Facebook app from either the apple store or the google play store, you are interacting with a PRODUCT the mobile app team controls. This mostly had to do with design and engineering. Designing for web is very different from desinging for mobile but given the end user interacts with both products depending on where they are in the world and whata they aare doing, there need to be a seamless experience across both platforms. This means the same funnctionality you have on the web platform, in terms on commenting, posting, and sharing need to be seamless. On each of these teams you are going to have designers and engineers who are working to update and maintain the product in its current state. Web developers know how to build for the web and mobile app designers know how to build for mobile platforms. Both teams have analysts and data engineers who manage moving data for the team specifically.

As a program manager you manager a particular program that one team probably owns and that team might build a number of different products. So the team that I worked with interacted with developers who were building products that interacted with thhe facebook app. The app is obviously a social platform and had an open API for developers to consume and produce data to integrate functions like login, or connect to enable end users for some downstream product to login via facebook or view a friends list from the platform.

In my case I joined a team working specifically on Developer Circles which were Groups on both the mobile and web platform that were location specific. Developers in Africa specifically a certain country like Tunis, Tunisia have a Developer Circle platform group where they can organize in person events and talk about the different ways they are using the API. The developers would also make requests about technical resources from experts on other teams. At the time AI and facebook AI was a really hot topic and some of the best researchers in the field were accessible in Menlo Park. With one messenger chat from a member of the dev c team we could get a very high profile AI researcher to answer a question about an emerging topic like: MEANINGFUL ENGAGEMENT.

We will come back to meaningful engagement becacuse it is a really important areea of research for the online groups platform and for my team.