Dark clouds have rolled back in over Menlo Park and Facebook is in the eye of the storm of the tech universe yet again. Frances Haugen, a former Product Manager who worked for the company for ~2 years, had also been working alongside the WSJ & SEC to leak thousands of pages of internal documents dubbed The Facebook Files. She went public with her identity and complaints Sunday night on 60 Minutes. And then, as further proof of the simulation we live in, Facebook’s family of apps disappeared from the Internet Monday morning.

No Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp…for hours! Twitter was ablaze! Their phone number deleted from the White Pages of the Internet leaving influencers, advertisers, and grandparents disconnected for almost an entire day. What did people do? Read books?!?

A challenging week for a company that has reached truly unprecedented heights and is not going to find a lot of sympathy across either side of the political aisle. Anyway, Zuck is getting enough heat this week! Instead, I’m thinking of the managers. But first, here are a few details here about the overall challenges of the moment I think are important and relevant to capture:

• Haugen previously worked at Google, Yelp & Pinterest. She was also the technical co-founder @ Hinge after finishing at Harvard Business School
• Haugen was hired at FB to work on civic integrity. This group that was disbanded following the 2020 election and their work was distributed to other teams
• Under SEC rules the whistleblower stands to financially gain 10-30% of any awards collected which can be found prominently in paragraph 2 on their website
• Facebook was the first company to connect 1B people online and has 4/5 of the largest social media apps in the West. YouTube being the holdout (Statista)
• Facebook has approximately 60,000 employees and sees 3.5B monthly users across its portfolio of apps which equates to about 1 employee per 58,000 users

If each manager looks after 10 employees then there are 5,000 – 6,000 leaders over at FB who are trying to staff stadiums full of people with one employee. Anyone else dealing with that type of scale? These things are never that simple.

As managers let’s assume we have a couple core responsibilities:

1.  Add value to our companies by executing the team’s strategy, helping team members grow, and staffing projects
   • All while carrying pesky individual contributor responsibilities which never quite go away..
2. Act as an ambassador of the company’s mission

Their company mission? Connecting people. For better or worse. It’s not easy to keep carrying responsibility #2 in times of controversy like this. Facebook, if nothing else, has done arguably more than any other company to connect people. That is their mission. And connecting humans has proven to be a messy business. In 2016 Buzzfeed leaked a memo from their now CTO Andrew Bosworth about Facebook’s mission which can be found here. He then apologized, Zuckerberg clarified the comments, and things of course have changed since 2016. The memo does help explain the opportunity and challenges of their mission though..

Regulation is probably coming to Menlo Park regardless of which administration is running Washington’s fickle agendas. In America, regulation is the cost of winning. And there aren’t a lot of sympathetic parties when you’ve won.

But this week I’m thinking of the managers who are staffing football fields of unpredictable, unprecedented amounts of people connected by Facebook’s apps. The air is thin up there at the top. Even those that climb Mount Everest come back down! What happens if you stayed up there? Unparalleled visibility and constant inclement weather.

Tools, technology, and even some sunlight will probably help highlight the scope of these challenges in a more productive way. Hopefully. But the challenges of connecting people will remain. For those inside Facebook managing teams and holding up the company’s mission? I hope you get some rest this upcoming weekend.