Inbal Reichman Cohen (Facebook) on Managing Privacy

Alex:
Welcome to the Interdisciplinarian, my name is Alex Cowan and I’m your host. Joining us today is Inbal Reichman Cohen who is a Darden Alumni and most recently was a product manager at Facebook. Thanks for joining us, Inbal.

Inbal:
Thanks for having me. Hi.

Alex:
Well, tell me about your role. Your last role that you had at Facebook.

Inbal:
I was at Facebook for about two years and I had a couple roles there. My last role was the product manager of the privacy and trust team at Facebook. That’s the team that’s responsible for anything that has to do with privacy- all the privacy settings, privacy sentiment on Facebook, and … In general, understanding data use.

Alex:
Probably we all know what Facebook is and we have a notion of what privacy is about. What would be an example of a project you would work on as a product manager for the topic of privacy?

Inbal:
Some people might think privacy at Facebook is something that you just tack on to whatever product you have. But, at Facebook they treat it very much like a product of its own with metrics, with a roadmap, and with pretty high level scrutiny on the products and projects that we work on. As an example for things that we did in the time that I was there is, we changed the way you choose who to post to. It’s part of the composer- that’s where you actually compose your posts on Facebook.

We decided to change the layout to make sure people are posting to who they really want to post to. We also focused a lot on privacy sentiment. In the past, there was a lot of focus on, ‘Let’s get people into the right settings on Facebook’. … privacy settings. But, in reality, what was really important is that people feel like they’re in control when they’re on Facebook. So, for example, they know where to find different settings, they know how to choose the right audiences to post to, et cetera.

So, we focused a lot on just kind of … I guess you would call it privacy sentiment or … It’s kind of like, more of a marketing aspect to make sure people really are posting to the right audiences. So, what we did is that we looked for different places to…

Alex:
Let me ask you a question, what’s the relationship between sentiment and the mechanics of the way somebody posts something?

Inbal:
Let me give you an example of how we would approach it. You’re going to an event and you write that you’re going to an event on Facebook, but you’re not sure who can now see that you’re going to this event. Is it your friends? Is it public? Is it everyone who’s going to that event?

So, we kind of took different places in the user journey on Facebook where you would potentially wonder, ‘What’s happening to what I’m posting?’ ‘Who’s seeing my information?’, and help you control that at that moment essentially, or very close to that moment. We found different opportunities to say, ‘Hey, here’s who can see your post’ or, ‘Did you know that this is what’s happening?’ or, ‘Here’s where you can learn more about how this works.’

We tried a bunch of different versions of that, we tested it pretty profusely, and we found something that really worked and people really responded to, and felt … We saw sentiment go up pretty significantly for these and then we just started rolling those out in different places around the product. You probably will see them the next time you’re on Facebook.

Alex:
What does sentiment mean exactly? How would you measure something like that?

Inbal:
So, sentiment … That’s a pretty tricky one. It’s not as easy as just seeing the number of posts that someone writes go up or down, right?

Alex:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Inbal:
But, the way we did it is using surveys. We had different questions that we used, tested them, and kind of saw which ones were correlated with behavior of users and which was the one that we thought was most accurate for our needs.

Alex:
Because … And tell me if I’m right or wrong about this, but, ultimately the idea is that you want the user to feel satisfied about privacy. But, ultimately you care about the level of activity that they’re undertaking and you hope that a better sentiment of privacy leads to more activity. Is that kind of what you’re meaning with those surveys?

Inbal:
One of the harder about privacy is that you don’t see results immediately. We will see results of our different products. We will see, Hey. Sentiment went up when we launched this or for the users who saw this in our A/B tests. But, you can’t see activity usage immediately change.

You can if you’re specifically talking about events when people post more on an event if they know what happening to their posts. But, usually it takes a lot more time to actually see activity move. So, that’s something we were following longterm. So, we had to hold out and we could see, Hey. These users have better …They post more, they’re more active, they comment more … Et cetera, et cetera.

Alex:
When you say a long time, roughly what kind of timeframes does that mean in this context?

Inbal:
Since we started we just had a hold out that didn’t get any of these campaigns … didn’t get any of these different product features. We just compare our people who have never seen these the things to people who have, and we over time kind of see what happens. This could be over … we saw it over six months, we saw it over a year, and the team keeps on following these over time to see what’s going on. The more we add the products, the more we can see the different effect of it.

At the end of the day, the company also cares about sentiment. That’s also a metric the company cares about on it’s own. So, that’s also something that is … When you see top level sentiment go up, that’s also a really important thing for the company.

