I see many FB PM openings for platform PM. The roles typically talk about owning an internal platform or products for internal customers. How are these PM roles compared to external facing PM roles? How is the growth in such roles? Can one move between internal and external easily? Any insights will be useful.
It’s a terrible spot to own one of those as a PM.
Details please!
Not sure about FB but in general a platform PM can own a B2C offering.
Platform != internal tool You can own a platform that’s extremely important for FB B2C products (ex: a horizontal graph ranking platform that multiple products use). Although your ‘customers’ are FB teams, this wouldn’t be considered an internal tool An internal tool is product that’s used to increase productivity of FB employees (ex: an internally built task tracking tool or dashboarding tool). Consumer facing products are the ones you’re familiar with (newsfeed, post composer tool, stories, privacy menu, etc). Upward mobility in an org is measured by opportunity for impact. In general, there’s fewer opportunities for big impact in Internal Tools bc that stuff can’t change all the time so things move more slowly (wlb is better). Growth trajectory should be similar between platform teams and product teams and will be team dependent. Moving between teams at FB is not hard and most people move teams every few years for a new challenge
Internal products will not be B2C but they’ll play a crucial role in enhancing the productivity of internal teams at Facebook Your customers could range from marketing to sde’s
Are these roles valued as any other PM role or have similar scope for growth?
Idk about within Facebook but yes they do hold value in the industry in general.