Alex:
Yup. The … So, you’ve got an outcome that you want and you have the general notion of what you want to experiment with. Let’s say, it’s the tagging or the event thing. How do you approach building new features or modifying settings? What was your process like there from idea to execution and testing?

Inbal:
The way it works at Facebook is that you have six month intervals where you have a road map that’s six months long and you plan a strategy for that roadmap in advance. And then, you kind of hit that ground running. Execute, execute, execute. The way the road mapping step works is that you gather a lot of data, you gather a lot of research on your product while keeping in mind your high level goals.

Your high level goals of sentiment, your high level goals is activity- whatever it is that your high level goals are. And then when you’re looking at data and looking at research you say, ‘Hey, here’s in opportunity’, ‘Here’s a problem we need to fix’, Here are different things that we could do’. And then, once you have a lot of the data and the research … The essence of that clear. You can start coming up with a bunch of ideas and doing a lot of brainstorming about, ‘What can we do?’ ‘What’s gonna be the most effective?’ ‘What tools do we have?’

Alex:
How do you do that with your interdisciplinary colleagues? What kind of people are involved at what points?

Inbal:
Everyone is involved, that’s one of the cool things that Facebook. I think it’s become pretty common place today that everyone’s involved in this process. It’s not like the product manager is sitting and saying, ‘This is what we’ll do’. And everyone kind of follows suite. But, everyone kind of brainstorms together and the product manager’s role is to essentially take the insights and ideas out of that brainstorming session and say, ‘Okay guys, here’s what I heard most, here’s what makes sense here, so, this will align with our strategy’…’This is what we’ll be doing, here’s our strategy.’

And then, you can get feedback if people disagree or if they have other ideas. But, in general you’re kind of facilitating that work while leading the team into a certain direction.

Alex:
When you say ‘everyone’, probably everyone’s … ‘everyone’ is not the same. If that makes sense?

Inbal:
Okay. So, a product team on Facebook is made of engineers, obviously, designers, marketing manager, data scientist, content strategist … I mean, there’s also data engineering, there’s also … But, that’s pretty much … Those are pretty much the main characters I think, if I’m not missing anyone.

Alex:
Are they on a dedicated team that’s focused on privacy?

Inbal:
Yeah. I mean, some of them have two teams they work on. Like, our marketing manager was also working on another product as well. But, also having to do with privacy in some way. Our data scientist was also working with a different team as well. But, they are … like, they have two teams they work on, privacy and something else. Our engineers were all privacy focused. We had seven engineers on a team, an engineering manager. Our designer was totally focus on our team.

Alex:
Let’s close it with a little bit about you. You have an engineering background, you got an MBA … What was hard and what was easy about doing a good job as a product manager at Facebook?

Inbal:
I had product experience in the past. So, I felt like ‘I know how to do this’. But, what was hard? I think two things. One is, Facebook is a social media company. Most people have not worked in social media before coming to work at Facebook. So, it is definitely a whole world of its own and you have to understand the metrics, you have to understand the way of thinking, and it takes a little bit of time to ramp up on that.

The other thing is that product managers are given a lot of autonomy and are expected to do very important things in the company. And are presented to Mark and to VPs in the company. A product manager just has a lot of responsibility. So, it’s sometimes a little daunting. Like, when you have a responsibility for that much work or so many users who are going to see your product, you kinda have to get it right. It’s not a very hierarchical company where every deck that you build goes through like, a million middle managers in the middle. So, it’s a lot of responsibility.

Alex:
What advice would you give to the Inbal of however many years ago, who is in her very first job after college and she wants to get to the point where you are now? What do you think was most important about preparing for the role that you were most recently in at Facebook?

Inbal:
I think the most important thing is to seize opportunities … Look for opportunities to seize, essentially. So, if you’re working with a team on a project, think of ways you can do more. Think of ways you could take more responsibility, think of ways you can come up with new ideas, new projects. Be an entrepreneur in your company if you can. Just take on as much as you can because, the more you take on, the more you can learn. So, don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to take on more.

I was lucky to have opportunities to grow in my experience and I was at first not sure that I was ready for them. But, then when you’re thrown in the water you just swim. Maybe you make mistakes and you learn from them, but that’s part of it. That’s part of the process.

Alex:
That’s great advice for project managers. Thanks, Inbal for joining us.

Inbal:
Sure thing. Thanks for having me.

Alex:
Alright. Well, this has been the Interdisciplinarian, you can check us out online under the Interdisciplinarian. If you want to learn how to do some of these things, check out Darden’s Agile Development specialization on Coursera at bity.ly/hi-agile. That’s bit.ly/hi-agile. Thanks for joining us.